Bathing beauties: contemporary art beneath Mimar Sinan’s 500-year-old hammam in Istanbul

The Marmara Group, a Turkish hospitality company, bought the hammam in 2010. Most of the İznik tiles that gave it its name (çini means tile) had been removed in the 19th century, and some are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Louvre. “We thought it would take three or four years,” said Koza Güreli Yazgan, the founding director of Zeyrek Çinili Hamam and a third-generation leader of The Marmara Group. The restoration took 13 years and became, in her words, “almost an archaeological excavation”. It turned up thousands of tile fragments, painted surfaces and artefacts from the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods, and eventually the cistern. “Suddenly the story was no longer only about a 500-year-old Ottoman hammam,” she said. “We were looking at layers of Istanbul stretching back much further.”

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Zeyrek Çinili Hamam reopened in 2023 with a museum for the finds and the cistern given over to contemporary art. Yazgan does not think adaptive reuse, the term usually attached to such projects, quite fits. “We haven’t replaced the building’s historic function with a new one,” she said. “We spent thirteen years making it possible for a 16th-century hammam to operate as a hammam again.” The cultural programme, she explained, grew out of the restoration. Hammams were historically places where people, particularly women, gathered and marked rituals together, and the owners wanted the building to go on serving that purpose.

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The cistern’s passages are dim and wind between walls of irregular masonry that still carry the marks of water and of the people who passed through. Anlam de Coster, artistic director of Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, said the restoration had managed to open the space to visitors “without neutralising its character”. “You are very conscious that you are entering a space belonging to another period of the city’s history,” she said.

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De Coster describes the cistern as “the subconscious of the hammam, or its underworld”. “Someone can come here to bathe and, during the same visit, learn about bathing culture, encounter an exhibition that resonates with the space, or discover a book,” she said. She chooses artists whose practices can engage with the building’s history and rituals, and does not want contemporary art placed there simply because the contrast with an old building looks striking. “For me, that is very different from using heritage as scenery,” she said. Each new artist, she added, “seems to notice a new crack, a new mark, something I have somehow missed despite spending so much time there”.

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There is little scope for lighting, and the walls cannot be used like conventional gallery surfaces. Every fixing has to protect the historic fabric. The more than 30 works on show include drawings on paper, paintings, embroidered towels and a parchment body form, and in the half-light they “appear gradually as you move through the space”, de Coster said. “The relationship to scale, body, and proximity is very different from what you’d have in a white cube.”

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De Coster first came across Červený’s work at Art Basel in 2022 and only later learnt that he had been to Istanbul in 2009. On that first trip, travelling alone, he found a coverless astronomy book in Arabic script in a second-hand shop on İstiklal Avenue. He couldn’t read it, but he was taken with the layout: text filling the central columns, with more framing the margins. He began drawing on the pages during a sleepless night in the city.

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Červený, born in São Paulo in 1963, often works on what he calls palimpsests. “You add your own gesture and ideas directly onto a surface that already holds information, that already has a memory and a history,” he said. Over the years his marks on the astronomy pages grew smaller, “as if I wanted to blend into the graphic construction the pages already have. The book also contains notes by a previous owner, someone who, unlike him, understood its contents. Červený calls the result “a meeting of four hands”, and describes himself as “an adventurer” with “a simply poetic, aesthetic view of it”. The Astronomy Notebook series, which he had never found the right place to show until now, forms the centre of the exhibition.

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“The exhibition emerged through the encounters,” de Coster said. “We did not begin with a fixed theme and ask the site to illustrate it.” On the same 2009 trip, Červený had become a regular at a neighbourhood hammam in Beyoğlu and left with two used peştemals, the cotton towels bathers wrap themselves in. He drew on them in Brazil, and women from a charity embroidered the drawings. One is exhibited here alongside five new peştemals bought in the Grand Bazaar. One of the new ones shows a large ship, which the exhibition text connects to Barbarossa’s fleet and to the graffiti on the cistern walls.

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Yazgan plans around two exhibitions a year at Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, along with talks, workshops and publications on the site, and wants closer ties with the museums that hold its scattered tiles. “These buildings need to participate in contemporary life if they are going to remain meaningful,” she said. “But I don’t think every historic building needs to become a hotel, a restaurant or a conventional cultural venue.”

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De Coster finds the carvings deeply moving. “They remind us that history survives not only through monuments or official narratives,” she said. “It also survives through scratches, inscriptions, gestures, and things left behind by ordinary people whose stories were never recorded.” Červený, she said, often described Atlas of Encounters as less a solo exhibition than “a group show with the anonymous historical artists who carved those ships into the walls centuries ago”.

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