Art

Sandan Art: antiquity remade by hand

The Sandan Art studio, founded in Adana in 2003, took its name from the chief god of Tarsus. Its principle was simple: to make things first for their own pleasure, then to reproduce them meticulously and share them with art lovers around the world. Reduced replicas of the wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ceramic coins in clay, ancient statuettes and oil lamps, silver jewellery inspired by Cilician coins — all of it the fruit of the plaster-mould and ceramic skills that Bekircan Tahberer's CV modestly lists under “plastic art skills”.

Under the same roof were the sculptor Selma Tahberer's exhibition “Faces from Çukurova” (75th Year Art Gallery, October 2004) and a sculpture-plaque project used by several institutions. The site is offline today; this summary draws on its 2004–2005 snapshots in the Wayback Machine.

The coin photographer

He was both curator and photographer of the Coinage Photography Exhibition that opened at the Adana Archaeology Museum in 2002. The coin photographs across the hundreds of plates of SNG Tahberer are his too: photographs that show the green of the patina, the shadow of the relief and the curve of the legend — teaching the eye to look as much as to catalogue.

Architecture, music and myth on coins

The lecture series he prepared in Vancouver for UBC Continuing Studies and Simon Fraser University read the coin as a source for art history: Architecture on Ancient Coins for temple fronts and city gates; A Short History of Early Music and Music from Ancient Coins for lyres, auloi and musician gods; Mythology from Ancient Coins and Homer's Troia and Odysseia on Coins for the epics struck in metal; and Art on Ancient Coins and Coins as Art Works, which asks the question outright: is a coin a work of art? Tahberer's answer is the presentation itself, revised three times between 2015 and 2024.