VIRTUAL ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper examines how contemporary artists engage critically with context and heritage through site-responsive practices that foreground process, material sensitivity, and temporal fragility. Focusing on the work of Catherine Bertola, in particular the exhibition Below the Salt (2021) at Temple Newsam, to explore how creative interventions can reveal latent histories embedded within architectural environments. Rather than preserving heritage as a fixed narrative, such practices activate space as a dynamic field of interpretation. Below the Salt translates the social hierarchies of the historic building and collections into a spatial and sensory experience. Through the symbolic use of materials, pattern, and architectural function, the work evokes the hidden labour of the past, that remains invisible to museum visitors, positioning absence, residue, and erasure as key interpretive strategies. The work operates across temporal and disciplinary boundaries, connecting past traditions to present interpretations and future understandings of place. Central to the installation is the poetics of salt as both material and metaphor. Historically associated with value, preservation, and social division, salt becomes a medium through which invisible boundaries are rendered perceptible. Its granular instability foregrounds processes of accumulation, erosion, and dispersal, evoking the fragility of memory and the impermanence of social structures. The paper argues that such materially driven interventions enable more inclusive and critical engagements with heritage, repositioning heritage sites as dynamic environments where past, present, and future continuously intersect.