For “Crystal Clear”—a group show inspired by philosophers Bruno Latour and Byung-Chul Han’s writings on the “climatic regime” and the false ideals of transparency, respectively—Elena Sorokina, curating from Paris, has partitioned the gallery with textile works, among them Paul Maheke’s The River Asked for a Kiss (To Pateh Sabally), 2017, a memorial to a Gambian refugee who drowned in Venice while onlookers filmed his death. The four digitally printed, diaphanous curtains recreate Sabally’s watery grave, and evoke the entirety of Suicide’s Note, the 1925 poem by Langston Hughes: “The calm, / Cool face of the river / Asked me for a kiss.” In Hale Tenger’s Fragile Grip, 2020, crystals symbolize and exemplify the art world’s reliance on extractive capitalism and the exploitation of natural resources. Presented in a pitch-dark room, the installation consists of a spherical mineral stone and a foam model Earth. As they revolve on their axes under dim spotlights, a thump-thump-thump heartbeat intermixed with ambient sounds loop through the speakers, lending these objects an otherworldly air (the mineral stone was purchased from an antique shop in Varenna; Tenger found the globe in an Istanbul garden).

A colorful, mordant video essay by İz Öztat, Confused Examination Under Given Circumstances, 2020, revisits a John Ruskin lecture titled “On the Elements of Crystallization” and Freud’s “crystal-principle” to draw parallels between the rigidity of crystals and the disciplinary procedures of governments. Öztat weaves her lecture through interludes of crystal-fondling and crystal-licking, testing the sharp, erotic edges of the mineral as her 3-D models melt into stringy, jellyfish-like forms. After guiding viewers through paintings, X-rays, and scientific documents on the subject, the artist’s hand enters a black glove and yanks a trapezoidal hunk of ersatz schairerite out of the frame. Öztat’s study reflects the show’s interest in crystals as shapeshifting organisms and emblems for the liquid borders between ancestral cultures and modernity, between translucence and opacity.

— Kaya Genç