Eyes were on Istanbul this past spring, when protests over the Turkish government’s plans to replace a public park in the center of the city with an Ottoman-nostalgic shopping mall boiled over. Presciently enough, the curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Fulya Erdemci, had chosen to focus on issues of public space and the body politic months prior. Her layered exhibition, titled “Mom, Am I Barbarian?”, after the book by Turkish poet Lale Müldür, runs from September 14 through October 20 at venues around town.
If the city has reached an inflection point politically, so too has it as a market for art, and a new fair, Art International, arrives to test the waters at the Haliç Congress Centre on the Golden Horn peninsula September 16 through 18. Responding to criticism that the city’s existing fairs have been too regionally focused, director Dyala Nusseibeh has banded together a more global coalition of galleries that includes heavyweights Lisson,Pace, and Yvon Lambert as well as incubators of young talent, like Ibid Projects, of London; Temnikova & Kasela, of Tallinn; and locals Pilot Galeri, Galeri Non, and x-ist.
New Yorkers who can’t get to the events can check out the solo debut at Paul Kasmin Gallery of one of Turkey’s most provocative painters, Taner Ceylan. His hyperrealistic renderings, which reclaim and update the gaze of 19th-century Orientalists in a kind of “revisionist art history,” as he puts it, are on view from September 18 through October 26.
