Beneath Istanbul, a sculptor reckons with time
Also this week: A Bosporus rooftop for Anatolian cuisine, gallery picks across the city, and Cappadocia's sound of soil.
Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.
Summer in Istanbul has a way of turning even ancient stone into something alive, and this week we follow that thread into a 1,600-year-old cistern where a sculptor stages his own reckoning with time, up to a Bosporus rooftop built for long lunches, across town to a gallery wall painted gold and out to the Cappadocia plains, where an artist has been recording the sound of soil.
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Thanks for reading,
Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)
P.S. Have tips on Istanbul’s culture scene? Send them my way at nertan@al-monitor.com.
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1. Leading the week: Down among the drowned gods
Seckin Pirim's sculptures glow crimson and white against the ancient columns of Serefiye Sarnici. (Dirimart)
Istanbul's cisterns have become the city's unlikeliest art darlings, with Byzantine plumbing repurposed as some of the moodiest exhibition space east of the Bosporus. The latest to succumb is Serefiye Sarnici, a roughly 1,600-year-old water tank built under Theodosius II, which now hosts “Then and Now,” sculptor Seckin Pirim's dialogue with 11 years of his own back catalog.
Pirim, born in Ankara in 1977 and trained at Mimar Sinan University, works in a tight, recognizable palette of black, white and, above all, red, a scheme he traces less to concept than to an ill-fitting blue T-shirt from art school he refused ever to repeat. His biomorphic red columns and plexiglass forms, drawn from shows dating back to 2014, are scattered among the cistern's marble pillars and reflected, doubled, in the standing water below.
The feature that elevates the work beyond photogenic stunt casting: sound. Pirim recorded the cistern's own dripping water and rebroadcast it through eight speakers, letting the space essentially perform itself back to its visitors, intervention as amplification rather than imposition. Read alongside his last two solo shows, “Retreat” and “Temporary Construction,” this one completes an unplanned trilogy: withdrawal, impermanence and now a reckoning with history itself.
Date: Until Aug. 31
Location: Binbirdirek Mah., Piyer Loti Cad. No: 2/1, Fatih
2. Word on the street: Lina Anatolian Kitchen
A rooftop spread at Lina Anatolian Kitchen, with the Bosporus doing most of the decorating. (Courtesy of the restaurant)
The refreshingly windy rooftop of the Maestro Hotel in Karakoy houses Lina Anatolian Kitchen: open sightlines to the Bosporus and a menu that reworks Anatolian staples with a light, modern hand. Smoked eggplant mutabal and hummus layered with pastrami open things gently; slow-cooked lamb shank in Anatolian spices and wood-fired octopus over fava puree carry the weight of the meal. Dessert leans playful, crispy pumpkin with tahini foam among them. Reservations recommended, especially at sunset.
Location: Meclis-i Mebusan Cad. No: 45, Beyoglu (The Maestro Hotel's Rooftop)
3. Istanbul diary
The sunny wall on Istanbul’s Anatolian side at “Be The Sun” (Chi Art Gallery)
On the Asian side of Istanbul, Chi Art Gallery’s “Be the Sun” gathers 15 artists, among them Aziz Cinar, Feyza Coban and Erman Gurcum, around a single, faintly therapeutic question: Can you generate your own light rather than wait to be completed by someone else's? Until Aug. 25.
Zilberman Istanbul launches “Unfold '26: Sites of Relation,” with 10 emerging artists tracing how place, bureaucracy and inherited history lodge themselves in wool, clay and hand-pressed frottage. Until Aug. 22.
At Istanbul Sanat Muzesi, Halic Tersanesi, “Donate Me, Please” gathers 64 artists in a direct appeal for organ donation, set against a sobering statistic: Only 20.4% of families consented last year, even as some 33,000 people in Turkey wait for a transplant. Until Aug. 23.
4. Book of the Week: ‘The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales’
As Turkey's Kurdish peace process inches forward, “The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales” seems apt reading. First published in Turkish decades ago and only now translated into English by Aron Aji, Ferit Edgu's (1936-2024) slim, spare volume follows an Istanbul journalist sent to document the ethno-national violence convulsing the country's mountainous east, alongside a set of short “Eastern Tales” that read like distilled parables. Edgu, who spent formative years in Hakkari and called himself “reborn” there, writes with almost no ornament: fragments, silences, a reporter who knows his dispatches will not stop the bloodletting but goes anyway.
5. (Beyond) Istanbul gaze
Merve Iseri on the Cappadocia plains, recording the sound of soil. (Galerist)
Ceramicist Merve Iseri spent June and July in Cappadocia as the first resident of Galerist and A.R.C.'s new collaboration, working across sound, moving image and mineral pigment. At “Topragin Sesi ” ("The Sound of Soil"), an Avanos studio devoted to ceramic percussion instruments, she recorded and extended her ongoing Sound Garden project into new video work drawn from the region's clay.
6. By the numbers
• According to TurkStat migration statistics, Turkmenistan now tops the list of nationalities newly registering as residents in Turkey at 23.2% in 2025, followed by Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Back in 2017-2020, Iraq led at 17.9%.
• Among foreigners granted work permits in 2025, accommodation (12.4%) and domestic household employment (11.6%) were the largest sectors. Nearly 44% of permit holders were high school graduates.
• Syrians led work permit recipients with 105,096 people, followed by Turkmen nationals at 62,412.
