A site-specific descent into the Byzantine cistern beneath Zeyrek Çinili Hamam.
Zeyrek Çinili Hamam opens its 2026 contemporary art program with Margaret R. Thompson’s first solo exhibition in Turkey. The show fills the hammam’s Byzantine cistern with site-specific paintings on canvas and silk, alongside sound and scent installations.
The exhibition takes its name from temenos, the ancient Greek term for a sacred space set apart from daily life — a protective sanctuary between the human and the divine. In psychology, the word names an inner refuge where one meets the unconscious safely. The hammam itself has long worked this way: a threshold outside daily life where social hierarchy is suspended and the body and mind open to change. The Byzantine cistern below becomes the door to what lies underground.
These reservoirs once kept the city alive; Thompson imagines the cistern as an “inland sea,” and the descent into it as a movement of attention inward. Her compositions are built around a vertical line that rises like a spine, read at times as a passage or channel. Repeated spirals, whirlpools, and fountains suggest purification, rebirth, and infinity, while winged creatures, birds, plants, shells, and celestial bodies surface across the works. Her materials include oils, spices, waters, and silks sourced in Istanbul, together with raw pigments and earth gathered from other regions.
‘’Margaret R. Thompson: Temenos: The Inland Sea’’ is on view through August 30 2026, at Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul.
