Istanbul etc

I know I’m not the only one who’s happy to see the back of 2025, even if there’s few concrete reasons to look eagerly ahead to 2026. While my home country has churned out one WTF news item after another, the year in Turkey has been no less eventful. The jailing of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March set off a wave of protests and boycott calls, some targeting cultural institutions seen as silenced by their corporate ownership.

Mamut Art Project’s 9th edition in 2021. Image via Mamut Art Project. “Whatever is on the minds of the new generation of artists is what you’ll see here,” Seren Kohen Ojalvo, the founding director of Mamut Art Project, told me back in 2019. This annual exhibition spotlighting emerging and independent artists, mostly from Turkey, debuted in 2013, the start of a tumultuous era for the country.

Displaced in Gaza by the last two years of Israeli bombardments, artist Fares Ayash would often walk up to four kilometers each day to find supplies to make his art, risking his life to scavenge for bits of useful material in destroyed buildings.

The busy autumn of arts and cultural events continues! If you missed them when they were first published, check out my Istanbul Biennial Guide and art season preview to help you keep track of everything that’s going on. Growing up in post-communist Slovakia in the 1990s, Lucia Tallová was surrounded by monuments celebrating the former regime, sparking an enduring interest in how historical narratives and collective memory are constructed, the artist told Art Unlimited in a recent interview.

The busy autumn of arts and cultural events continues! If you missed them when they were first published, check out my Istanbul Biennial Guide and art season preview to help you keep track of everything that’s going on. The classic shapes and motifs of traditional tile work become fiery, feminist, and fun in the hands of contemporary ceramicist Elif Uras.

From brutalist bus stops to fashion icons, traditional street photography to alternative processes to works with scant connection to light or lenses at all, there’s a little bit of everything at 212 Photography Istanbul. Initiated in 2018, the annual festival features exhibitions at more than a dozen locations, along with talks (mostly in Turkish), workshops and portfolio reviews (generally with a fee), film screenings, performances, book signings, and more.

The new season’s cultural calendar is so jam-packed with events that I’m breaking with my usual biweekly publishing schedule to throw in a bonus roundup of what’s on in Istanbul. Enjoy! Not one, not two, but three festivals this autumn promise to push the boundaries of technology, sound, and contemporary art with a multimedia blend of electronic music performances and immersive audiovisual installations.

By most accounts, it all began with “Tunç Abi,” who fell in love with breakdancing as a child via clips glimpsed on cassettes, honing his moves with tips from his relatives when they visited from Germany.

Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district woke to the news yesterday that a detention order had been issued for local mayor İnan Güney, among the latest political figures and city employees to be swept up in what many see as a targeted judicial attack against Turkey’s main opposition party.

When the Kadıköy Municipality announced a series of other events in July, the immediate response online was nearly unanimous: “But what about the Kalamış Summer Festival?!?” Fear not, this beloved festival returns this weekend with a showing of the 1970s classic Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalım (The Girl with the Red Scarf; in Turkish, no subtitles) tonight and a performance by singer-songwriter Burcu Güneş on Saturday night, followed by a full program of outdoor concerts and movie screenings, all...