Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s solo exhibition titled Phantom Quartet opening at Arter offers a comprehensive insight into her artistic practice centred on the notions of identity, memory and nature. The works on display point to the ruptures in urban history through the artist’s personal past rooted in the two neighbourhoods surrounding Arter, namely Kurtuluş and Tarlabaşı. Bringing together the works produced by the artist for this exhibition with a selection of earlier works, some drawn from the Arter Collection, the exhibition explores dualities such as presence and absence, life and death, body and spirit, erasure and reconstruction across four distinct chapters. Curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer, Phantom Quartet will be on view at Arter’s 3rd-floor gallery as of 27 November.
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s solo exhibition Phantom Quartet held at Arter brings together the artist’s newly produced works for this exhibition, along with a selection of earlier works, some drawn from the Arter Collection. The exhibition traverses the artist’s core engagement with the notions of invisibility, cyclicality, memory, architecture, the city and nature through her personal past rooted in the two neighbourhoods surrounding Arter – namely Kurtuluş and Tarlabaşı – and through the ruptures inscribed in urban history. Büyüktaşcıyan weaves the traces of these ruptures together with imaginary landscapes shaped by fragments, echoes and voids distilled from her memory. The exhibition thus entwines different times and spaces to construct new narratives.
Drawing on the term ‘phantom limb’, which evokes a lingering presence that follows loss and is originally used 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.
Through the materials and the deconstructive form language she employs, Büyüktaşcıyan points to a surface tension and examines both the collision and coexistence of different elements transformed by time. Tracing the imprints of individual and collective memory by means of textures, sounds and urban landscapes, her works attest to a world woven with dualities such as presence and absence, life and death, body and spirit, erasure and reconstruction. By overturning dominant narratives and modes of seeing, her approach enables historical memory, the non-human and what lies beyond the perceived world to be understood in new dimensions.
Press release from Arter
Image: Hera Büyüktaşcıyan. The Coat of an Early River. 2025. Drawing and frottage with graphite on fabric. Dimensions variable. Photography by Murat Germen. Image courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist
