Six decades of Bedri Baykam in Bodrum

Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

The heat is on, and the city has emptied onto the coast, so this week we follow it. We begin in Bodrum, where Turkish art’s l’enfant terrible Bedri Baykam has hung 60 years of work, then climb the hill to a kitchen that charges 2,000 Turkish lira for the privilege of booking a table.

Back in town, Arter opens its garden, cinema diva Turkan Soray turns out to have been painting all along, and a Turkish name lands on the Booker longlist with a prison cell where the bathroom should be. We end in Ankara, with 12 yellow pawns and one restless knight — an artsy critique of the EU visa policies.

If you want to receive this newsletter or our other weekly City Pulse newsletters — for Doha, Dubai and Riyadh — sign up here.

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.

Also, don’t forget to follow us on Instagram: @citypulsealm

1. Leading the week: Sixty years, all at once

Bedri Baykam, “Layers of Dreams, Traces of the Illusory” (Courtesy of the artist)

Bodrum in August is not where you usually go to look at paintings. The heat, the traffic on the Ortakent road, the general sense that everyone is somewhere with a view. Inspera Bodrum Kultur Sanat has been betting otherwise since it opened in 2024: a stage named after Zulfu Livaneli, an open-air stage, an art academy, a bookstore, a design store and two kitchens, all running until midnight. A cultural hub in the full sense, not a gallery with a cafe attached.

Its August headliner is Bedri Baykam. “Ayni Anda” (“All at Once”) gathers some six decades of output into the Art Space and refuses to line it up chronologically. About half the works were made this year and have never been shown in Bodrum; they hang against much older pieces so that the two argue rather than illustrate. One section comes out of “Baykam on Picasso,” his recent “Piramid Sanat” show in Istanbul — less a story of influence than a conversation between visual languages.

Bedri Baykam, “Intuitive Impressions of a Time Traveler” (Courtesy of the artist)

Baykam remains Turkey’s most productive one-man cultural industry: painter, novelist, polemicist, political activist and the former child prodigy/l’enfant terrible who has never entirely stopped being one. He moves between painting, installation, video and his layered stereoscopic surfaces, and once spent six months drawing an art history map for his students at Altinbas University, plotting the Renaissance, Impressionism and Cubism as fault lines, with Marx and Steve Jobs down one side and Ataturk and Yasar Kemal down the other. He later calculated that the same hours would have produced 25 large canvases, but he does not appear to regret it — partly, I assume, because its prints sold so well.

Thursdays bring talks with the artist, signings, children’s sessions and a screening of Stefan Svetiev’s Baykam documentary. The line-up at the arts hub is worth the drive on its own, with Selcuk Sirin, arguably Turkey’s foremost educator, and the novelist Nedim Gursel both due. The full program is on Inspera’s Instagram.

Date: Until Sept. 13

Location: Muskebi Mah. Kemer Sok. No: 16/1, Ortakent, Bodrum

2. Word on the street: Mezra

Open-fire cooking at Mezra Yalikavak (Courtesy of Mezra)

In the hills above Yalikavak, Mezra is Serhat Dogramaci’s farm-to-table argument, cooked over open fire: his own vegetable garden and animals outside, an heirloom seed bank and some 150 geographically marked products sourced across Turkey. Salted bonito meets fresh and fermented strawberry with a whisper of red chilli; the Turkish coffee dessert arrives as a chilled almond millefeuille with orange marmalade, light and rich at once. One warning before you commit: Booking requires a 2,000-lira deposit per head, refundable only if you cancel 48 hours ahead.

3. Istanbul diary

Dolapdere Noise Orchestra plays Arter’s back garden on Aug. 21 (Courtesy of Arter)

Every Friday in August, Arter waives admission from 17:00 to 21:00 and hands the evening to its back garden: a DJ and open-air cinema on Aug. 14, the Dolapdere Noise Orchestra on Aug. 21, Tayfa Tatavla playing old Tatavla on Aug. 28, plus themed tours of “Void” and “Topography.” A free shuttle runs from Taksim. Concerts and films need no booking; tours are signed up for at the desk. Irmak Cad. No: 13, Dolapdere.

Ibrahim Karaoglu curates an unlikely double act at Muze Gazhane. “Meeting in the Garden of Memories” sets silver-screen diva Turkan Soray’s paintings, costumes and installations against recent canvases by Yalcin Gokcebag, who spent decades as a TRT cameraman and credits the framing in his work to it. It was Gokcebag who proposed the show, after catching sight of Soray’s canvases on a visit. Free until Aug. 30.

Three generations of one family made the public face of Turkish cinema, and “Before the Screen” lays out the Agakay archive to prove it: hand-painted posters, lobby cards, billboards and the cinema lanterns that came before them, at the new Istanbul Sinema Ofisi in Kasimpasa. Until May 12, 2027, so no rush.