Overcoming the phonetic resemblance between museum and mausoleum

In its new era, the Sakıp Sabancı Museum opens the very concept of the “museum” up for debate. We spoke with Museum Director Prof. Dr. Ahu Antmen, who set a clear stance immediately upon taking office with the Suzanne Lacy exhibition, which centers on participation and social justice. Reading the concept of “being museum-like” in reverse, positioning the institution not as an authority but as a “stakeholder,” and aiming to transform exhibition halls into a living “agora,” Antmen described SSM’s new roadmap, the future of the collection, and the resistance of being “together” in the digital age to Unlimited. This interview acts as a critical complement to understanding the curatorial and institutional vision behind Suzanne Lacy’s Togæther exhibition

Interview: Merve Akar Akgün

Suzanne Lacy and Ahu Antmen, At Birlikte / Togæther, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2025. Photo: Canberk Ulusan

For years you analysed “the institution” from the outside—as an art historian and an academic. Now you are leading that very institution: the Sakıp Sabancı Museum. Museums are undergoing a profound identity crisis and transformation on a global scale; in ICOM’s revised definition, the emphasis on participation, transparency, and social justice has begun to overtake the older primacy of conservation and display. With Suzanne Lacy marking the outset of your tenure, and with your expanding public programmes, are you staking out a vision for SSM as a living agora: a space that debates, provokes, and at times unsettles?

When we assess museology—a field fundamentally shaped as an ideological space—critical inquiry becomes especially crucial. As you also imply, this is precisely what makes the reasons behind ICOM’s current search for a new stance and a renewed definition for museum practice so pressing. As we enter the twenty-first century, issues of identity may become even more complex under the impact of artificial intelligence; yet it is equally clear that conflicts over it will persist. Modern museology, as it took form in the twentieth century, placed conservation and display at the forefront, and it was largely organised around the preservation and presentation of dominant identities. Today, whether we are dealing with material heritage or artistic production, we are learning to approach the museum through a different conceptual lens—beginning not with what is framed on the wall or sealed behind glass, but with the chain of decisions that brought it there in the first place (and with the decisions that excluded other objects). We ask what is preserved, for whom, and by which criteria. Museums are increasingly rendering their collecting histories legible—subjecting past acquisition logics to scrutiny—and recalibrating their practices in the name of transparency and social justice. For that reason, I do not read the current moment as a crisis so much as an opening: a threshold towards a more plural, more accountable system of representation. At a moment like this, to foreground at SSM Suzanne Lacy’s inquiries—into who and what does or does not become visible across the museum and the wider public sphere—and to present an approach that insists on sociality and participation, one that invites us to question what “the public” can mean, is significant; and if, for the duration of the exhibition, this gives rise to the sense that the museum has become a kind of agora, that can only be welcome. It is also worth recalling that the Sakıp Sabancı Museum has previously hosted works by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović, Agnes Denes, and Ai Weiwei—figures who imagine art as a polyphonic, political field.

You are also a writer who has consistently placed critical thinking and feminist reading at the very centre of art writing in Turkey. Suzanne Lacy’s practice, too, is built precisely on “Relational Aesthetics” and social confrontation. Institutional Critique, as we usually understand it, is typically mounted from the outside—aimed squarely at the museum. Yet with this exhibition, you invited critique into the institution’s core— from the director’s chair. As an art historian, what does it mean to dial back the museum’s authoritative voice and replace it with a more polyphonic—perhaps more vulnerable, more porous—narrative? How might that transform SSM’s established collection and its deep institutional memory?

Suzanne Lacy’s feminist practice introduced new methodologies and materials into the field and, through the participatory work she framed as “new genre public art” well before “Relational Aesthetics” entered the lexicon, she is—like many artists of her generation—very much a representative of what we call Institutional Critique. To situate a practice of this kind within the museum is to do two things at once: it deconstructs the museum’s conventional self-understanding, while also carving out a new—genuinely inventive—space for the institution to operate, and that tension is precisely what makes it so compelling. In this sense, Suzanne Lacy’s work is a challenge for any museum. How does one make visible—how does one even exhibit—the few-hour fabric of commitment that emerges when hundreds of people voluntarily gather to think through social realities together? Because Lacy’s performances take shape around local questions that shift from one country to another, every museum will carry them into its own context differently—and that difference is not incidental; it is the point. The museum, in turn, becomes neither a mere site nor a singular authority, but a stakeholder: implicated in, and actively participating in, the exhibition process itself. For museums, the question of twentieth-century time-based works—how to show them, but just as crucially how to preserve them—is a challenge in its own right, and this is one of the most significant dimensions of the Lacy exhibition. I can also say that, when presenting the museum’s established collections, we will favour an approach to display that prioritises asking questions and researching together with our audiences.

Suzanne Lacy, Birlikte / Togæther, Exhibition view, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2025. Photo: Canberk Ulusan. Courtesy of the artist and Sakıp Sabancı Museum

Private museology in Turkey has largely developed under the patronage of major capital groups and, almost inevitably, is perceived as a representational space for a particular class. Yet in your recent moves, I sense a clear endeavour to make the museum a point of encounter for a broader constituency of citizens. On the one hand, there is the hard reality of a private museum operating within a holding structure; on the other, the social—indeed public—sense of responsibility you embody. In the Turkey of 2025, where economic crisis is making access to culture ever more difficult, how might these two imperatives come to sustain one another? How far can SSM’s private walls be stretched—elastic enough to meet public needs?

