Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

Summer in Istanbul has a way of turning even ancient stone into something alive, and this week we follow that thread into a 1,600-year-old cistern where a sculptor stages his own reckoning with time, up to a Bosporus rooftop built for long lunches, across town to a gallery wall painted gold and out to the Cappadocia plains, where an artist has been recording the sound of soil.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: Down among the drowned gods

Seckin Pirim's sculptures glow crimson and white against the ancient columns of Serefiye Sarnici. (Dirimart)

Istanbul's cisterns have become the city's unlikeliest art darlings, with Byzantine plumbing repurposed as some of the moodiest exhibition space east of the Bosporus. The latest to succumb is Serefiye Sarnici, a roughly 1,600-year-old water tank built under Theodosius II, which now hosts “Then and Now,” sculptor Seckin Pirim's dialogue with 11 years of his own back catalog.

Pirim, born in Ankara in 1977 and trained at Mimar Sinan University, works in a tight, recognizable palette of black, white and, above all, red, a scheme he traces less to concept than to an ill-fitting blue T-shirt from art school he refused ever to repeat. His biomorphic red columns and plexiglass forms, drawn from shows dating back to 2014, are scattered among the cistern's marble pillars and reflected, doubled, in the standing water below.

The feature that elevates the work beyond photogenic stunt casting: sound. Pirim recorded the cistern's own dripping water and rebroadcast it through eight speakers, letting the space essentially perform itself back to its visitors,........

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