Since reopening in 2023 after a 13-year restoration, Zeyrek Cinili Hamam has built a reputation for staging ambitious contemporary art in its Byzantine cistern. Under the artistic direction of Anlam de Coster, the program has leaned toward younger, often female, artists who move fluidly between ancient symbols and contemporary materials, letting Istanbul and its materials — silks, spices, ironmongers and woodworks — inspire them.
Margaret R. Thompson’s “Temenos: The Inland Sea” is the latest. The title comes from the ancient Greek temenos, a word for a sacred space set apart from everyday life, a zone of protection and transition. In psychological terms, it also points to an inner chamber where difficult encounters can take place under shelter.
Thompson builds the exhibition around that idea with a tightly controlled visual language. Large-scale paintings are organized along central vertical axes, reading almost like passageways. Repeating forms include vessels, spirals and vortices, suggesting circulation and return rather than narrative scenes. Textile works hang and drape in the space, echoing the softness of water against the cistern’s hard surfaces.
Motifs surface and recede: winged chimeras, mythological figures, hybrid bodies that refuse to settle into a single story. Materials are specific and tactile. Oils mixed with spices, silks sourced in Istanbul, natural pigments and earth gathered from different geographies give the works a density that resists the clean neutrality of white-cube painting.
