Contemporary art takes over restored Byzantine cistern |
Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.
Spring has a way of resetting the city — and, in my stubbornly traditional Turkish-housewife imagination, that reset begins with a proper clean. This week, we follow that instinct from a hammam turned art space in Zeyrek Cinili Hamam to a rooftop on Istiklal that thrives on spectacle, with stops in Balat, Izmir and Cyprus along the way.
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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)
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1. Leading the week: Into the Temenos
Margaret R.Thompson’s “Temenos.” (Courtesy of the artist)
Since reopening in 2023 after a 13-year restoration, Zeyrek Cinili Hamam has built a reputation for staging ambitious contemporary art in its Byzantine cistern. Under the artistic direction of Anlam de Coster, the program has leaned toward younger, often female, artists who move fluidly between ancient symbols and contemporary materials, letting Istanbul and its materials — silks, spices, ironmongers and woodworks — inspire them.
Margaret R. Thompson’s “Temenos: The Inland Sea” is the latest. The title comes from the ancient Greek temenos, a word for a sacred space set apart from everyday life, a zone of protection and transition. In psychological terms, it also points to an inner chamber where difficult encounters can take place under shelter.
Thompson builds the exhibition around that idea with a tightly controlled visual language. Large-scale paintings are organized along central vertical axes, reading almost like passageways. Repeating forms include vessels, spirals and vortices, suggesting circulation and return rather than narrative scenes. Textile works hang and drape in the space, echoing the softness of water against the cistern’s hard surfaces.
Motifs surface and recede: winged chimeras, mythological figures, hybrid bodies that........