When the Berlin Wall virtually cut in half of Germany’s workforce and a labor shortage threatened to derail its miraculous economic engine, West Germany imported thousands of Turkish gastarbeiter, or guest-workers, during the 1960s and 70s. A very different commodity, however, was similarly imported in the 1860s and 70s: the treasure of Troy. Bookended by these two events, Los Angeles-based artist Liz Glynn has created No Second Troy, an exhibition featuring installation, video and photographic works that examine the ideas of fable and obsession, desire and displacement.

No Second Troy includes video documentation of interventions staged at archeological sites around Turkey and crudely made but preciously embellished artifacts based on the infamous Prium’s Treasure—jewels, goblets, vases, weapons and plates made from copper, silver and gold—excavated at Troy by amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Fabricated from trash and re-cast in gold-plated silver and bronze, Glynn’s replicas allude to both the real artifacts as well as the copies commissioned by the Pergamon Museum in Berlin that, in another purloining, were confiscated by the Red Army in 1945. Other works in the series are based on the material culture of Turkish emigrants—foods, crockery and other consumer goods purchased from local Berlin markets—referencing both the everyday life of Turkish emigrants and the copies of Turkish treasure regularly displayed in museums.

Glynn’s practice frequently uses ancient references to explore human agency and the potential for change in the present. This exhibition represents her first major attempt to link ancient contexts directly with contemporary material culture and the occasionally disjunctive nature of this relationship.