Exhibition: 17 September–25 October 2025
Bayetav Sanat, Pagy Mansion, İzmir, Türkiye
Open daily (except Mondays) 11am–7pm

Artists: Shezad Dawood (UK), Aşkın Ercan, Pınar Boztepe, Sinan Kılıç, Sarp Keskiner, Gökçe Süvari, Melisa Geçalp, Güneşin Oya Aydemir (Turkey), and Can Luca Etterlin (Switzerland-Estonia).

Forecast Türkiye: Memory of Water / Suyun Belleği programme focuses on future thinking from one of the Earth’s oldest places of ideas.  Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the World and once a port on the Mediterranean fed by the Menderes River Delta. It held a theatre capable of holding 24,000 people and was home to famous ancient polymath thinkers such as Heraclitus who rightly viewed the world as constantly in flux, declaring that ‘everything flows’. This is our starting point in a world of climate change, inequality and uncertainty.

Our work explores how Ephesus was expanded to a city of 250,000 by the Romans, who celebrated water spiritually through magnificent majestic fountains. Their government even had water curators to test the river’s quality, funnelling  it through expansive pipes and storing it beneath the city in cisterns. Today, Selçuk is a thriving town with a beautiful aqueduct passing through the city centre and storks nesting on the Roman ruin columns. Yet the Menderes is now a ‘dead’ river, and the town does not have safe drinking water through its taps. The causes and issues include pollution from industrial areas upstream, excessive use of fertiliser by farmers causing runoff into the river and the sea, and the worsening impacts of climate change.

The Menderes River carries centuries of extraordinary narratives. Once “the home to Western ideas” in the shape of Homer and Heraclitus, the region also advanced knowledge in mathematics, medicine and architecture. It was an intersection and a passage of the ancient Silk Route between Greece and Anatolia, so its numerous antiquities have been plundered by European explorers; especially from Paris and London to sell to their respective Museums. 

How do we find solutions to our rivers and coastlines at this time of crisis? How do we bring communities already suffering from poverty and uncertainty, excluded from decision-making, towards new ideas that can bring improvement for humans and the environment?

In Forecast Türkiye: Memory of Water / Suyun Belleği, Invisible Dust, in collaboration with Teos Culture and Art Association, brings together Turkish and UK artists and scientists to draw inspiration from the beautiful wildlife of Selçuk, the Scarborough coastline, and the Derwent River running through the North York Moors. We encourage new interdisciplinary thinking and positive futures.

The etymology of the Menderes River gives the artists the opportunity to explore the origins of this common description for water: ‘Running in a direction excessively tortuous so that from the course of this river all windings are called meanders’ (Strabo, Anatolian geographer, 64-21 BC, quoted in Jeremy Seal’s travel book ‘Meander: East to West Along a Turkish River’). The past and present of the Menderes River is central to our thinking and has given us this English word ‘Meander’, which means moving in a winding way rather than taking the straightest and quickest path.

This idea of meandering is apt for our storytelling and for thinking together about the Menderes River Delta and Scarborough’s marine and river wildlife. We will take in multiple perspectives rather than going straight to solutions or conclusions.

We have the collective opportunity to explore the effects on the ancient swamps of Pamucak coast which is a migratory habitat of hundreds of species, some of which are endemic, its rural farmers and their stories. In both Turkey and the UK, the water systems and nature continuously suffer from water pollution and the effects of climate change.

Our collaboration includes Güneşin Oya Aydemir, director of Çamtepe Ecological Life Center (Çanakkale), whose many years of experience connect us with a wider network of green arts organisations across Turkey. These NGOs work with communities and histories of local storytelling traditions in rural and coastal areas of high biodiversity and food growing. We aim to bring artists and environmental networks together in Istanbul.

Forecast Türkiye: Memory of Water / Suyun Belleği is part of Invisible Dust’s ongoing international programme Forecast, initiated in 2021 to ask at “What is shaping how you are thinking about the future of the planet?: Uncertainty, how the past shapes the future, what role for nature…” Invisible Dust is currently preparing new programmes on Forecast India in London, October 2025, and Forecast Arctic in Finland, 2026.

We are not alone in addressing our rivers. Internationally, growing movements are reflected in Is a River Alive? by UK writer Robert Macfarlane, who argues that rivers are not merely resources for human use, but living beings – deserving recognition in both imagination and law. Inspired by the activists, artists and lawmakers of the young ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, his book takes three major journeys and calls for rivers to be recognised as legal entities to enable local communities to work together for their benefit. We join him, and many others worldwide, to ensure that –  like Heraclitus’s vision – that flow is a positive one for both people and nature.

Alice Sharp, Invisible Dust, August 2025.

The exhibition Forecast Türkiye: Memory of Water / Suyun Belleği, designed by the Teos Culture and Arts Association (Turkey) and Invisible Dust (UK) in collaboration with the KARANTİNA collective, the Municipality of Selçuk (Izmir, Turkey), and the One Seed Foundation – Çamtepe Ecological Living Center (Çanakkale, Turkey), will open on 17 September 2025.

Forecast Türkiye: Memory of Water / Suyun Belleği by Teos Arts and Culture Association and Invisible Dust is supported by the British Council’s Creative Collaborations Grant Programme. In partnership with the Municipality of Selçuk, Çamtepe Ecological Life Center, the Old Parcels Office, and scientists from Hull and Istanbul Universities.

The production of the art book is supported by the SAHA Association’s Sustainability Fund.