At Contemporary Istanbul, Politics Is Everywhere – Except The Art

The week-long press trip for the annual Contemporary Istanbul art fair brought together more than 20 international journalists. It began with a dinner at the 5-star Aliée Istanbul hotel to celebrate the hotel’s acquisition of Dutch textile artist Claudy Jongstra’s Landscape of Mercy (2026), a sweeping 7-metre landscape made with ancient felting and plant-based dyeing techniques.

Between bites of sea bass and sips of wine, one journalist noted that the collection is linked to the hotel group’s founder, Fettah Tamince, a businessman whose political ties, including his former relationship with the Gülen movement and links to Jeffrey Epstein, have given his guests plenty to talk about. Although not that many of them seemed to mind that night; one journalist from Berlin indulged excessively and, while having a photograph taken, fell into the swimming pool. 

The 21st edition of the fair returned this month to the Tersane, a recently revitalised complex in the historic Ottoman shipyards on the Golden Horn, with more than 70 galleries from 24 countries and a special focus on contemporary art from Asia.

Contemporary Istanbul’s founder and chairman, Ali Güreli, opened the event with a press conference discussing how the artworld has changed over the past few years. He highlighted political tension, inflation, insurance, travel and transport challenges, and Turkey’s 20 percent VAT as particular sore points.

All these factors have made galleries and collectors more selective about which international market events they attend, Güreli added. The approaching presidential election has also amplified a broader lack of trust in the government and speculation about whether these conditions will improve, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been in power for more than two decades, pursues constitutional changes that could allow him to remain in office.

At the same time, Güreli sees potential for a new generation of collectors in Turkey, where wealth management, real estate and private banking businesses have expanded alongside a growing number of five-star hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, members’ bars and yachting ports.

“There is money, but who has it?” Güreli asked. “That’s what we are trying to understand. Generation by generation, we see that there is an increase in the market that is, in general, positive.”

What wasn’t spoken of was the brewing situation in Turkey’s stock market. In the week ending 18 September, Turkey’s main stock index fell more than eight percent as investment funds struggled to meet requests from investors wanting their cash back. Regulators ordered the liquidation of 131 funds, affecting around 353,000 investors. It was the market’s worst week since the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu in March 2025.

Contemporary Istanbul’s partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism provides several measures to reduce costs and risks for exhibitors. It has also enabled the fair to collaborate with hotels around Istanbul that host collectors, curators, advisers, artists and journalists. A longstanding partnership with Turkish Airlines gives the fair 40 tonnes of free cargo capacity for exhibitors, saving them around 20 percent in shipping costs.

This edition brought in 22 first-time exhibitors, including Takato Kano Gallery from Tokyo, which offered one of the earliest Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculptures for $770,000. Elsewhere, the fair featured special public presentations with undisclosed prices, including Chisaro Matsumoto’s Sail of Light (2026), a 200sqm sculpture inspired by shibori techniques and presented by Pearl Lam Galleries, which is based in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The fair’s artistic director, Sarp Kerem Yavuz, reiterated that the project would not have been possible without Turkish Airlines’ support, given its monumental scale.

Throughout the week, the programme repeatedly led back to what one journalist called “the Güreli empire”. A visit to the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, a sixteenth-century Ottoman bathhouse whose founding director is Güreli’s daughter, Koza Güreli Yazgan, featured an exhibition by Brazilian artist Alex Červený. A lengthy restoration had returned the historic bathhouse to use as a working hamam, where visitors can now come for an intensive soap-up and scrub in addition to seeing art. The Güreli connection extended beyond the satellite venues: one attendee pointed out that the wine served throughout the events also came from a winery owned by the family.

For some journalists, the press trip concluded with a dinner at the Peninsula hotel with the Bahraini artist Sheikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, a member of Bahrain’s royal family and founder of the RAK Art Foundation in Riffa, Bahrain. Al Khalifa’s work Inhabited Crate – Multicolored (2026), a large-scale sculpture of colourful gridded metal mesh, was displayed on the grounds of Tersane. The presentation’s organiser, Swiss curator Marc-Olivier Wahler, director of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (MAH) in Geneva, confirmed that the work was priced at $200,000.

During the closing dinner, the conversation circled back to politics. The sheikh asked whether we believed artists “should feel obliged to create work responding to politics or certain tragedies, or if they should be left alone” to make what inspires them without such external pressures.

He added: “Critics say that some artists can’t feel the suffering or problems going on, but, of course, we do. You can’t force artists – it has to be something that comes from within.” An Italian journalist agreed: “Artists have no obligation,” she said. 

“All good art is political,” Wahler countered. “Every good artwork addresses many different issues.” Indeed, political works were notably scarce at the fair, though, with enough effort, you can find political meaning in almost anything. 

Next year, the fair will focus on German art to mark the 70th anniversary of the Turkey–Germany Cultural Agreement, which established a framework for cooperation in art, science and education between the two countries. The choice of Germany suggests that, amid the political and economic uncertainties Güreli described, the fair is aiming to further Istanbul’s role as a conduit between regional and international artworlds. 

But with pressure still weighing on Turkey’s cultural sector, the fair’s global ambitions are unfolding against an increasingly complicated backdrop.