We are entering the new year with the intense pace of the exhibition calendar. Exhibitions opening and continuing in museums and galleries during the first month of 2026 offer a fresh beginning to the art agenda through new narratives and powerful works that engage with the spirit of the times. The editors of ArtDog Istanbul have brought together a selection of January’s highlights for you.
January’s art calendar charts an ambitious course for the cultural agenda with major retrospectives, multi-layered exhibitions, and new productions. Spanning from Istanbul to Ankara, and from Eskişehir to İzmir, Antalya, Adana, and Nicosia, museums and galleries across this route welcome the start of 2026 with exhibitions shaped around themes of memory, the body, and time, alongside new narratives focused on space, identity, and transformation. While Istanbul Modern opens 2026 with Semiha Berksoy: An Aria of All Colors, the Ferahfeza exhibition at Odunpazarı Modern Museum in Eskişehir centers on shared emotions and cultural memory through the concept of the “table.” Artİstanbul Feshane, Istanbul’s largest public exhibition space, brings the city’s art-infused past to audiences with its ninth exhibition, Memory of the Collective: İBB Collections. We have listed for you the exhibitions on view throughout the month across numerous galleries and museums.
New Exhibition at Istanbul Modern: “Semiha Berksoy: An Aria of All Colors”
An Aria of All Colors brings together Semiha Berksoy’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning stage and canvas, cinema and literature—through more than 200 works. Following the retrospective held at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the exhibition is presented at Istanbul Modern within a newly conceived curatorial framework, offering an in-depth look at the artist’s creative processes through archival documents and sound recordings. The exhibition stands as the most comprehensive selection ever dedicated to the artist in Türkiye.
Visitor Information
• Dates: January 22 – September 6, 2026
• Venue: Istanbul Modern
• Admission: Istanbul Modern
Gözde İlkin “Gelgit” at .artSümer
Gözde İlkin’s solo exhibition Gelgit, in which the artist employs domestic textile fabrics such as tablecloths, curtains, and bed sheets that function as objects of memory within her practice, approaches the movement of matter as a process of becoming and remembering. Fluid forms, folding fabrics, roots, stones, and dunes appear in the exhibition not so much as symbols, but as active elements that accompany the artist’s system of thought. Each surface opens and closes like a tide, rendering visible the permeable relationships between body, space, and time. Curated by Zehra Begüm Kışla, the exhibition centers on the mode of making that İlkin weaves between nature, matter, and the body.
Visitor Information
• Dates: December 13 – January 23
• Venue: .artSümer, Piyalepaşa
• Admission: .artSümer
Mustafa Batıbeniz Exhibition at ARUCAD Art Space
Known for his interdisciplinary practice, Mustafa Batıbeniz presents his exhibition Post-Colonial Humanoids at ARUCAD Art Space in Nicosia, bringing together hybrid beings living in an imaginary universe shaped by Cyprus’s post-colonial memory. Drawing on cinema, architecture, and fashion, these humanoid figures explore the possibilities of a post-human future through their mutated bodies and liminal modes of existence. With its uncanny and retro-futuristic atmosphere, the exhibition invites reflection on identity, the body, and remembrance.
Visitor Information
• Dates: December 23 – January 31
• Venue: ARUCAD Art Space, Nicosia
• Admission: ARUCAD Art Space
“– Faruk, gene ben…” by Bihrat Mavitan
Galeri Siyah Beyaz is hosting Bihrat Mavitan’s twentieth solo exhibition, titled – Faruk, gene ben…. The exhibition renders visible the metaphorical dialogue the artist has sustained with Faruk Sade over a forty-two-year friendship, through drawings and works spanning different periods. Mavitan’s responses articulated through line open up a narrative space in which personal memory and collective memory become intertwined.
Visitor Information
• Dates: January 9 – February 14
• Venue: Galeri Siyah Beyaz, Ankara
• Admission: Galeri Siyah Beyaz
Group Exhibition at x-ist
Bringing together works by Ansen, Burak Dak, Burcu Urgut, Gülin Hayat Topdemir, Merve Atılgan, Murat Palta, Sefa Karakuş, Serkan Yüksel, and Tayfun Gülnar, Please Do Not Disturb approaches the historical atmosphere of the Pera Palace as a narrative space. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider figures who stayed—or are rumored to have stayed—at the hotel through contemporary artistic interpretations. The selection opens up a field of re-reading through contemporary encounters established between past and present.
Visitor Information
• Dates: December 25 – January 24
• Venue: x-ist, Gümüşsuyu
• Admission: x-ist
Works by Gülfem Kessler & Nadide Akdeniz at Labirent Sanat
The exhibition A Photograph of a Dream by Gülfem Kessler and Nadide Akdeniz centers the state of dreaming by approaching existence not through oppositions, but through the continuous transformation of these oppositions. The artists reconsider the image as a process of becoming constructed at the threshold between consciousness and the unconscious, control and intuition. Two distinct modes of production—between chaos and cosmos, planning and letting go—create a complementary field of tension within the exhibition. Opening up a poetic space, the exhibition reminds viewers that the image is not a fixed outcome, but a process in flux.
Visitor Information
• Dates: December 27 – February 7
• Venue: Labirent Sanat, Beyoğlu
• Admission: Labirent Sanat
Erdem Çolak “(S)Till, Life” at Ka
(S)Till, Life brings together Erdem Çolak’s paintings situated on the threshold between the still image and a sense of living presence. The artist approaches fragments of nature not as represented images, but as surfaces transformed through his engagement with material. The exhibition proposes a painterly language that focuses on a state of becoming rather than completion.
Visitor Information
• Dates: December 26 – January 24
• Venue: Ka, Ankara
• Admission: Ka
