Ghost Quartet: Hera Büyüktaşcıyan at Arter – Identity, Memory, and the Secrets of Istanbul
When the layers of memory begin to shift, everything invisible rises to the surface. Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s new solo exhibition, titled Ghost Quartet, meets visitors on the 3rd-floor gallery of Arter. Curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer, the show offers a comprehensive look at the artist’s practice, which centres on concepts of identity, memory, and nature.
Büyüktaşcıyan’s works point to the city’s moments of rupture through the personal history rooted in the two neighbourhoods where the Arter building stands: Kurtuluş and Tarlabaşı. The artist blends the traces of these fractures with fragments, echoes, and voids filtered through her own memory, creating dreamlike landscapes that stitch together different times and places into new narratives.
The Architectural and Physical Memory of the Invisible
The exhibition title Ghost Quartet refers to the medical term “phantom limb,” which describes the sensation of a limb’s continued presence after its loss. Structured as a quartet, the show consists of four distinct sections that bring the outside world indoors: Necropolis, Courtyard, Street, and Gaze. These sections resonate through the infiltrating elements of fire, air, water, and earth. Weaving together four temporalities — past, present, future, and limbo — the exhibition creates sensory fields in which ghosts hidden within objects, forms, surfaces, and sounds gradually reveal themselves.
Büyüktaşcıyan’s works, which trace textures, sounds, and urban landscapes, bear witness to a world woven from dualities: presence and absence, life and death, body and soul, erasure and reconstruction. By challenging dominant narratives and ways of seeing, the artist opens space not only for historical memory but also for thinking about the non-human and that which lies beyond the perceived world.
Exhibition Information Summary
Artist: Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. 1984, Istanbul)
Title: Ghost Quartet
Curator: Nilüfer Şaşmazer
Venue: Arter, 3rd Floor Gallery, Istanbul
Dates: Open from 27 November 2025 onwards
