Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: Phantom Quartet / Hah!

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan: Phantom Quartet
Curator: Nilüfer Şaşmazer
November 27, 2025–August 30, 2026

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’s building, 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 is on view at Arter’s third-floor gallery.

Drawing on the term ‘phantom limb’, which originates in the medical field and evokes a lingering presence that follows loss, Phantom Quartet unfolds in four chapters – Necropolis, Courtyard, Avenue, and Gaze – that 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 various 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.

A video-focused group exhibition: Hah!
Curator: Delfin Öğütoğulları
November 27, 2025–April 12, 2026

The new group exhibition Hah! curated by Delfin Öğütoğulları brings together contemporary video works from within and outside the Arter Collection. Featuring works by artists from Türkiye and various geographies, the exhibition explores satire’s role in criticising power structures and questioning contemporary conditions. While highlighting the material and inner struggles artists navigate within economic and institutional power dynamics, Hah! delves into power imbalances, authoritarian modes of governance, and gender norms. The video-focused group exhibition Hah! is on view at Arter’s fourth-floor gallery.

Drawing from video’s capacity, as a medium, to manipulate the flow of time and blur the distance between artist and viewer, the works displayed in Hah! create an unsettling sense of closeness by emphasising the artists’ voices – spoken directly or metaphorically. This temporal and sensory pliability highlights the tensions embedded in lived experience through shifting rhythms and fractured edits. In confronting top-down mechanisms, the participating artists mock the grip of authoritative approaches through playful visual cues and interplay with music. The works presented in in Hah! oscillate between humour and gravity; in so doing, they embrace satire not to dismantle systems outright, but to highlight and deconstruct their shortcomings. The exhibition proposes a layered perspective by adopting wit as a critical tool and revealing the absurdities of prevailing systems. 

Artists featured in the exhibition
Özgür Atlagan, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Selin Davasse, Burak Delier, Braco Dimitrijevic, Cem Örgen, Serra Tansel, Berkay Tuncay, Sinan Tuncay, Kubilay Mert Ural

Visit here for Arter’s current and upcoming programme. 

Press contact: Senem Çelikörslü, senemc@arter.org.tr.