“Did we pull the body from underwater?” Letters that pop up from a pitch-black sculptural box form this eery sentence that could have been used in a film noir. It is, in fact, a stanza by Turkish poet Edip Cansever.

“Cansever is one of my favorite poets. I have quoted some of his verses either as titles or integrated them into some of my works,” said Hale Tenger, an artist who held her first solo exhibition in seven years in a gallery months ago. 

Tenger's first use of Cansever's poetry goes back to 1995 when she recreated a guard booth placed inside a barbed-wire zone. The work, which was a site-specific one created for the 4th Istanbul Biennial, was destroyed at the end of the exhibition but was reconstructed in 2015 with nonprofit Protocinema in New York. It is now exhibited at Istanbul's Arter museum. “It also took its title from one of Cansever's stanzas: ‘We didn't go outside, we were always on the outside / We didn't go inside, we were always on the inside.’ It has been 25 years, and now it is included in one of the inaugural shows at Arter, and unfortunately, it is still extremely relevant to today's conditions,” Tenger told Al-Monitor.

A quarter of a century later, Tenger’s exhibition at Istanbul’s Galeri Nev borrows its name from one of Cansever’s best-known works, “Where the Winds Rest,” a poem from his 1980 book “The Travel Log of a Poet.” The exhibition was launched last December in the historical Misir Apartments erected in 1910 by Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavur, at Istiklal Caddesi, the main artery in downtown Istanbul. From the suggestive context of Tenger's work, it would be possible to misconstrue the phrase as a quotation from Turkey's charged present, but it dates back to one of the most turbulent years of Turkey’s history — the infamous Sept. 12 military coup that was accompanied by arrests, disappearances and the death of thousands.