Before opening its pages to the world stage, "The Three Body Problem" leaped from the laps of nerdy students and dropout gamers and entered the forums of entrepreneurs and techies. Among the intellectuals of Chinese society, where the science fiction novel emerged in 2008 under the pen of author Cixin Liu, it became a sensation that broke literary stereotypes, and soon found its place within the mainstream readerships long dominated by realist fiction.

In his postscript to the American edition, which U.S. President Barack Obama read while in office to clear his head after the book first appeared in English in 2014, Cixin described his passion for science as the harbinger of narratives and ideas grander than any epic has encompassed, deeper than any form of literature bound to the humanities for, in his eyes, it is only by the cold, exacting structures of mathematics where the mind perceives furthest through creation, to grasp at the edges of outer and inner space.

About midway through the novel's astronomical heights touching on everything from artificial intelligence (AI) to alien invasion and virtual reality gaming, told ingeniously against the propaganda-riddled backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, Cixin titled one his more incendiary chapters, "The Universe Flickers." In it, he exhibits his bravura for visualizing generally unfathomable scientific concepts, like cosmic microwave background, which with his literary wit, he turned into such metaphors as a fluorescent tube and a lamp hanging in the wind. Stunningly, the flickering becomes signaling as he posits the notion that the entire universe communicates to its self-aware, intelligent life.

The art of the afterglow

Entering the former Siniossoglou apartment building on Istiklal Avenue, renovated with an understated contemporary edge for the next generation of global creatives, the rectangular metal detector at SALT Beyoğlu serves as a captivating visual kaleidoscope, marked by a row of neoclassical columns that lead to a projection over a reception desk at the end of the hall, reading: "The Universe Flickers." The exhibition begins with the minimalistic, site-specific mural paintings of Navine G. Khan-Dossos, titled "Scenes from a Pre-Crime (Performance for Security Guards)." Her rudimentary washes of pale, spherical colorations in striking transparent blues and pinks, beiges and grays, provoke seers to visualize nebulous mysteries from the origins of the universe. Delicately drenched against the industrial facade, her cloudy palettes work wonders around the borders of service doors and grated vents, and especially where coded to the apartment's exposed original ceiling designs and spectrums.

Her central concept recalls themes popularly known from Steven Spielberg's 2002 film, "Minority Report," which drew from the imagination of the science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, specifically a collection of his short stories by the same name. Her interpretations consider how domestic space is transformed into a public venue in the context of crimes foreshadowed due to a precedent, whether known or unknown, as in the reoccupation of space amid the fickle, subjective transience of the historical record. It is a topic especially pertinent to the tumultuous chronicles of properties in Istanbul, how they have changed hands, particularly where long abandoned Levantine residential districts and their bygone minority economies have since become touristic, cultural centers. Khan-Dossos paints the emptiness of the past as forgotten and concealed, though still re-traceable by utilizing the discrete finesse of detective work while employing the muses of art. The multicolored, forensic rulers that border her monochromatic murals amplify the behind-closed-doors performance aspect of the work in conceptual continuity with the 150, fleeting years of the building's usage.

"For my work, having people present in the space completes the work. The murals are about the architectural space of SALT, which is always related to the bodies that inhabit it. So, to see people investigating the volumes of the rooms my murals set out to create was exciting. The moment the work feels complete is when it is in relationship to the body of the viewer," wrote Khan-Dossos in a recent interview. "From the beginning of the process I was interested in the shared presence of the institution and its history as apartments and commercial space. There is a slippage there that can be exploited to talk not just about the building, but public and private space in the wider world beyond the galleries. The recent works done on the building have revealed that relationship, and the ceiling paintings are the anchor between these two realities."


"How Minds Are Made" by Anna Boghiguian, an installation of paintings (2010-2011) and
cut-outs (2017-2018).

The heart of the city skips a beat

Upstairs in the greater, floor-wide exhibition space at SALT Beyoğlu, a dark curtain awaits curious eyes to immersion in the dim hall where Merve Ünsal intervenes with three works, titled, "Outside Instead of Before" (2018), a two-channel video installation, "Listening to SALT Beyoğlu" (2018), a sound installation, and "Prop Surfaces" (2018), a print on textile. Under the interpretive placard rests a booklet, "Ignorance is Bliss" (2018), printed in English with the accompanying transcripts for "Outside Instead of Before."

Anglophones are best informed by the publication, as voice-overs are read in Turkish. And the quality of the text is world-class, as cut up phrases stream like fine, contemporary, avant-garde poetry, outlining the ecological hemorrhages that have ensued in Istanbul as a result of extreme gentrification efforts amounting to an entire overhaul reconstruction face-lift for the ages. Ünsal projects a humanistic witnessing, as from the humble windows of a couple inner city flats, where inhabitants espy the top-down excavation of post-imperial modernity in favor of what can only be described as a void of time and space, a bureaucratic black hole in full effect.

"There are ways to enter each and every work in the exhibition, I feel. In terms of my own works, I could say that as the voice-overs for the videos and the radio drama are all between 15-20 minutes, many people might not listen to the whole thing, but that's OK. I tried to imagine a constellation of sounds and texts and things that could be explored extensively or a glimpse of these things, visually or aurally, is also completely fine. I do think a lot about listening vs. hearing and hearing through the grapevines, whisperings, utterances," Ünsal wrote in recent correspondence.

"I am a user of SALT in that I use the institution and the space for different purposes on a daily basis. I use the reading rooms, the winter garden for working as I don't have a very specific studio practice; I attend the events as an audience member, and I have been involved with various public events and exhibitions, sometimes as a co-conspirator and sometimes more openly as a content producer. In that sense, it was a challenge to 'occupy' this space that I was already very familiar with. I wanted to respect the uses of the space and keep that in mind while producing work for and within this space."

To converse with all existence

Ünsal herself attests that, with her three interventions, she exhibits a relatively thorough projection of the psychosocial impacts of urbanization, detailing the uprooting of people and livelihoods with radio dramas averaging about 20 minutes in length, a duration not necessarily suited to the time most people will endure standing in a gallery, never mind in an alternative cultural complex exposed to a flood of new information and artistic media conveyed by unparalleled individual expressionism.

Similarly, the works by Anna Boghiguian and Rana Hamadeh are equally, if not more formidable, to casual observers. Boghiguian has conveyed her testament of the great catastrophe that is history with her visceral sketches, literally ripped fresh from a spiral-bound notebook, ranging across her personal cartographies stretching from her birth in Cairo to her Armenian ancestry and life as a contemporary artist. The pieces, beautifully curated, hold an energy akin to the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose canvases bemoaned the egregious facts of human relations with handwritten treatises scrawled over his figurative abstractions. In a related tone, she raised three-dimensional drawings on puppetry stilts from purple, seemingly blood-stained desert dirt.

And finally, the 45-minute opera composition installed with multifaceted, interactive trajectories by Hamadeh, is titled, "The Ten Murders of Josephine (The Tongue Twister)." Readapted in the last year for the innermost interior hall at SALT Beyoğlu, her volatile intervention is dense with methods of madness on a variety of legal motifs that tie all four artists together, inviting the public to come forward with a healthy, amoral skepticism for law and history, to ask new questions about where and how they, as humanity, stand, in a flickering universe.