ALEV EBÜZZIYA SIESBYE ‘Vibrations’ with (Bijoy Jain’s Studio Mumbai) at Salon 94, Salon 94 Design, New York (May 9-August 8, 2025)
- Venetia Kapernekas
- Jun 16
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 10
“Curator Fabienne Stephan skilfully orchestrated a harmonious dialogue between Alev and Bijoy in New York.”
“Echoes of Stillness: The Ritual Geometry of Alev and Bijoy” (by Venetia Kapernekas), New York, June 16, 2025
It was a warm Mother’s Day - May 13 - one of those New York afternoons that signalled summer’s arrival. I made my way up Fifth Avenue toward East 89th Street, heading to Salon 94 where Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye’s installation Vibrations had just opened. I had already seen the installation a few days earlier and was drawn back by the chance to meet the artist in person during her presentation. As I stepped inside, the transition was immediate: the honking, hurried pace of Fifth Avenue dropped away, replaced by something quieter, steadier, more composed - like slipping into a sanctuary hidden behind the city’s pulse.
There was a quality in the light, the way it touched the bowls, that carried me back to my first memory of Knossos - the Minoan palace in Crete. The red-frescoed rooms, the black columns, the way ritual and architecture lived together returned to me vividly. In two main rooms, each arrangement of bowls sat upon architect Bijoy Jain’s tall Douglas fir tables - structures that seemed to lift the pieces into reverence. Their placement, symmetrical and spare, recalled not only the balance of Knossos but the altars of ancient Greece, where height signalled offering and visibility to the divine. That day at Salon 94, the gallery felt less like a formal exhibition space and more like a breathing space of ritual and repose - where stillness, placement, and care merged into a quiet spatial poetry shaped by Alev and Bijoy alike.
The experience unfolds slowly. One enters first into the darker wooden room—restored by the late architect Rafael Viñoly - where Alev’s silver, gold, and matte black bowls glow softly under restrained lighting. Here, intimacy and shadow hold sway. Then, passing quietly forward, we arrive in the luminous gallery where soft reds, coral, ochre, and deep purple bowls gather the light. The contrast is striking. And yet, in both rooms, the atmosphere is one of stillness and offering.
She was poised, elegant, and quietly alert. While she was talking about her work, there was a kind of inward focus—measured, thoughtful, never overexplaining. She returned often to the hours of labour: how each bowl demanded patience, how the process slowed her breath, shaped her days. There was clarity in her answers, a touch of dry humour, and a quiet conviction in how she spoke about the rhythm of her work.
Her presence stayed with me as I returned to the installation: rooted, reserved, poised somewhere between Turkey and Europe. She studied sculpture in Istanbul before moving to Germany to work in a ceramic factory, then to Copenhagen as an artist and designer at the Royal Copenhagen, Denmark’s Royal Porcelain Factory, in the stoneware section. Since 1987, Paris has been her home. That quiet resonance—the way stillness, light, and attention held the room—has remained with me ever since.
Alev’s ‘bowls’ at Salon 94 did not announce themselves. They simply were. Thin-lipped, hushed in tone, almost impossibly symmetrical—each one seemed to carry an inner breath. You didn’t look at them so much as listen. This was not just an installation of porcelain—it was a room filled with quiet offerings, shaped by a woman who has spent a lifetime in dialogue with stillness, labour, and light.
What came to mind was a passage from Edmund de Waal’s The White Road, a book I’ve long admired. He writes: “Porcelain warrants a journey, I think… It is light when most things are heavy. It rings clear when you tap it. You can see the sunlight shine through. It is the category of materials that turn objects into something else… it is alchemy. Porcelain starts elsewhere, takes you elsewhere.”
That alchemy—that turning of earth into light - felt utterly present in Alev’s bowls.
In the stillness of that space, one felt the hand of her collaborator: Indian architect Bijoy Jain. Founder of Studio Mumbai, Jain redefines architecture as a collaborative act of making. His studio operates as a collective—carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths—who create through hands-on experimentation with locally sourced stone, silk, bamboo, and reclaimed wood. He doesn’t just design; he listens to land and labour.
Bijoy Jain’s work resists speed. Like Alev, he creates through time—through shadow and breath. In 2023, they first collaborated at Fondation Cartier in Paris on the exhibition Breath of an Architect (December 9, 2023–April 21, 2024), where Alev’s vessels were placed on hand‑fired brick plinths within an immersive bamboo-and-clay architectural setting. As Jain explained,“Silence has a sound… we hear its resonance in ourselves. This sound connects all living beings; it is the breath of life.” Their dialogue continued at Salon 94, where the spatial and sculptural language they had first explored in Paris found a more intimate register. In that fragile space between breath and gesture—where every curve and surface speaks—we encounter more than objects. We glimpse our own capacity to pause, to listen, to dwell. And through that encounter, Alev’s vessels—shaped by human hands and human silence—open both outward and inward, inviting us into communion with form, light, and ourselves.
