Artists

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan

Press release

Antiphonies brings together works by Hera Büyüktaşcıyan created over the last four years and previously exhibited in her solo exhibition at Arter, Istanbul. Restaged at ΕΜΣΤ, the works are presented in Greece for the first time. Centring on invisibility, cyclicality, displacement, memory, architecture, and nature, the exhibition unfolds historical ruptures inscribed on personal and collective memory. Referencing the interplay of two voices in a choral composition, Antiphonies evokes an answer coming from the other side—a sound carried across distance, time, borders, and absence. In the exhibition, these resonant voices are but fragments and traces of things past responding across the shifting registers of memory and place—like two landscapes, two rivers, and opposite temporalities chanting to each other. The exhibition revisits recurring questions in Büyüktaşcıyan’s practice. The built and natural environments are treated as sites of mnemonic accumulation, shaped by frictions, divisions, kinships, and acts of rewriting across the tidal movements of time. Through works that evoke the four elements, the exhibition navigates shifting grounds where memory, time, and place are restaged. These landscapes emerge through sediments, echoes, and voids drawn both from the artist’s own memory and from the memory of an urban world shaped by territorial disputes, upheaval, and displacement, particularly the intertwined fates of minority communities amid the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new nation-states. The exhibition includes works rooted in Tatavla—formerly known as Little Athens—the multi-ethnic Istanbul neighbourhood where the artist was born, whose spatial and sociopolitical transformations have long informed her practice. The historical fractures embedded in this landscape resonate with Athens, where those uprooted by the region’s turbulent past found refuge. On a different level, the works are the site of an uncanny confluence— Istanbul’s Dolapdere and Athens’ Ilissos echo across transformed landscapes. Büyüktaşcıyan’s highly material, formally deconstructive visual language, explores states of surface tension by examining the collision and coexistence of elements transformed over time. Across her sculptures, drawings, and sound installation, she proposes a reverse perspective through which temporal sediments, the non-human, and what lies beyond the perceived world can be understood within a new hybrid reality. Opening: 10 December | 19:00 – 23:00 Curated by Nilüfer Şaşmazer BIOGRAPHY Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. 1984, Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Istanbul. She graduated from the Painting Department of Marmara University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2006. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing and film, her multidisciplinary practice explores the relationships between memory, identity, space and time, often drawing on architecture, archaeology, mythology and the natural world to uncover forgotten histories, invisible narratives and traces of displacement. Her recent solo and group exhibitions and biennial participations include (selected): TURANDOT: To the Daughters of the East, collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale, Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, Venice (2026); Phantom Quartet, ARTER, Istanbul (2025–2026); Whispers on the Horizon, 14th Taipei Biennial (2025–2026); Recipes for Broken Hearts, 1st Bukhara Biennial (2025); Soft Logic, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2025–2026), and Lunds Konsthall (2026); Siren Songs: Water as Told by Artists, Villa Medici, Rome (2024–2025); Defending Ancient Waters, CCC OD, Tours (2024–2025); and The Life of Things, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (2024).