Contemporary Art Enters Istanbul’s Deep Past at Koza Güreli’s Zeyrek Çinili Hamam

One of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary art is its ability to open new narrative possibilities in places already dense with layered pasts. Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is one such space, and perhaps one of the most compelling examples in Turkey of how a context-sensitive hospitality project can integrate heritage preservation, archaeological research and contemporary artistic production without reducing one to the backdrop of the others.

Acquired in 2010 by Marmara Group, one of Turkey’s leading hospitality groups, the present-day Zeyrek Çinili Hamam emerged out of a 13-year restoration of a 16th-century double hammam. “We have residences, hotels, extended stays and other hospitality projects, and we were looking to expand our knowledge in hospitality,” Koza Güreli told Observer when we visited the space to preview the on-site exhibition. Her mother initially had the idea, she added, and Güreli took over the lead after her mother retired. Güreli’s father is the founder of Turkey’s key art fair, Contemporary Istanbul, and has long been collecting art. Güreli recalls growing up around fairs before beginning to collect herself at age 26. “I was always interested in art, but I never had a plan to create an art space. The hammam was not initially conceived as an art venue. Then it came together.”

Located in the Zeyrek district on the city’s historic Golden Horn peninsula, part of the UNESCO World Heritage list, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam is a unique heritage building that embodies different moments of the city’s history. The roughly 32,000-square-foot bath was commissioned in the 1530s by Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, the Ottoman grand admiral who helped transform the empire into a dominant Mediterranean naval power. He entrusted the project to Mimar Sinan, then in the early stages of a career that would later make him the sultan’s leading architect.

The project proved unusually ambitious. No known hammam of the period appears to have possessed a tile program of comparable richness: more than 10,000 blue-and-white İznik tiles are believed to have once covered its interiors, incorporating 37 distinct patterns produced specifically for the building. Indeed, the richness of the decoration gave the hammam its name: çinili, or “tiled.”

Over the centuries, the building changed hands and underwent successive alterations, eventually falling into disuse as the hammam’s communal role diminished with the spread of domestic plumbing in the 19th Century. This gave the antiquities dealer Ludovic Lupti the opportunity to acquire the tiles around 1874 and sell them in Paris. An anonymous memorandum submitted to Sultan Abdülhamid II some years later lamented the removal and sale of the tiles as part of a broader depletion of the Ottoman Empire’s artistic heritage. Dispersed around the world, some are now held by major museums, including the Louvre, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon; others are in private collections.

The restoration resisted the temptation to reconstruct what could no longer be known. Cengiz Kabaoğlu and KA-BA Architecture, who led the architectural conservation and restoration project, refused to reproduce the missing İznik tiles or manufacture the illusion of an intact 16th-century interior. Instead, they preserved the traces of what remained: worn marble, fragments, scars, painted surfaces and absences.

It took more than a decade of restoration, archaeological excavation and archival research to reconstruct this fragmented history. During the work, nearly 3,000 pieces of 16th-century İznik tile were recovered from the site. “It was not supposed to become a heritage project at the beginning, but it became one,” Güreli acknowledged, emphasizing that, as a family, Marmara Group has always valued heritage buildings. They recently renovated Esma Sultan Palace on the Bosphorus, now an event space. “Personally, we like antique things and old things. We like preserving them.”

A selection of what was recovered is now on display in the museum integrated into the complex. The exhibition design developed by the German studio ATELIER BRÜCKNER masterfully stages a narrative among the artifacts on view, which span 1,500 years, from the 5th Century through the Ottoman period and into the 20th, while a series of objects introduces visitors to the rich social history of hammam culture. One particularly striking display brings together dozens of wooden bath sandals, or nalın, some elaborately inlaid with mother-of-pearl and raised on astonishingly high platforms, whose varying heights were the only element distinguishing one class from another within the hammam. They were part of a broader personal apparatus of bathing: embroidered pouches containing soaps, combs, towels, bowls, scrubbing cloths and other objects required for the ritual.

