ISTANBUL.- 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 is on view at Arter’s 3rd-floor gallery.

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.

Based in Istanbul, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (1984, Istanbul), in her multidisciplinary practice, unfolds the ways in which memory, space, time, and knowledge are shaped by deeply ingrained yet constantly evolving waves and ruptures of history. The artist often references nature, archaeology, and iconography, as well as architectural structures, as the foundation for her works, closely observing their genealogies and the ways in which they shift and evolve over time. Through her site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings and films, Büyüktaşcıyan delves into the terrestrial imagination by unearthing patterns of selected narratives and timelines that unfold the material memory of unstable spaces and the hybrid nature of things embedded within.


Nilüfer Şaşmazer (1986, Istanbul) received her master’s degree in Cultural and Artistic Project Management from Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France. Between 2012 and 2016, she worked as an arts writer and, since 2016, she has served as an editor for various exhibition publications, artist books and monographs. She has taken on curatorial roles for exhibitions at different art institutions and independent venues. She was the coordinator of Yanköşe, an open-air non-profit art platform, from 2017 to 2019. In addition to contributing texts to several exhibition catalogues, her essays on contemporary art have been featured in various printed and online publications. Şaşmazer, who curated the exhibitions Nuri Kuzucan: Passage (2023), Maaria Wirkkala: Landing Prohibited (2024–2025), Angelica Mesiti: Future Perfect Continuous (2025), and Under Pressure Above Water (2025–2026) at Arter, joined the curatorial team of the institution in 2024.