The new exhibition of Pera Museum Istanbuls Today features the work of 11 photographers who live in Istanbul and offers striking snapshots of the city in their unique styles. Curated by Refik Akyüz and Serdar Darendeliler, Istanbuls Today will run until September 17, 2023. Featuring the works of Silva Bingaz, Osman Bozkurt, Ci Demi, Kıvılcım S. Güngörün, Ekin Özbiçer, Emin Özmen, Ahmet Sel, Ali Taptık, Kerem Uzel, Erdem Varol, and Cansu Yıldıran, the exhibition touches on the artists’ way of interpreting the city as a personal interaction space while exploring the oddities of a city that are as mundane as they are extraordinary. The themes range from the city’s topography of emptiness, loneliness, eeriness, and incongruousness to its socio-political dynamics, the migration issue that has become more evident in the last decade to young people who took refuge in Istanbul to avoid marginalization, and the Istanbul Canal project, a recent addition to the exponentially growing list of mega projects in the last twenty-five years.
Discovering today’s Istanbul with photographs
Istanbuls Today is a narrative about the city’s state of flux and transformation, according to exhibition curators Refik Akyüz and Serdar Darendeliler: “These last twenty-five years has been an interesting period during which Istanbul has physically grown many-fold, consequently undergoing a cultural change and losing—or surrendering—its culture due to internal and external migration, gentrification, urban transformation, and political atmosphere—topics explored in the exhibition. And Istanbuls Today is a photography exhibition crafted to collect current narratives about this state of change and transformation in Istanbul, hoping to establish a layered view of the city’s present and create a considerable repository for future retrospective looks.
According to Akyüz and Darendeliler, the exhibition takes cross-sections of the city to serve as examples of the various Istanbuls experienced today. While doing so, the artists focus not only on the lives of the residents of the city, but also on its topography and built environment, current social/political dynamics, ecological challenges, its mundanely extraordinary oddities, alternative cultures, and the issue of migration, which has intensified in the last decade, but was always a part of the city’s story.
Meanwhile, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı, Fırat Genç, Şebnem İşigüzel, Melisa Kesmez, Biray Kolluoğlu, Gamze Toksoy and Sibel Yardımcı, each an author who studies, contemplate, and fictionalizes the city of Istanbul in their works, draw inspirations from the photographs on display in the exhibition in their articles, adding yet another layer to both the exhibition and its catalogue.
