Guido Casaretto at SANATORIUM, Istanbul: The Sea Peoples and the Afterlife of Objects

In many Levantine family homes, there is a shelf of things that came from far away: a statuette, a plate, a figurine of uncertain origin. Nobody remembers exactly what each one meant where it was made. They mean something else now — a relative who emigrated, a voyage, an absence. Guido Casaretto’s “The Sea Peoples” at SANATORIUM in Istanbul, opening on 5 November 2026 and curated by Domenico de Chirico, is built around such objects and the strange, beautiful mistranslations they carry.

Guido Casaretto, a researcher of transfer

Casaretto, born in 1981 and long based in Istanbul, is also one of SANATORIUM’s co-founders. His work investigates how geographical and cultural identities are represented, with particular attention to craftsmanship, material experiment and the histories of technique. He has shown with Zilberman Gallery (2015, 2017, 2021), at MOCAK in Kraków (2019), at YUNT in Istanbul (2025) and Imalathane in Bursa (2022), and took part in the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale and the NGV Triennial in Melbourne in 2020. His works are held by MOCAK and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Melbourne is not an incidental credit. The Australian city is one of the poles of the new exhibition.

Three chapters of The Sea Peoples

A Few Came Back from Melbourne is the exhibition’s centre of gravity. It draws on accounts of Levantine emigrants who left for Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Things they sent or carried back gradually filled their families’ homes, detached from their geographic, historical or religious meanings. Over time, the gallery explains, such objects came to be sorted by material rather than origin. Its example is memorable: an Indian representation of the Buddha that ends up standing for a son who lives on the other side of the world. The object survives; its meaning migrates.

Marmaro 2 turns to stone. Casaretto is fascinated by the geological time compressed into marble — and equally by the stucco artisans who painted marble effects onto walls and ceilings where real stone was unaffordable or impossible. The series moves from artificial slabs to architectural fragments and refers to the entrance floor of the historic Zografeion Lyceum, the Greek school in Beyoğlu. The result is a surface where natural origin and human imitation sit side by side, each mapping the other.

Your Well Traveled Uncle 2 follows decorative patterns that began in East Asian interiors, were adapted by Western craftsmen as production moved into factories, and were finally standardised by colonial trade into a reproducible commodity — a badge of refined taste cut off from any root.

Copy, imitation and the dignity of the fake

What unites the three is an unusual generosity toward the copy. Much contemporary art treats imitation as loss: the souvenir as kitsch, the faux finish as deceit. Casaretto, in the gallery’s phrase, “positions repetition and transfer as autonomous processes” — worthy of study in their own right rather than as degraded versions of an original. The painted marble is not a lesser marble; it is a different, human history laid over a geological one.

The title points the same way. “Sea Peoples” is the name historians gave to seafaring groups who moved across the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean and whose identities remain disputed. Casaretto borrows it for the Mediterranean’s modern travellers — emigrants, traders, artisans — whose movements left behind objects that outlived their meanings.

Why this show belongs in Istanbul

Few cities are better suited to the subject. Beyoğlu itself is a palimpsest of Levantine, Greek, Armenian and Italian communities, of imported styles and locally made imitations of them. The reference to the Zografeion grounds the show a short walk from the gallery. For local audiences, the exhibition reads as a portrait of the neighbourhood’s material memory; for international visitors, it is a lens on Mediterranean migration that avoids both nostalgia and lament.

For collectors and makers

Casaretto’s practice sits where research and craft meet, and that makes it rewarding for collectors interested in work with institutional depth — NGV and MOCAK holdings suggest as much. For artists, especially those working with surface and ornament, Marmaro 2 is worth studying closely: it treats a decorators’ trick as a serious sculptural language.

Visiting information

SANATORIUM, Emekyemez Mahallesi, Abdüsselah Sokak No:3, Beyoğlu, İstanbul (the gallery also runs a Tophane space — confirm the venue before visiting). From 5 November 2026; the press text gives 27 December as the closing date, while the gallery’s page header lists 26 December. Open Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–19:00, Sunday 12:00–17:00; phone +90 212 293 67 17; [email protected]. See our Guido Casaretto exhibition listing, the official exhibition page and further openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.