These spaces were much more than a public utility or the privatized luxury spa experience to which they are often reduced today. Hammams were spaces of socialization, community and belonging, structured around a shared ritual of cleansing and regeneration that moved through heat, steam and water, and was as spiritual and emotional as it was physical.

This was particularly true for women. The hammam offered a space outside the home where women could gather independently, inhabit a social world without men, spend hours together and construct forms of social life that extended well beyond bathing itself. Weddings and other rites of passage had their own hammam rituals; conversation, gossip, celebration and bodily care unfolded together.

That spiritual and energetic dimension of the hammam ritual, as much as the extraordinary architecture itself, has deeply informed the contemporary art program developed around the building since its public opening in 2023. “For me, hammams used to be very important communal spaces where people gathered. Especially for women, the hammam was one of the only places they could come without their husbands, spend the day, gossip and build their own social life. Each neighborhood had its own hammam,” Güreli explained, noting how the goal from the beginning was also to restore the social, cultural and even spiritual role of this space. “Today, hammams are mostly tourist spaces, but at the time, they fostered a sense of belonging within the community. It is important to me to continue that tradition of people getting together.”

The inaugural exhibition, “Healing Ruins,” curated by the space’s artistic director, Anlam de Coster, unfolded throughout both the women’s and men’s sections of the historic bath as well as its newly uncovered Byzantine cisterns. Bringing together 22 artists, “it was a way to launch the space, but it was also a way for everyone to experience the building for free before the hammam opened commercially as a functioning bath,” Güreli said.

The program now encompasses two exhibitions each year, despite the fact that the team does not have a conventional museum-scale exhibitions department and the architecture imposes significant constraints: walls cannot be treated as neutral hanging surfaces, heat and humidity affect materials, and visitors encounter different works depending on which bathing section they use.

Artists are generally selected in conversation with the artistic director, Anlam de Coster. “The starting point for me is always the hammam itself,” de Coster told Observer in a separate conversation. “I am interested in artists whose practices can enter into a genuine conversation with the memory, physical character and symbolic charge of the building, rather than simply placing contemporary art within a historic setting.”

In conceiving the exhibitions, de Coster has increasingly focused on the hammam as a kind of temenos, a protected sanctuary set apart from ordinary life. This idea became particularly present for her through Margaret R. Thompson’s show, “Temenos: The Inland Sea,” which approached the cistern as a contained space for inward transformation. “Historically, the hammam was also a third space of gathering, one in which people came together outside the structures that governed much of daily life. Once we undress, we return quite simply to being bodies. Social hierarchies become less visible, and there is a certain freedom in that,” she reflected. “I am not looking for artists who illustrate the themes of bathing, healing or ritual. I am looking for artists whose work already shows sensitivity to transformation, memory, the body, the sacred, or the ways in which images and symbols travel across cultures.”

De Coster further pointed out that the hammam carries a different, almost sacred quality. “It comes from the architecture itself, with its starry domes, its ethereal light and sound, and the repetitive rituals of purification. Cleanliness itself carried a spiritual dimension.” Beneath the hammam lies the cistern that was buried for centuries, introducing another powerful set of dualities: light and darkness, concealment and revelation, alongside those already present in the hammam above, between water and fire, purity and transgression.

“There is such symbolic intensity in the space. This is important to me when I think about the artists we invite,” she added, noting how over the 13-year restoration the building gradually revealed itself almost through an excavation of memory. “That is perhaps where psychoanalysis entered my thinking around the program: the idea that what is buried does not disappear, but continues to shape what exists above it.” The work of the artists they choose to present need not be religious or spiritual in any explicit sense, but she is drawn to practices that can speak across cultures and periods and carry an awareness of something larger than the individual.

According to Güreli, the art presented at the hammam is intended to stand on its own while responding to the building’s history and function, as well as to the city and neighborhood in which it is situated. For this reason, all projects are conceived as site-specific. Prioritizing international artists who have not previously had a solo exhibition in Istanbul, the team invites them first for a research residency and, when the project requires it, a production residency as well. That time in the city and in the hammam is crucial, de Coster noted: “It gives the artists a chance to encounter the building slowly, to understand its histories and material traces, and to develop work from that encounter rather than arrive with a finished exhibition that could simply be transplanted into the space. Site-specificity, for me, comes from that process of exchange.”

