Pera Museum presents the contemporary art installation ReCollection, specially produced by Casper Faassen for the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Orientalist Painting Collection, as part of the exhibition Intersecting Worlds: Ambassadors and Painters.
An important work in the exhibition that captured Casper Faassen’s attention is Yeni Cami and The Port of İstanbul by Jean-Baptiste Hilair (1753, Audun-le-Tiche – after 1822, Paris). As noted in the artist’s inscription on the lower section of the painting, the scene depicts the loading of antiquities collected by French Ambassador Choiseul-Gouffier onto a ship bound for France.
Hilair’s collaboration with Choiseul-Gouffier began in 1776, when the two first arrived in the Ottoman Empire to map the Aegean. Many of Hilair’s works later appeared in Choiseul-Gouffier’s monumental publication Voyagé Pittoresque de la Grèce, a richly illustrated account of ancient ruins and landscapes. This partnership—between an artist with a refined eye for topographical and atmospheric detail and a diplomat driven by his fascination with classical antiquity—continued when Choiseul-Gouffier was appointed French ambassador to İstanbul in 1784. Hilair’s painting referred to earlier, therefore, is not merely a record of a port scene, but also a visual document of Enlightenment-era collecting practices and the early mechanisms of cultural displacement.
It is precisely this moment—the loading of the marbles onto the ship—that inspired Faassen’s ReCollection series. In these works, Faassen revisits the idea of collecting and transporting cultural heritage, tracing the journey of artifacts that have been displaced and recontextualized over time. By isolating and reinterpreting the very objects once removed from their origins, he confronts questions of ownership, appropriation, and memory. Through his distinctive visual language—where layers of light and translucency evoke both presence and absence—Faassen transforms these objects into ethereal recollections, hovering between history and loss.
In ReCollection, the artist symbolically reverses Hilair’s narrative: where Hilair documented the departure of antiquities from İstanbul, Faassen enacts their return. Some of the marbles he depicts do not appear in Yeni Cami and The Port of İstanbul itself but derive from other excavation sites associated with Choiseul-Gouffier’s expeditions. In doing so, Faassen brings together dispersed fragments of history while re-enacting the moment the artefacts began their journey as an abstract expression of the restitution of cultural heritage objects.
In this way, the act that Hilair once observed—the loading of cultural treasures onto a ship—becomes, for Faassen, both subject and metaphor: a point of departure for a contemporary meditation on movement, memory, and the afterlife of art.
