The Basilica Cistern Museum presents the exhibition ‘Deeper Beneath”’

The Basilica Cistern, which was built centuries ago for the collection and storage of water, is also a place where universal cultural consciousness and collective social memory intersect, reaching us from different layers of history. After comprehensive and meticulous restoration works, it opened its doors to visitors with its first exhibition, ‘Deeper Into,’ prepared with a contemporary museological approach.

The exhibition ‘Deeper Into’ invites viewers on a mysterious journey among the infinite layers of time, bringing together artworks by Ali Abayoğlu, Aslı İrhan, Berkay Buğdan, Güneş Terkol, Jennifer Steinkamp, Malik Bulut, Muzaffer Tuncer, Ozan Ünal, and Yasemin Aslan Bakiri.

The historical memory of the Basilica Cistern forms a universe for the art of the future. Just like ‘Water,’ art also inspires this exhibition as the source of life, the foundation of vitality and existence, and the means of healing and purification. With its visible and invisible vibrations, thoughts, imagination, forms of creativity, and their reflections, the Basilica Cistern invites visitors to go ‘Deeper Into’.

Deeper Beneath

The Basilica Cistern, built about 1500 years ago, is a timeless place. Like every place that transcends its time, Basilica is a place of enigma since it has gone out of its own time. This spot, which was built for a technical need in the late antique world centuries ago, has gone far beyond being a mere Byzantine water cistern after centuries. Undoubtedly, encountering a place of past times confronts people of today with history. However, historical places that have gone beyond time and whose function cannot be grasped simply create a spiritual trigger on human beings’ perception of the past. The possibility of going back in time opens the door to imagination and spirituality.

The Basilica is not on the plane we live in, it is below, underground. Something must have happened to this structure that challenges our understanding. Those who see it a thousand
years after it was built doubt that it is a sunken palace. According to our collective human spirituality, such a magnificent masterpiece, a palace, should probably have been cursed
and sent seven floors underground.

Basilica opens a door to the underground, hurling us into another dimension not only chronically but also planar. In the common spirituality of humanity, the underground as uterus, is the realm of pre-life, post-death and the uncanny full of unknowns. The underground represents the depths of the collective emotional memory of humanity. Our secrets are hidden deep in the underground; beings that are undesirable to be seen and words that are undesirable to be heard have been sent there.

Basilica belongs above ground. She did not die, but she has long exceeded the limit of a lifetime and reached the age of 1500. A hero who went underground and acquired immortality from there is a legend who carried her life beyond her own time.

Now that you came to meet her, are you ready to go underground? Below, in our personal and social spirituality, Medusa awaits you in the heart of the Basilica. Let’s go a little deeper, to the “emotional depths” of ourselves and humanity.

The exhibition titled “Deeper Beneath” brings together the works of Ali Abayoğlu, Yasemin Aslan Bakiri, Berkay Buğdan, Malik Bulut, Aslı İrhan, Jennifer Steinkamp, Güneş Terkol, Muzaffer Tuncer and Ozan Ünal. At the same time, along with the works, a unique experience meets the audience via a digital-video mapping of the story of the Basilica Cistern from the past to the present. This digital experience, designed and implemented by the art collective “Decol”, turns Istanbul into a poem, and the audience the passengers of the ship that has set sail towards the meaning of this poem. This experience, which invites the audience to the boundless layers of time, from the present day to Greek mythology, and to the mythological Argo ship sailing from the Bosphorus to the Black Sea, promises a healing journey by placing the collective consciousness of the ancient city of Istanbul to center. The experience that begins with the restoration of the Basilica Cistern ranges from the epics of Ulysses and Odyssey, the journey of the Golden Horn from the Marmara waters to the Black Sea, from the legends of water transport to Byzantium to the Ottoman waterways, from Medusa’s love with the Sea God Poseidon to the protective talismanic columns of Istanbul, and invites its visitors to the dance of Medusa and Sahmaran. The artists creating the experience, on the other hand, bring together the old and new charms of Istanbul throughout the interaction that spreads through the cistern.

Mahir Polat / Curator

Artworks