Some narratives are born with an ‘alien’ perspective – as opposed to the notion of ‘indigenous’ (someone who is native to the land), based on a perception from distant lands. This viewpoint is an attempt to overcome the idea of the ‘epistemological abyss’, which has been so much discussed in contemporary humanities. Within the Western art scene, both Eurocentric and south-global, stepping onto the Asian boundaries provides a broadening opportunity to explore new horizons. Narrowing our focus to just a few countries is not only cruel, but also dulling.

Faced with this premise, Istanbul is a city of cultural confluences – a place with a vibrant biennial, which next year will present its eighteenth edition, and whose curators include Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (New Jersey, USA, 1957), Nicolas Bourriaud (Niord, France, 1965) and Adriano Pedrosa (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1965). As the city, since the 1920s – under the republican leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Salonica, former Ottoman Empire, 1881) – continues to align itself with the requirements of the northern art scene, Istanbul is also pushing – according to data from the Susma24 platform, established eight years ago to counter censorship and self-censorship in Turkey, and a story published in the Folha de São Paulo newspaper – a stranglehold on artists by the current government led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Kasımpaşa, Turkey, 1954), restricting the scope for political debate through artistic avenues.

This is the bittersweet, grand and unpalatable scenario in which the Istanbul Modern stands as both Turkey’s leading contemporary art museum and one of the most impressive in the world: inaugurated in 2004 to a design by well-known architect Renzo Piano (Pegli, Italy, 1937). This building was designed to engage in a structural dialogue with Istanbul’s urban framework and, in particular, with the Bosphorus. Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1967) is presenting his solo exhibition in this context until February 9, 2025. It revisits works from his career and also presents new ones conceived for Istanbul Modern. Your unexpected encounter is the artist’s first major showing in Turkey since the 1997 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Rosa Martínez (Soria, Spain, 1955), where Eliasson unveiled Beauty (1993). The exhibition is also curated by Istanbul’s Öykü Özsoy and his peers Nilay Dursun and Ümit Mesci, and is the first to be held independently of the institution’s collection in the museum’s Temporary Exhibition Room.

As soon as Your unexpected encounter was launched, it was decided to develop a narrative with direct, noiseless references to the Bosphorus. In Dusk to dawn Bosporus (2024), the Icelandic-Danish artist brings to mind water motion with a composition made of coloured glass on wood. He also features works with colour studies in acrylic paint and a bronze sculpture.

Eliasson has made an interesting choice to use colour in his first impression of Turkish waters. In the biographical book Istanbul – Memories of a City, by Nobel Literature Prize winner Orphan Pamuk (Istanbul, 1952), the writer describes it as a city overwhelmed by a feeling known as the hüzun, a sort of collective melancholy that reflects the decadence of a former great empire. Pamuk, when describing European artists and the way they saw the city, brings up a black and white drawing of the shores of the Bosphorus by Le Combusier (La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1887). Apparently, Olafur Eliasson’s Nordic outlook picks up on some extra light, an additional warmth that shines through like light beams when it engenders the poetics of Istanbul. But this romanticising of heat and its prism-like colouring is quickly dispelled in the second part of the exhibition.

The works grow in scale in this section, as does the curatorial narrative. It goes further than the banks of the Bosphorus and the Turkish borders. A gargantuan crystalline wall, with a diamond-cut texture, divides the halls of the Istanbul Modern. This is the work Less ego wall (2015). Towards the end of this hall, a large metal, mirror and LED globe called The critical zone sphere (2020) warns us that we mustn’t talk about water without discussing the ecosystem that sustains the planet.

Eliasson, between these two installations, presents the photo series The glacier melt series (1999/2019), frightening onlookers by revealing the changing nature of glacial landscapes during the last few decades of global warming. If the Turkish feeling of hüzun is one of melancholy over the decline of the Ottoman Empire, it is legitimate to intensify this melancholy when faced with the process of human extinction that we are following in real time.

The third moment of the exhibition, still wrapped in the surface of Less ego wall (2015), the curatorial narrative reveals a greater logic than the planetary one. With works such as Your solar nebula (2015) and The lost compass (2013), the exhibition posits a constellational, galactic vision and introduces magnetic rationales that go beyond the Earth. This universal feeling also emerges in Unforgetting solar exposure (2020), a watercolour series that addresses solar issues in this planetary deregulation process.

While this third part of the exhibition brings the audience works hinting at a wider, universal reality, the exhibition space used is much smaller than that of the second section, resulting in an opposite feeling for the viewers: one of spatial flattening. This part of the exhibition also features works that, while highly plastic, flirt with the idea of glaciality and even journeying (as is seen in The ship series, from 2024), which do not seem so engaged with the curatorial narrative as with the institutional need to exhibit these items.

This is perhaps why, at this moment, the exhibition features a passageway that gives the public three options: two dark rooms on the sides or the continued exhibition in a straight line. Just before the dark room where Model for a timeless garden (2011) is presented – a beautiful installation involving sounds, water jets and strobe lights -, three installations with wood pieces collected from Icelandic waters appear to disrupt the exhibition flow: like the waters of a river, metaphorically, along this twisting junction, the exhibition feels a bit chaotic and polluted.

Your unexpected encounter, in its fourth and least inspired moment, smothers the tubular sculptures that enshrined Olafur Eliasson’s career and even Sunset kaleidoscope (2005) – a work that directly dialogues with the view of the Bosphorus and all the elements mentioned in the first moments – by cluttering the exhibition hall core with the artist’s countless studies made in 1996 and the queues of visitors eager for content on their social media that can be seen in the light and shadow of Your pluralistic coming together (2024).

With more hits than misses, Your unexpected encounter offers one last grandiose moment. Room for one colour (1997) is a vast room with powerful yellow lights and a black ceiling. The viewer, submerged in this tonal spectrum, sees the bodies in the exhibition room solely in greyish tones. The flames and ashes of an announced apocalypse, a not so surprising encounter.

Your unexpected encounter pleases the alien and natural eyes of the former Ottoman Empire. In plastic terms, it is as splendid as the architecture of the Istanbul Modern and gives the general audience a good insight into the work of Olafur Eliasson. Although there are some shortcomings in the exhibition narrative, the curators have done a wonderful job with the supporting texts, in particular with a valuable, intuitive and well-written exhibition catalogue.

Unfortunately, the current Turkish context allows us, on the one hand, to consider climate issues – such as global warming and polar ice melt – but, on the other, it only lets us see the tip of the iceberg.