“Colors of Fire,” a ceramic tile exhibition featuring works by artist Mümine Ateş and her students, opened at the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum (TIEM) in Istanbul.
The exhibition was organized with contributions from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Istanbul Culture and Tourism Directorate, the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA), the Participation Banks Association of Türkiye (TKBB) and Kıztaşı Sanat. Protocol members and academics delivered speeches at the opening ceremony.
Istanbul Governor Davut Gül praised the contribution of artists and cultural figures to the city’s identity.
“Istanbul is a beautiful city. We are not talking only about geographical beauty here. What makes Istanbul Istanbul and what makes Istanbul more beautiful, is what people working in culture and the arts produce,” Gül said.
He thanked Ateş, her students and those who attended the exhibition, and expressed hope that more exhibitions and works of this kind would be held.
“The most valuable thing in Istanbul is protecting and preserving its beauty. In this respect, what you are doing is very important,” Gül said.
IRCICA Director-General Mahmud Erol Kılıç said traditional arts have undergone an important revival process in recent years.
“We have all come here to see how the fire lit by Mümine Ateş and shared with her students has taken shape,” Kılıç said.
He said Turkish-Islamic civilization could be viewed as one of “delicacy and grace,” adding that traditional arts had been revived through the efforts of teachers and sponsors.
Kılıç also said his wife was among Ateş’s students and praised her approach to traditional art education.
“Mümine Ateş is one of the rare teachers who still practices traditional methods of education. Her students did not learn only an art or a profession from her; they also learned humanity,” he said.
TKBB Secretary-General Ismail Vural said the association sponsored the exhibition to support the preservation and transmission of traditional arts.
“Our job is to appreciate talent. Of course, there will be a financial aspect to the work and an aspect of making money, but we have been working with Mümine Ateş for quite some time to ensure that an important carrier of our civilization and our art is passed on to future generations,” Vural said.
Artist Mümine Ateş said she was very happy that the opening coincided with Mawlid al-Nabi, the Islamic holy night commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.
Describing her 22-year journey in ceramic art, Ateş compared her work to the way a writer expresses an inner world through words.
“For 22 years, I have been writing my emotions, my soul and the traces of our civilization onto ceramic tiles. In this writing, my brush is my pen and the colors are my voice,” she said.
Ateş said the exhibition was more than a collection of objects, describing each work as a “stone book” blending the memory of a deep-rooted civilization with symbols and colors.
She said she dedicated what she called the book’s most painful page to the humanitarian tragedy in Palestine.
“I placed in this exhibition a ‘burnt mirror’ that I fired in my workshop, but whose fire has not gone out within us,” Ateş said.
She described the work as both a reflection of lives lost and suffering in Palestine and a place for humanity to confront the conscience it has forgotten in the face of the tragedy.
Ateş also thanked her family, supporters and students who share her artistic language.
Following the speeches, gifts were presented to the speakers. The exhibition was officially opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, after which attendees toured the exhibition.
Ateş provided visitors with information about the works on display and their production processes.
The “Colors of Fire” exhibition, created through the joint efforts of Ateş and her students, focuses on the transformation of ceramic art through the firing process.
The exhibition traces the journey of ceramic clay through a kiln at temperatures reaching 1,000 degrees Celsius (over 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit), showing how the firing process transforms colors into glazed works of art.
The selection features original designs spanning a broad range of decorative traditions, from classical naturalist motifs and Seljuk geometry to mystical symbols and modern lines.
The exhibition brings the aesthetic depth of the Islamic art tradition into the present while combining the patience of earth, the power of fire and the elegance of the brush.
