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3 weeks ago | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
Swept up in the masses of people pushing their way down a broad city street toward the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB) headquarters, part of the largest wave of protests in Turkey since the Gezi Park resistance in 2013, the cultural legacy of those earlier demonstrations was impossible to miss.
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2 months ago | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
The promised snowpocalypse hasn’t (yet) fully materialized in Istanbul, but many events in the city have been cancelled or postponed in anticipation of a weekend whiteout and some venues are closing or limiting their opening hours over the next few days. The New and Newest Music Festival at ARTER, a Michael Snow film series at Istanbul Modern, and concerts at the Pera Museum are just a few of the events that are not happening this weekend.
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2 months ago | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
On the second anniversary earlier this month of the devastating 6 February 2023 earthquakes, 30 artists from Antakya, one of the hardest-hit cities, hung their paintings on the exposed interior walls of one of the many buildings still lying in ruins.
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2 months ago | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
Perched on the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus north of the second bridge, a cluster of large, weathered metal cylinders makes for an incongruous sight amidst the green hills and fine wooden mansions more commonly associated with the famous strait.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
Anyone who has spent time in Turkey will recognize the word that opens this group exhibition: “Arıza.” Meaning “malfunction” or “defect,” it’s often plastered on out-of-order turnstiles or toilet stalls.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
Once known as “Green Bursa” for the forests surrounding its great peak Uludağ and its lush landscaping in Ottoman times, Turkey’s fourth-largest city has become famously smothered in concrete as its population soared from a half million people in the 1950s to more than 3.2 million today.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
Deities from ancient Mesopotamian mythology and motifs with strong symbolic value in the artist’s hometown of Mardin – among them pigeons, serpents, and keys – predominate in this Istanbul solo exhibition, named after the Kurdish word meaning “mourning” or “blue” but also related to the word for “life.” The warm limestone of Mardin’s historical buildings turns blue in Kılıç’s architectural cyanotype prints, a process he also applies to cloth to populate the gallery with ethereal figures.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
When I first moved to Turkey, its neighbor to the south was still a place where people would go for cultural tourism or to learn Arabic (I will always sorely regret not visiting a friend while she was studying in Damascus back then). Within a few years, though, the Syrian revolution had begun, quickly spiraling into a prolonged, brutal war that sent millions fleeing for their lives.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam
If you think you’re seeing birds everywhere you turn inside this gallery space, it’s no coincidence: the title of the exhibition refers to a creation myth describing a time before the beginning of the world when there was no land, only birds flying above an endless sea.
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Kabir Mokamel |Jennifer Hattam
The blazing eyes of a young Afghan girl, her face illuminated by the fire cradled in her palms, stare out from inside the open door of an abandoned school in Istanbul’s historic Fener neighborhood. Created by Kabir Mokamel from the Afghanistan artists’ collective ArtLords, the mural, called “Phoenix,” welcomes visitors into the central exhibition of this year’s Mahalla Festival.