Some artists spend extended time in the hammam and make work on site, while others produce in their studios after gathering materials. “Artists are very inspired by the space and the context because for many of them it is the first time they have worked in a place like this. It often encourages them to expand their materials and their practice,” Güreli noted. “I think the program creates new energy.” For her, these commissions also represent an important form of cultural exchange. International artists bring new audiences to the neighborhood, while the unusual context pushes artists to expand their materials and methods.

Since opening, the hammam has built a diverse audience: the project attracts international visitors and a sophisticated art crowd, but it has remained anchored in the local community and its engagement. The public program draws on the archaeological and conservation research behind the restoration. They host free panels on the dispersal of the hammam’s tiles, historic wall paintings and related architectural history, publish research, organize children’s activities and offer workshops ranging from scent creation and miniature painting to neighborhood photography walks.

“We try to make all of this accessible,” Güreli said. “People from the neighborhood come to the exhibitions, and the museum is free on Thursdays. There was no resistance from the neighborhood. We get along well. Once a year, we host a large dinner for the neighbors so that they feel the place is also for them.” The latest addition is a free research library focused on Sinan, Barbarossa, tiles and the hammam’s history, though it remains one of the least-used parts of the complex.

With the hammam once again functioning as a bath, the contemporary art program has increasingly gravitated toward, and concentrated in, another extraordinary space underneath it: a Byzantine cistern uncovered during the restoration. While excavating an area intended for storage, the team discovered the subterranean structure on which Sinan had partially built the hammam, incorporating the earlier architecture into his own. This separate site and route have made the core exhibition accessible to anyone, even those not participating in a hammam session.

The cistern carries its own unresolved histories. Incised into its plaster walls are remarkably detailed images of ships, galleys and other vessels, whose makers and precise dates remain unknown. Given their appearance, which differs markedly from Ottoman designs, researchers have come to believe that the makers may have been sailors or captives familiar with Mediterranean fleets.

It is in this subterranean space that Brazilian artist Alex Červený’s “Atlas of Encounters” unfolds. Červený is an internationally recognized artist who has shown at major institutions including Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Gwangju Biennial, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The show marks his first solo exhibition in Turkey.

Continuing the largely subconscious, almost divinatory practice, in which he intuitively weaves together history, mythology, literature and autobiography, Červený has created a richly imagined and unusually resonant symbolic journey through a site already saturated with memory, allowing Istanbul’s maritime history, a city shaped by the waters of the Bosphorus and by centuries of movement between continents, to mingle with personal, mythological and archetypal imagery drawn from Brazil and from a wider vocabulary of human symbols. “With Alex, this dialogue became especially rich because his work already operates through accumulated layers of history, memory, travel, knowledge and imagination,” de Coster said, pointing to the artist’s extraordinary ability to bring things from very different times and cultures into the same image without forcing them into a hierarchy.

Time and geography are fluid in Červený’s work. Images migrate between cultures and centuries; scientific diagrams slip into invented cosmologies; individual memories widen into archetypes. Through these crossings emerges a contemplation of the movement between lower and higher realms of human experience, between the bodily and the celestial, the individual and the collective, the historical and the imagined.

Once the artist began looking closely at the site, according to de Coster, there were so many points of connection with his existing symbolic universe: the archaeological layers of the building, the relationship between architecture and the body, Ottoman astronomy and navigation, the history of Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, but also much smaller traces such as the ship graffiti preserved on the walls. “These marks are deeply moving because they remind you that history is not confined to monuments or official narratives. It also survives through gestures, scratches, inscriptions and things left behind almost accidentally.”

