‘Chamber of Immortality’

IN A disused hangar in İstanbul, Turkish artist Ahmet Güneştekin uses thousands of metal human skulls and twisting, spiky animal horns to re-tell some ancient myths in a towering, fearsome installation.

Mr Güneştekin says his work Chamber of Immortality draws on the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king who tried in vain to find the secret of everlasting life, and on the closely related Biblical story of Noah, whose ark some believe landed on Mount Ararat, Turkey’s highest peak.

The centrepiece is an enormous metal skull with a twisting animal horn jutting from its mouth, made up of 11,000 smaller skulls, all crafted by hand. Around it there are two curved walls made of yet more skulls, some of which sprout animal horns from their ears, temples and mouths.

The large skull represents Noah, while the tonguelike horn that spills from its mouth represents animals, Mr Güneştekin said.

“In a way, it shows how the concepts of human and animal are nested within one another,” he said.

The structure, which took over four years and $1 million to create, is inspired by Göbeklitepe, a 12,000year-old temple in Turkey that this year became a Unesco World Heritage site.

A self-taught artist, Mr Güneştekin is known for unconventional techniques to depict oral narratives, myth and legends mainly from Anatolian and Greek civilisations. Chamber of Immortality is being shown at Contemporary İstanbul till Tuesday and afterwards will travel to London, Berlin and New York.