Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: Phantom Quartet

This book, which accompanies Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s solo exhibition Phantom Quartet at Arter, approaches the artist’s practice, whose core engagement revolves around the notions of invisibility, cyclicality, memory, architecture, the city and nature, in a multi-layered way. Opening with an in-depth conversation between the exhibition’s curator Nilüfer Şaşmazer and Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, the volume examines the relationship between the artist’s personal memory and the ruptures inscribed in the city’s history through various formal and conceptual tools such as the “ghost”, “reverse perspective”, and the “surface tension”. Aykan Safoğlu’s essay “In the Scab Form of Time” reimagines the artist’s past stretching from Kurtuluş to Tarlabaşı, and the reflections of this past in her practice, in the form of a walking narrative, while Anne Barlow’s text “A Landscape within a Landscape” offers a wide-ranging reading of the temporal and spatial sensitivities that emerge across Büyüktaşcıyan’s international exhibitions. Katerina Gregos’s essay “Unsettled Ground” considers the artist’s multi-layered practice, focused on themes of identity and displacement, as a poetic archaeology that renders suppressed histories visible. Designed by Utku Lomlu, the book brings together Murat Germen’s photographs of the works with images scanned from the artist’s sketchbooks and archival photographs.
Held in Arter’s third-floor gallery, Phantom Quartet brings together Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s newly produced works for this exhibition, along with a selection of earlier works, some drawn from the Arter Collection. Drawing on the term phantom limb, evoking a lingering presence that follows loss and used originally in the medical field, Phantom Quartet unfolds in four chapters – Necropolis, Courtyard, Avenue, and Gaze – which bring the outside into the gallery space. This fourfold structure resonates through the elements of fire, air, water and earth, each seeping into the works in different ways. Interlacing four distinct temporalities – past, present, future and purgatory – the exhibition creates a sensory terrain that summons the ghosts hidden within objects, forms, surfaces, sounds and colours.