Whether private or state-run, I think museums are, by virtue of being museums, already obliged to attend to public needs. What grants a museum its cultural value is its refusal to be governed by market dynamics; once compromises are made on that front, it makes little difference whether or not the sign on the door still says “museum.” In Turkey, private museology did, of course, set out under the patronage of certain capital groups; yet it can be misleading to view private museums solely through that lens. The sense of social and public responsibility you point to is present in almost all of our colleagues working in these institutions; in my view, working day after day in a place that is constantly in contact with the public almost inevitably instils such an awareness. As for SSM, the museum’s founding philosophy is already grounded in the idea of sharing; the decision to transform a private household, together with its collections, into a university museum is what sets SSM apart from other private museums. This particularity places upon SSM a responsibility to research its own collections and the related cultural phenomena more deeply, and to share that knowledge with the public. That responsibility, of course, is also reflected in the kind of exhibition programme one chooses and in how those exhibitions are presented to the public.

In Bare, Naked, Nude, you offered a richly layered reading of modernisation in Turkish painting through the lenses of body and gender. SSM, meanwhile, is a site of institutional memory that houses some of the most canonical works in the history of Turkish painting. Under your directorship, might we see Ottoman- and Republican-era works—whether kept in storage or hanging on the walls—recurated through the frameworks of contemporary queer theory, feminist historiography, or postcolonial perspectives, in exhibitions that deliberately upend expectations? Or will contemporary exhibitions continue to stand in for the “new,” while the collection remains tasked with safeguarding the “traditional”?

Under a single roof, the Sakıp Sabancı Museum brings together an unusually rich range of cultural registers: the Emirgan mansion itself—together with its garden, its architectural presence, and the decorative objects that shape its interior world; the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection; the Painting Collection; and, alongside these, a programme of temporary exhibitions in modern and contemporary art. Taken together, these layers function almost like a mirror of how Turkey has modernised and of the cultural curiosities—and priorities—that have gathered momentum across time. Within the museum, there is also a palpable permeability between what is usually filed under “traditional” and what we call contemporary. For instance, while the Arts of the Book and Calligraphy Collection safeguards the “traditional,” it also holds a contemporary work by Kutluğ Ataman that is directly and materially connected to that collection. In the same spirit, we are exhibiting Murat Durusoy’s newly acquired digital work, Post-Nature Studies V.2, within that very constellation—precisely because it resonates both with the garden and with the vegetal ornament of the book arts, allowing us to question what the motif of the plant and the flower has meant in different eras, and how those meanings shift. Such juxtapositions, in turn, offer visitors who enter those galleries expecting to encounter only the traditional what you aptly call a “twist”: an experience that disrupts the anticipated script and opens up a different cultural aperture. And we aim for a comparable effect in relation to the Painting Collection as well—developing modes of display that can catalyse fresh readings of historical memory, prompting viewers not merely to recognise what is already canonical, but to interpret it anew.

Suzanne Lacy, Birlikte / Togæther, Exhibition view, Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2025. Photo: Canberk Ulusan. Courtesy of the artist and Sakıp Sabancı Museum

Paul Valéry once called museums “the graveyard of art.” Yet today, under the twin pressures of digitisation and artificial intelligence, we find ourselves in a moment when art is increasingly uncoupled from the object. You, however, immediately prioritised works that gather people physically—works grounded in embodied experience and dialogue, like Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt. Is this a deliberate counter-move against the chill of the digital and our dependence on screens—an insistence on human presence? As we enter 2026, how do you position the museum’s physical space as an experiential field against the speed of the digital world?

There is such a thing as the museal! As Adorno suggests, the link between museum and mausoleum is not only a linguistic coincidence; it points to a deeper intuition about what institutions of culture can do to living practices. And yet contemporary museum experience can no longer be described as conservation and display alone. Participation and shared forms of presence have become central. In visitors’ encounters with art, alongside historical knowledge and aesthetic experience, we increasingly recognise art’s reparative potential—its capacity to offer reflection, resonance, and sometimes a kind of emotional relief. The Suzanne Lacy exhibition includes many screens, but they are not the destination; they are means. They carry the narrative, and they allow us to witness the moments in which the exhibition’s core ideas—togetherness and solidarity—take shape. And it is precisely among those screens that embodied experience becomes essential: touching the texture of an actual kilim while engaging The Crystal Quilt; picking up a pen and writing; sitting together at tables to talk about ageing; and—faced with violence voiced in a darkened arena—being able to feel shame together. In other words, the exhibition insists on bodily presence, not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a necessary condition for what it is trying to stage. Museums, as you suggest, offer singular journeys through time—places where we can resist the brutality of time and experience something irreducibly physical. That is why, when we design a display, we should remember that visitors do not move through it only with their minds, but also through perception, feeling, and affect!