“The Corrupting Sea”
2026
A Solo Show At Ferda Art Space, Istanbul
from September 18 to October 17.
The exhibition takes its title from Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (2000). Against the idea of the Mediterranean as a homogeneous whole, the book reconstructs it as a network of countless ecologically distinct micro-regions, joined by a discontinuous but persistent connectivity. Fragmentation and connection are not exceptions to this history; they are its structure.
El Meleegy's works test this framework at the level of material. Each fragment keeps the trace of its own pattern, glaze and domestic history. No piece assimilates into its neighbour, and wholeness is built through this resistance.
Then there is the red, the exhibition's real weather. Large fields are given over to a single saturated colour, laid fragment by fragment so that it behaves as glaze rather than pigment: flat, fired, absolute. Red is the difficult colour of this sea's ceramic traditions. The raised coral red of the İznik kilns, made with a slip of bolus armenus, appeared in the sixteenth century and vanished within decades, undone by environmental and political pressures as much as by the fragility of the glaze itself. The copper reds of the eastern kilns turned grey or disappeared at the wrong temperature. In clay, red costs the most and survives the least. To spread it across whole panels in industrial fragments is to make the region's most fugitive colour ordinary again, abundant and laid across the floor like heat. It is also the colour of the shore itself: terracotta, roof tile, sunburn, and the flat red of a wall at two in the afternoon when nothing moves.
📸Baris Ozcetin