Istanbul's Museum Moment

New York Times

3 days ago

Filled with the grand monuments and evocative ruins of three empires — Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman — the city once known as Constantinople is practically an open-air museum. Over the last few years, Istanbul has been adding numerous indoor museums as well. Spread across the city's seven hills, these new and newly reopened institutions feature an array of impressive buildings — renovated Ottoman-era baths, converted old factories, bold new experimental structures — and collections of everything from centuries-old Islamic artifacts to cutting-edge contemporary art. Traveling between them is both a plunge into the city's rich history and an exploration of its dynamic 21st-century creative scene — a scene that will be further highlighted this year at the 20th edition of Contemporary Istanbul, the nation's top art fair, in September.
Istanbul Modern
Big things are springing up along the Bosporus, the strait that separates the European and Asian continents and divides Istanbul in two. Fans of the architect Renzo Piano, who designed the splashy new home of the Istanbul Modern museum, will recognize signature stylistic elements like the silver-gray exterior, boxy geometric forms and cantilevered base on slim columns, which make the museum a structural cousin of other Piano projects, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the additions to the Harvard Art Museums.
Inside, two galleries for temporary exhibitions are complemented by an entire floor of Turkish art since 1945. Earthy, paint-encrusted canvases by Albert Bitran (a Frenchman who lived in Istanbul) and gritty street photography by Ara Guler (whose works can also be seen in the Ara Guler Museum) help represent the 1950s, while Halil Altindere's 2022 digital NFT — a spooky computer-animated rendition of a barren, post-apocalyptic Earth — carries the collection into the current moment.
Women are strongly represented, including postwar pioneers like Fahrelnissa Zeid, whose large canvases burst with colorful interlocking geometric forms, and Semiha Berksoy, an opera star who painted cartoonlike female nudes, simultaneously comical and haunting, in shaky, childlike strokes. But the museum's real star might be Istanbul itself. Thanks to vast glass panels in the walls and a roof deck with a reflecting pool, the city's mosques, towers and choppy Bosporus waters are on permanent display.
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