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<\/h4>\nJennifer Hattam<\/h4>\n
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Turkish artist Felek\u015fan Onar is part of a tradition some 4,000 years old. Her craft of glass-working dates back to the Bronze Age, when Mesopotamian artisans are believed to have first adapted stone-cutting techniques to shape beads, seals, and other small objects out of glass. Later came molded glass pieces, like the intricately decorated perfume flasks and pendants from 6th century BC Phoenicia that sit in a vitrine across from their blown-glass successors, an array of Roman-era vials and vases, on a mezzanine floor of the Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum<\/a> in Istanbul.<\/p>\n Some of Onar\u2019s own glass works have temporarily taken up residence among these ancient antecedents as the museum hosts her solo exhibition, After Utopia: The Birds<\/em><\/a>, alongside its collection of archeological artifacts. The show marks the privately run institution\u2019s first foray into displaying contemporary art.<\/p>\n Inspired by present-day refugees from the war in Syria and communities forcibly relocated\u00a0en masse<\/em>\u00a0across the Aegean Sea a century ago, Onar\u2019s glass sculptures connect thematically and geographically with the older stories of displacement, migration, and cultural transmission and change that are embedded in many of the museum\u2019s artifacts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This meeting across millennia reflects the fact that \u201cthe story we\u2019re telling is one that started many years ago, and will continue for many more,\u201d says Onar. But that story is not just one of continuing artistic traditions or timeless motifs, as striking as the visual resonances are between the ancient and modern works that have been brought into dialogue through her exhibition. Inspired by present-day refugees from the war in Syria and communities forcibly relocated en masse<\/em> across the Aegean Sea a century ago, Onar\u2019s glass sculptures connect thematically and geographically with the older stories of displacement, migration, and cultural transmission and change that are embedded in many of the museum\u2019s artifacts.<\/p>\n The roughly 7,300 objects in its archeological collection range from the Neolithic period through the Byzantine era in Anatolia, a region where \u201cidentities and boundaries and languages were historically constantly shifting and being negotiated,\u201d according to writer and curator Arie Amaya-Akkermans, who collaborated with Onar on the exhibition. (A separate wing of the museum displays its more sizeable Turkish-Islamic art collection, including ceramics, textiles, and calligraphy.)<\/p>\n Figurine Messenger Bird, Tereus, Felek\u015fan Onar, \"After the Birds: Utopia.\"<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Izniktileand Perched, Felek\u015fan Onar, \"After the Birds: Utopia.\"<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Tereus and Pigeons, Felek\u015fan Onar, \"After the Birds: Utopia.\"<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Vitrine 2SHM, photo Ivan Erofeev, Felek\u015fan Onar, \"After the Birds: Utopia.\"<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> After Utopia: The Birds<\/em> draws from Onar\u2019s previous work Perched<\/em><\/a> (2017\u201318), a collection of 99 mold-blown glass swallows \u2014 small, wingless, and individually colored. The idea for them had been percolating in her mind ever since a period of turmoil in Turkey, when Istanbul and other cities were shaken by mass protests and terrorist attacks, while also struggling to integrate an influx of millions of Syrian refugees. At the time, it was common to see entire Syrian families sitting on the streets of central Istanbul with their meager belongings, holding up photocopies of their useless passports in a desperate plea for aid.<\/p>\n \u201cI booked some time to work in a friend\u2019s glass studio in Berlin with all these feelings building up inside of me, and a desire to reflect these fears and anxieties in my art,\u201d Onar recalls. On long walks in the German capital, she observed Turkish migrant workers idling on the streets in between jobs, and began to reflect on some memories from her childhood in a rural Aegean town where old Greek houses stood empty but some Greek words lingered in the local vocabulary.<\/p>\n The pieces came together via a novel by the English writer Louis de Berni\u00e8res that tells the fictionalized story of an Anatolian village torn asunder by the 1923 population exchange between Greece and the then-newly formed Turkish Republic. Under a convention of the Lausanne Peace Treaty<\/a>, signed following the First World War, a \u201ccompulsory exchange\u201d was made of at least 1.5 million people. Those affected were \u201cTurkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and\u2026the Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory,\u201d according to the text of the convention.<\/p>\n The title of de Berni\u00e8res\u2019 novel, Birds Without Wings<\/em>, gave Onar the visual language she had been seeking to \u201creflect on people torn from their roots,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Groups of the Perched<\/em> birds were initially exhibited in the Aleppo Room at the Pergamon Museum<\/a> in Berlin (in 2018) and the Damascus Room at the State Ethnographic Museum<\/a> in Dresden (in 2020\u201321). Both rooms are reconstructions of ornate Syrian residential interiors from the 17th to 19th century, their lavishly decorated wooden wall paneling purchased by European collectors during the colonial period in the Middle East and spirited away from their original homes.<\/p>\n After the Birds: Utopia installation at the Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum, Istanbul.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div> Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum: After the Birds: Utopia.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> \u201cFelek\u015fan was interested in the interplay in how these birds can travel to Europe much more easily than people,\u201d says Amaya-Akkermans, who is also a contributor to The Markaz Review<\/em>. \u201cThese great institutions with their colonial past really defined the context for the project. When she wanted to show her work in Istanbul after this journey, it was clear to us that it couldn\u2019t go into an institutional white cube space; it had to go somewhere with a charged history. The pieces had become imbued with that meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n At the Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum, the presentation of After Utopia: The Birds<\/em><\/a> begins subtly, with some of Onar\u2019s Perched<\/em> works sprinkled throughout those of the museum\u2019s sections devoted to the prehistoric and ancient Greek periods. A single pale-turquoise glass swallow sits at the feet of a trio of terracotta figurines who appear to be staring at the new avian arrival in their midst. A pair of the birds perches on a plinth near a finely wrought Bronze Age model of two bulls pulling a wagon. Another duo blends in with a grouping of similarly colored Athenian red-figure pottery.