The Markaz

The landscape of memory in modern Turkey has been largely shaped by interruptions and discontinuities, sometimes violent, and contemporary artists have often responded to this challenge by means of historical reconstructions and encounters that bring us closer to a recent past that often seems completely buried and absent from the collective imagination. Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, an Istanbul native, is one of those artists, whose practice reenacts lost moments from the past as if they had persisted into the present, subtly confronting hidden historical narratives with images of the present, in which the ghost meets the presence. In her sculptural installations, we always encounter architectural or archival elements that carry within them traces of the disappearance. In her extended journeys through islands, bodies of water and monuments, we grasp temporarily at metaphors for these shifting sands of this memory, continuously re-writing the past.

There are two stories concerning a hammam, an Ottoman bathhouse, separated by a decade in time, but also by a series of spatial movements and material reflections, between cities, bodies of water, political events, historical periods, subterranean currents and islands. When Büyüktaşçıyan opened her exhibition In Situ (2013) in Istanbul, as part of a residency at the now defunct PiST in the spring of 2013, the ephemeral installation was an act of remembrance that conjured up images of a historical hammam in the neighborhood of Pangaltı where she was born, and home to one of the last Armenian communities in Turkey. Made entirely from bars of Turkish bath soap, recognizable by their characteristic citrus fragrance, the symbolic reconstruction of the hammam, performed the role of preservation in situ, a term used in archaeology to refer to the conservation of an archaeological asset in its original location.