The positioning of the bowls on Jain’s Douglas fir tables—grouped gently in ritual geometries—offered not a display but a rhythm. Nearby, a series of thread-woven chairs and settees—also designed by Jain—lined the wooden room like quiet invitations to stillness. Their structure, held in tension with hand-threaded mesh, seemed quietly suspended between structure and lightness. Some were blue, others neutral, their forms resting against the dark paneled walls. These seats did not insist. They waited—present, observant—as if holding space for contemplation, like ritual attendants in a sacred alcove. The space read more as ceremony than display. The alignment evoked not only sacred geometry but also emotional scale—a quiet interior distance that opens before us, not to be crossed but to be sensed, to truly meet these vessels.
Together, Alev and Bijoy created an architecture of stillness. Their collaboration felt less like a staging and more like a weaving - threads pulled between clay and wood, breath and beam. Jain’s architecture, shaped by labor and time, echoed Alev’s own slow coiling. Each bowl, made by hand over weeks, seemed to rest in sympathetic rhythm with the high The space read more as ceremony than display.” Constructed not as pedestals but as platforms of attention. This was a space not only designed but composed, a duet between sculptor and architect.
The tables, built tall, invited reverence. The bowls were elevated—like votive offerings. Their grouping suggested not marketplace arrangement but altar sequence. It reminded me of the altars of sacrifice in ancient Greece, where the height of the platform was not just symbolic but functional—a place where offerings were made visible to gods and humans alike. Height carried meaning.
Between Fire and Breath
Alev told us, that afternoon, how slow the work must be. How each bowl begins with breath and coil—then rests. And rests again. Porcelain requires patience. It remembers every gesture. If it dries too quickly, it cracks. If left unattended, it collapses. So it must be shaped gently, over days—coiled by hand, rested, and dried in its own time. Then fired. And fired again. Each step is a kind of waiting, a quiet act of trust between hand and earth.
One could feel that rhythm in the finished bowls. They appeared weightless, yet anchored. The glazes—ash grey, rose smoke, pale umber—offered no shine, only a quiet depth, as if the colour had settled slowly into the surface, not applied but absorbed.
Alev’s bowls reminded me of other quiet forms: Cycladic votives, Korean moon jars, Japanese tea bowls. But hers were not nostalgic. They stood fully in the present. And they asked for our stillness in return. Paul Greenhalgh observes in Ceramic: Art and Civilisation, ancient Greek vessels were never purely utilitarian - they carried ideological and symbolic weight. They embodied civic identity, sacred offering, and aesthetic balance. Alev’s bowls belong to this lineage. They are not simply containers, but presences. They hold memory, and meaning. The colourful bowls in the first room - ochre, crimson, mustard - brought to mind spice markets in India. But here, lifted and reordered, they became something else. Not ingredients, but invocations. A choreography of attention.
Alev’s bowls also recalled to me the votive forms of the Cycladic and Hellenistic periods—objects used not only in domestic rituals but also in civic and sacred ceremonies. These were bowls of offering and alignment. When placed on Jain’s tall Douglas fir tables, Alev’s vessels take on a similar resonance. They become ceremonial. The tables rise like altars, elevating the bowls into a shared space of attention. The architecture proposes reverence; the porcelain responds with restraint. Together they enact a gesture: of stillness, of slowness, of ceremony. Not a re-enactment of the ancient, but an echo—a contemporary ritual poised between sculpture, architecture, and silence.
Echoes from the Archive
This line of thinking was enriched by a memory that resurfaced as I reflected on Alev’s work - the exhibition She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C. at the Morgan Library & Museum. That exhibition brought together, for the first time, a comprehensive selection of artworks capturing the shifting expressions of women’s lives in ancient Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium B.C. The Morgan foregrounded the spiritual and intellectual authority of early Mesopotamian women, including their ritual and poetic practices. There, small ceramic bowls, votive plaques, and libation vessels became more than archaeological artefacts: they emerged as instruments of sacred and domestic rhythm. The link between vessel and voice - between form and incantation - felt strikingly close to what Alev achieves in her studio.
The Japanese incense ceremony (kōdō) elevates this activation to an art. I remember reading Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows —his evocation of sensory depth in half-lit rooms made me see objects differently. I imagine Alev’s bowls in that dim light, catching scent instead of light.
The architecture proposes reverence; the porcelain responds with restraint. Together they enact a gesture: of stillness, of slowness, of ceremony. Not a re-enactment of the ancient, but an echo—a contemporary ritual poised between sculpture, architecture, and silence.
What Alev offers us is not a retrospective, nor a display of mastery. It is something more intimate: a space of alignment. Between cultures. Between materials. Between stillness and movement. Her bowls are not about the past. They are about what endures. What is carried. What is placed gently into the center of the room and asked to speak—without needing to say a word.
In a way, her collaboration with Bijoy Jain makes this visible. His structures of breath and rhythm hold her forms with quiet care. It is as if Alev’s coils and his beams—each shaped by patient labor—are threads in the same tapestry. Together, they compose a space that is not just built, but woven.
Sources & References _ Exhibitions & Historical Context
Cycladic marble ritual vessels from the Early Cycladic II period (c. 2700–2200 B.C.), including prototypes of votive and funerary bowls (Christies.com)
Paul Greenhalgh in Ceramic, Art and Civilisation (publication Bloomsbury)
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (1933; English trans. 1977)
photos @Venetia Initiatives, New York unless otherwise noted
Thank you Emily Bonnet/Salon 94 & Salon 94 Design New York for providing me with credited photos.
published on June 16, 2025
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