In “Temporary Assembly of Living Things,” Hakan Topal took on Turkey’s multifarious state violence, indicting the perennial tactics of press censorship and police brutality as well as the more recent employment of drones to monitor—and attack—people moving across the country’s borders. Such violence along migratory routes was a focal point of the New York–based artist’s show, which opened with The Golden Cage, 2022, a video that posits birds as transnational creatures and follows, in particular, the northern bald ibis. Called kelaynak in Turkish, this migratory species is said to be the most