ISTANBUL.- Salt offers visitors and users a space for encounter, research, and expression through a wide range of programs.

Focusing on the pedagogical approach and collective practice of the Tapestry Studio within Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s Department of Painting, We've Been at the Tapestry Studio Since the 90s is on view at Salt Beyoğlu until March 1. The upcoming exhibitions, to be presented at Salt Beyoğlu and Salt Galata in the first half of 2026, will explore issues related to spatial practices, ecology, and collective memory.

Exhibitions by Güneş Terkol and Onur Gökmen

The projects selected as part of the second edition of the Salt Artistic Research and Production Grant Program, realized in collaboration with the BBVA Foundation, will be presented at Salt Galata. Güneş Terkol’s work, developed in collaboration with her mother Elmira Terkol, will be on view between January 30–March 8. Conceived over two decades through interviews, archival materials, and collected objects, the project traces a multi-stage migration from Russia to China, and eventually to Turkey. Exploring everyday practices and carriers of memory, the exhibition centers on migration chests and their symbolic contents and brings together oral testimonies, family narratives, and cultural materials to uncover layered histories embedded in personal and communal experience.

Onur Gökmen’s Subsoil, to be presented between April 1–May 6, revisits a largely overlooked episode in the environmental and institutional history of Turkey: the detection of radioactive contamination in Black Sea tea following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Drawing on research conducted at Middle East Technical University, the project investigates how scientific findings are shaped, silenced, or dismissed within state institutions. Tracing the movement of radiation through natural and institutional systems, the exhibition highlights how environmental harm—though invisible and slow—can alter public health, policy, and collective memory.

Trash

The program traces the display units and materials used in Salt’s past exhibitions, questioning the meanings ascribed to them throughout their journey from the exhibition space to storage. Drawing on Salt’s 15-year exhibition practice, it reveals how discarded materials can also carry memory and hold archival value. Throughout the program, a series of workshops and talks with designers, users, and constituents will explore upcycling, repair, and design processes, aiming to repurpose these items in response to spatial and artistic needs. Built around a pile of materials, the program will take place at Salt Beyoğlu between March 11–April 12, opening up exhibition-making and design practices for discussion.

Breaking Through a Dam

Breaking Through a Dam, to be presented at Salt Beyoğlu from April 22 to August 23, reflects on relationships between land, memory, and archive across a geography extending from Turkey to Palestine, Lebanon, and Tunisia. The exhibition approaches land as a relational space where rivers, mountains, deserts, sinkholes, dams, surveillance systems, satellites, coffee houses, and sidewalks intertwine, positioning it as a witness that bears both visible and invisible traces of structural, colonial, and slow violence. It explores ways of relating to land beyond practices rooted in property and extraction, envisioning new forms of “being-with-place” through the artists’ works.

Salt Research

As part of the Art Archive, which focuses on the history of art in Turkey, Handan Börüteçene’s archive will be made accessible online, along with a collection related to performances from the 1980s and 1990s. Building on Nur Koçak’s 2019 exhibition at Salt and her archive at Salt Research, a monograph offering a comprehensive perspective on the artist’s practice will also be published. The collections of Han Tümertekin and Selahattin Yazıcı will be incorporated into the Architecture Archive, while Bülent Erkmen Archive will be added to the Graphic Design Archive. The archives of Enver Esenkova and the Baban and Aygen families will be made available as part of the City, Society, and Economy Archive, which brings together documents related to social life, education, and the built environment from the 19th century to the present.

Applications for the 2026 Salt Research Funds—organized annually since 2013 to support studies that develop original approaches to overlooked histories—will open in January. Together with the Garanti BBVA Economic History Fund, which aims to contribute to research in the field, a total of eight projects will be supported in 2026.

Forum: Water Assemblies

The outcomes of Water Assemblies, the first edition of Forum—a platform for transdisciplinary research and collaboration that launched with a series of programs at Salt Beyoğlu in March 2025—will be published on a dedicated website. Featuring the work of five research strands that examine water in relation to geographies, infrastructures, language, and imagination, this online platform will present perspectives from fields such as architecture, design, ecology, ethnography, art, and literature. Continuing throughout 2026, the project aims to develop multi-layered narratives on the political, cultural, and ecological dimensions of water through archival research, fieldwork, critical mapping, sound and performance-based inquiry, and speculative storytelling.