A Minaret for the General’s Wife

Erdem Taşdelen tells real and imaginary stories about an architectural oddity.

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In the Lithuanian city of Kėdainiai, a minaret stands in a park between the train station and the Dotnuvėlė River. Minarets are tall thin spires typically built as part of a mosque, but the minaret in Kėdainiai is agnostic, disconnected from worship. 

It was built in 1880 by Russian general Eduard Totleben to mark his country’s victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878, a bitter conflict between the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Orthodox Christians. But if you visit Kėdainiai, you’ll hear another story about the tower, one that suggests it was a gift for the general’s Turkish lover, a woman who became his wife.

The general’s minaret bears distinctive features: a sealed front doorway, a staircase to nowhere, and two plaques. One, in Ottoman Turkish, praises a beautiful palace built by a 15th-century sultan and the other, in Arabic, quotes from the Qur’an.

Toronto-based Turkish Canadian artist Erdem Taşdelen researched his exhibition, A Minaret for the General’s Wife, on view at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver until July 31, during a residency in Vilnius. He builds on the dualities embedded in the minaret’s singular structure, conjuring histories both sealed and open, and using storytelling to blend history with fiction.

Such a fictionalizing practice is not wholly unique to biographical narrative, yet Taşdelen offers a materialist approach, weaving the storyline through an assemblage of objects that gesture to the actual life of the structure and the lover it wasn’t built for. 

He endeavours to create transparency by constructing the gallery space as a set for a fake film or a play titled after the show. Period-style props are spread around the room alongside archival photographs of the tower and pictures of people who could be the general, could be his lover, or could be people who knew them. Video footage of the tower grounds in the present day plays over a trio of televisions, showing the wind blowing over grass in the park; it, too, is a container for this odd fiction that’s also a little bit true. 

The gathered objects are like a daydream. Small vignettes fold and unfold on themselves, letting the mind wander over things that did happen and illusory events that are merely summoned. Taşdelen has produced a fictive world that refers to the historical one. His show is a fabulation, an invented tale. 

An accompanying booklet contains a dozen vignettes that move around or centre the minaret, including fake letters, diary entries and emails, as well as scenes, descriptions and poetry from the perspectives of various characters. This was the most fruitful item on view, reinforcing the magical and productive qualities that can be created through text. 

One entry, from the artist’s viewpoint, describes the difficulty in accessing archival records to confirm the myth of the Turkish lover. The exhibition grows from this story of failed research: “Why do I need to find these letters anyway? I’m not a bloody historian – why on earth wouldn’t I just write them myself?” ■

Erdem Taşdelen, A Minaret for the General’s Wife, at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver from April 22 to July 31, 2022.

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