Felekşan Onar: After Utopia: The Birds

Sadberk Hanım Museum presents After Utopia: The Birds, a solo exhibition by glass artist Felekșan Onar, in a multidisciplinary collaboration with writer and curator Arie Amaya-Akkermans. It is the first contemporary art intervention at the museum which houses an outstanding collection of archeological and Ottoman artifacts. Spanning across sculpture, theater, video, archaeological artifacts and field research, “After Utopia: The Birds” is conceived around three main components: a series of new glass sculptures in conversation with selected artifacts from the museum’s collection, a contemporary play made into a short film, and a monograph of the research process undertaken over the course of two years by the artist and the curator. Housed in the top floor of the museum’s archaeological section, it is the first exhibition of its kind in Turkey.

Following from the success of her celebrated project Perched that began its journey in 2017 at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Onar’s most recent work, titled after the exhibition, is a sculptural series returning to the language of birds in traditional glass making, using kiln casting and mouth-blowing in plaster molds, and referencing millennia of glass making in the region dating back to the Late Bronze Age. These recent sculptures, namely Tereus and the Messenger together with Odysseus, however, tell a story without a defined time or space, but that was first told in the year 414 BC: They are the main characters in a dramatic sketch, written by Amaya-Akkermans, as a reception play on Aristophanes’ The Birds. Inside the vitrines of the archaeological display, the glass sculptures initiate a series of complex conversations with archaeology about multi-temporality, the meaning of deep past and inquiring on the ways in which humans shaped it.

The play serves as the script of a short film, produced by Kanat Akar and directed by the artist and the curator duo, asking similar questions to those of Aristophanes’ play, yet addressing a contemporary audience: Are utopias possible? How to redirect the historical imagination? What happens after a disaster? Turning to popular ballads in Karamanlidika Turkish, as a metaphor for dislocation in time, and visually revisiting the sites of the Karamanlides’ presence in Anatolia, the film was first conceived as an oral theater performance. Out of this comic universe, from the classical old comedy to the Karagöz shadow play, new narrative possibilities appear on the horizon for these birds and their interlocutors in the exhibition hall: antiquities ranging from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman era. Perched is also a part of this artistic dialogue at Sadberk Hanım, taking stage as the chorus of the play.

This unique conversation between different material pasts of the present and utopian, speculative narratives was possible only through a slow-conceived engagement with the cultural history of artefacts in the collection. The exhibition monograph, available in both Turkish and English, includes vast archival documentation of the curatorial process at the museum, a text of the play, and introductory essays on the intersection between contemporary art, the classical world, modern archaeology and literary theory. After Utopia: The Birds runs at Sadberk Hanım Museum, everyday except Wednesdays from 10am till 5pm, starting September 10, 2022, through February 28, 2023. The exhibition is part of the parallel events of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, September 17 through November 20.

Founded in 1980 as a subsidary of Vehbi Koç Foundation, Sadberk Hanım Museum is Turkey’s first private museum. From nearly three thousand objects at its inauguration, the museum collections have grown to over twenty thousand today. The museum is dedicated to passing on the country’s cultural heritage to future generations and through its programme of activities and events contributing to the scientific and educational development of the society. The museum’s Archaeological Section consists of examples of material culture belonging to all the civilizations that have flourished in Anatolia from the 6th millennium BC to the end of the Byzantine period. The Turkish-Islamic Art Section, consisting predominantly of Ottoman period items, includes a rare collection of Iznik tiles and ceramics, silverworks, calligraphy, Ottoman textiles, costume and embroidery.