<\/p>\n \u201cSeeing these works together makes you appreciate the beauty of both sets of pieces,\u201d says M\u00fcge Arseven, a specialist in classical art and curator of the museum\u2019s antiquities collection. \u201cPeople usually associate stylization with modern art but ancient people were adept at it too; even early Bronze Age icons have concise, pure, stylized forms.\u201d<\/p>\n The aesthetic and thematic continuities become even more pronounced on the museum\u2019s top floor, where the main exhibition of Onar\u2019s works has been installed. This includes five new glass pieces representing characters in a play written by Amaya-Akkermans as a kind of sequel to the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes\u2019 satire The Birds<\/em>. The text of the new play, framed as a conversation between two birds and the mythological hero Odysseus following the imagined collapse of Aristophanes\u2019 bird utopia, incorporates a chorus made up of fragments from songs narrating the stories of exile of the Karamanlides. This largely forgotten Orthodox Christian population, who spoke and wrote in Turkish using the Greek alphabet, lived in Central Anatolia before being uprooted during the 1923 population exchange.<\/p>\n A short film of the play produced for the exhibition incorporates video footage shot in landscapes associated with the Karamanlides. It screens on one wall of the museum in front of a group of Onar\u2019s Perched<\/em> birds, representing the play\u2019s chorus. The \u201caudience\u201d for the performance is made up of Roman pieces, primarily figures of gods and theater masks, from the Sadberk Han\u0131m collection.<\/p>\n In other vitrines around the room, Onar\u2019s new works are placed in their own conversation with 11 artifacts she and Amaya-Akkermans selected from the museum\u2019s collection, including a 4,000-year-old partridge-shaped rhyton (ritual drinking vessel), a ceremonial terracotta nail with cuneiform inscriptions from the Sumerian period, and an Ottoman ceramic tankard decorated with images of sailing vessels. A boat-shaped, turquoise-glazed ceramic bowl from the Seljuk period decorated with mythological siren figures resonates with Onar\u2019s kiln-cast glass boat in royal blue representing Odysseus, while two terracotta pigeon figurines from the classical period so resemble the form of Onar\u2019s Perched<\/em> birds that, she says, \u201cthey could have been made by my own hand.\u201d<\/p>\n Since first putting it on display in 1988, the museum has built its archeological collection with the goal of creating a succinct but multifaceted history of Anatolia. This has been done in part by acquiring, at foreign auctions, pieces that had potentially been smuggled out of the region in the past. \u201cWe don\u2019t like to use the language of \u2018bringing them home\u2019 but we are trying our best to put them in a better context,\u201d Arseven says.<\/p>\n One of these key pieces is a small Early Bronze Age marble idol known as a \u201cStargazer\u201d for its slightly up-tilted head, which appears as part of the After Utopia: The Birds<\/em> exhibition. Originating in western Anatolia, Stargazers, also called Kilia Idols, are extremely rare and valuable. Only 14 such pieces have been found to date as complete figures; they are scattered throughout museums and private collections around the world. The Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum reportedly acquired its 6-centimeter-tall Stargazer at a Christie\u2019s auction in New York in 2010. Another Stargazer consigned to Christie\u2019s by an American collector fetched $12.7 million in 2017 but the finalization of the sale remains stalled by Turkey\u2019s as-yet unsuccessful campaign<\/a> to get the figure back.<\/p>\n By conceptually uniting the journeys of the Stargazer, Onar\u2019s birds, the Karamanlides, and other generations of refugees, the exhibition prompts viewers to meditate on issues of identity, belonging, displacement, and the meaning of home. This last is something particularly challenging to define in the case of Anatolia, where so many different civilizations have made their mark over millennia. In some cases, both Greece and Turkey have sought repatriation of the same objects, for example.<\/p>\n Though After Utopia: The Birds<\/em> is the first contemporary art intervention at the Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum, it is part of a growing interest in archaeology within the art world. In Istanbul alone, Bronze Age artifacts from the Sadberk Han\u0131m collection, including a gold mouth plate and ear plugs thought to have been used in funerary rites, were included alongside contemporary works in the recent group exhibition Rounded by Sleep<\/em><\/a> at Arter. A show at the Yap\u0131 Kredi Cultural Center about the ancient city of Sagalassos<\/a> included new jewelry made by one of the site\u2019s official artists-in-residence. And the Istanbul Archaeological Museums recently exhibited two dozen works<\/a> inspired by cultural heritage, including virtual-reality installations and 3-D printed sculptures.<\/p>\n Such juxtapositions highlight not only the shared questions and ideas that have fascinated humankind since our species\u2019 beginnings, but also the fact that what we do and create now will one day be part of the past. For our descendants, Onar\u2019s birds may perhaps be the subject of as much interpretation, study, and contestation as the artifacts that surround them in the Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum are to us today.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jennifer Hattam reviews “After the Birds: Utopia” at Istanbul’s Sadberk Han\u0131m Museum \u2014 an exhibition inspired by refugees. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":336,"featured_media":25038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,51],"tags":[274,2336,2335,807,920,1181,1453],"coauthors":[2334],"class_list":["post-25032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-tmr-weekly","tag-art","tag-cultural-heritage","tag-glass","tag-home","tag-istanbul","tag-museum","tag-refugees","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Figurine](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/FigurineMessengerBirdTereus-Feleksan-Onar-After-the-Birds-Utopia-tmr.jpg\")
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<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n![\"After](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/after-the-birds-utopia-installation-1.jpg\")
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