When you hold this issue in your hands, you may first notice the stillness of a sunflower field on the cover—its faces turned toward an unseen light, its yellow caught somewhere between memory and time. This issue begins in that quiet.
Our March–April edition turns to The Museum of Innocence, the new series inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s novel and now finding its own life on screen. Yet what compelled us was not merely an adaptation, but a rare artistic gesture: a work that thinks through memory, obsession, and repetition not only in dialogue, but in rooms, in light, in the way objects endure. In this world, corridors remember, surfaces age, and things kept too long begin to speak.
The series reminds us that memory is rarely written in words alone. It is held in what is touched, misplaced, guarded, or left behind—a handbag, a key, a teacup, a pair of worn shoes. Objects do not simply record what happened; they carry what never fully did. They hold the tremor of unrealised lives, the echo of withheld confessions, the stubborn persistence of longing.
In our special dossier, we follow this language of objects and spaces through conversations with the creative team and essays on the series’ visual and emotional architecture. What emerges is a shared conviction: this is not a period drama but a timeless one, a narrative open enough to allow each viewer their own private reading, just as Pamuk’s novel has always done. The sunflower on our cover is not an illustration of a scene; it is an atmosphere, a memory, a quiet signal.
This issue also carries news that humbled us deeply. At the inaugural 2025 Awards of the Sanat Tarihi Derneği, ARTDOG Istanbul was honoured with the Cultural Arts Media and Publishing Award of the Year. The jury cited our commitment to rigorous, research-based journalism; our effort to make contemporary art visible; our dedication to critical thought and ethical reporting; our engagement with international cultural discourse; our inclusive editorial perspective; and our sustained, innovative presence across digital platforms.
Awards, of course, belong less to a publication than to a shared conviction. They belong to writers who labour over nuance, to artists who trust us with their stories, to readers who believe culture deserves depth, patience, and seriousness. To receive this recognition in the same ceremony that honoured İpek Duben with a Lifetime Achievement Award and Beral Madra as Curator of the Year was, for us, profoundly meaningful. Their work has shaped the very terrain on which we stand.
ARTDOG has spent years asking a simple question in many forms: How does art help us remember who we are? Sometimes the answer appears in a small exhibition notice, sometimes in a long conversation with an artist, sometimes—as in this issue—in the echo of a novel reborn on screen.
Sunflowers turn toward the light. With this issue, we turn toward memory—the fragile, persistent light that keeps stories alive long after they have been told. Because every magazine, at its best, is also a museum: a place where what we have loved, questioned, and believed in waits quietly to be remembered again.
Issue 33 is Now Available!
Get it in both print and digital versions.
Turkish Edition
