Istanbul etc

3 weeks ago | istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam

Looking to infuse some color into this grey and rainy Istanbul weekend? Photographer İzzet Keribar’s solo exhibition provides a transporting fix. His early black-and-white works from 1950s Istanbul strike a lot of Ara Güler-like chords but are enriched by being paired with contemporaneous color work from South Korea, with Keribar capturing both countries at a time when they were poised on the brink of rapid urbanization. The rest of the globe-trotting exhibition pops with bold color.

1 month ago | istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam

After a May Day dampened by rain as well as the usual lockdowns of central neighborhoods and police arrests of demonstrators, the International Labor Film Festival officially opens this evening at Atlas Cinema in Beyoğlu with a screening of Cycle, an award-winning drama about domestic workers in a wealthy household in Istanbul. With parallel programs in İzmir and Ankara, the festival showcases fiction and documentary films about the lives of working people.

1 month ago | istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam

Dear readers, I hope all of my fellow İstanbullular have recovered from the jolts of this week’s earthquake. And I hope the scare has prodded you – if you haven’t already – to get together an earthquake kit and make some emergency plans with friends, family, and neighbors.

1 month ago | istanbuletcetera.substack.com | Jennifer Hattam

A poignant sense of impermanence suffuses, and unites, the visually bold and diverse new works by artist Itamar Gov in this solo exhibition, from the neon piece “You & I Are Earth” to the sand-sculpted “43 Tools for the Revolution” and the light and sound installation “When Small Men Start to Cast Big Shadows It Means The Sun is About to Set.” Alluding to the challenges of the present political moment they also create space to imagine its transformation, if only through the inevitable march...

2 months 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.