At the center of the exhibition is Červený’s Astronomy Notebook series, originating in pages from two Ottoman astronomy compendia that he found in a secondhand bookshop during his first visit to Istanbul in 2009. Written in Ottoman Turkish and Persian and containing scientific texts and diagrams, the pages become surfaces on which the artist has instinctively inscribed new constellations, bodies and signs. Into these existing systems of knowledge and imagination, Červený has woven his own visual cosmology, allowing one symbolic order to inhabit another while revealing similarities and archetypal patterns shared across cultures.

Červený responded very intuitively to this kind of material. As de Coster confirmed, historical documents are never fixed sources of information for him: “They become porous surfaces onto which other memories, images and systems of knowledge can be projected. This is what happened with the Ottoman and Persian astronomy notebooks, with historical engravings, with the peştemals, and eventually with the architecture of the hammam itself.”

The exhibition brings together more than 30 works that map connections among astronomy, architecture and the body. In another group of works hanging throughout the tunnels, Červený has intervened on facsimiles of engravings by the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch artist and traveler Cornelis de Bruijn, drawing from an original copy of his Voyage au Levant, which he had serendipitously been gifted by a collector ahead of embarking on this project.

Historical representations of Istanbul and the Bosphorus become grounds for new inscriptions and imagined signs, weaving additional threads between the past and present of a waterway that has always been more than geography: a passage through which people, commodities, languages, religions and empires have moved, grown and been submerged by new waves in the impetuous course of history and humanity’s fate. Yet Červený also draws mysterious, wave-like forms that connect the sky with the towers of various mosques, suggesting a possible evolution and transcendence from this time-bound earthly realm toward a more timeless, universal dimension that links human imagination and souls with the cosmos.

Suspended throughout the cistern are traditional hammam towels embroidered by the artist with similarly archetypal presences. Across them, human, animal and archetypal figures suggest this thread, this vital cyclical interconnection of micro and macrocosms, earthly and celestial, while repeatedly returning to the fluid condition of human existence itself, to bodies that are, after all, largely made of water.

“I often think of the Byzantine cistern as a kind of subconscious space within the hammam,” de Coster echoed in her explanation. “You descend beneath the functioning bathhouse into a darker, older architecture where different periods of the building seem to coexist, along with an almost palpable sense of past lives and presences. For Alex, whose work constantly moves between the real and the imagined, the personal and the historical, this labyrinthine environment became a very natural setting.”

One of the most powerful of the textile works in the show offers a symbolically rich allegorical portrait of Istanbul: a city that has held many names, passed through many hands and witnessed the rise and collapse of successive empires, yet has persisted as a generative presence at the threshold between seas and continents. Červený folds that historical weight into something more intimate and elusive, something almost maternal and cosmic at once, as if that ancient land and city were a mother who had contemplated several possible human fates and turns of history, yet still holds and keeps each together as part of its multilayered identity and timeless energy. The same energy that Istanbul’s many cats, wandering its streets freely by day and night, still guard and channel.

The ritual of the hammam, revived and kept alive in this space, offers a similar experience of both regeneration and reawakening, inviting the body into another relationship with matter: to surrender to water, heat, air and vapor. The body moves continuously between density and dissolution. As it is scrubbed, heated, submerged and released, one watches the vapor rise toward the domes, dissolving and becoming one again with the daylight filtering through their star-shaped openings.

At Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, contemporary art adds another layer through which to reapproach these ancient rituals and the wisdom they embody with a different, and hopefully more attuned, spirit. And artists like Červený are able to intuitively engage with the “hammam’s subconscious” and translate it into new symbolic forms. Looking upward from the heat of the hammam toward those points of light, the movement enacted by Červený’s cosmologies suddenly feels less metaphorical: matter lifting toward something less tangible, the individual body momentarily placed back within a much larger order.

In the past few years, hammams have become more attractive to locals again, part of a broader interest in wellness. Through these contemporary exhibitions, collaborations with Turkish and international designers, public programs and ongoing research, Zeyrek Çinili Hamam’s key mission is to make hammam culture relevant to a new generation without detaching it from the sensory and spiritual experience of bathing. “When you experience the hammam, it is something else. It can feel almost divine. Through these interventions and collaborations, we make the culture relevant again,” Güreli concluded.

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