Turkey’s Art Scene Goes Global

There is a line from Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk that I always thought captures what it feels like to live in Istanbul: ‘Life can't be all that bad… Whatever happens, I can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.’

It feels fitting, then, that Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires, which went on view at the V&A South Kensington on 7 November, begins with a video of the Bosphorus: ferries cutting through the brilliant blue strait, a rainbow sunset streaking across the sky and the city’s monuments – Hagia Sophia, Galata Tower and Dolmabahçe Palace – seen from the water.

The exhibition, billed as the first of its kind in the UK, opened in the museum’s grand rotunda to a soundtrack of remixed Turkish classics. It feels indicative of a wider moment in which Turkish art is beginning to be taken seriously in Britain.

A new wave of emigration from Turkey began a decade ago after an attempted coup in 2016 led to a widespread crackdown on dissent by the government. Since then, an ongoing economic crisis – with inflation peaking at 85.5 percent in October 2022 – and elections in 2023, in which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held on to power after more than two decades leading the country, have led many to question their future in Turkey.

Turkish emigration to Europe is not new. A 1961 labour recruitment agreement between Turkey and West Germany initiated a period of mass migration. Today, around three million people of Turkish origin live in Germany.

There are few reliable figures to quantify the latest exodus from Turkey, but one statistic stands out. In 2009, only 1.6 percent of graduates from Istanbul Erkek Lisesi, an elite state boys’ school, went abroad for university. By 2024, that figure had climbed to nearly 90 percent.

‘Aya Sofia Constantinople’ (1852) by Gaspare Fossati. On display at Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires. Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum.

What has changed is who is moving abroad, notes Çelenk Bafra, artistic director of Istanbul Modern, Turkey’s leading museum of modern and contemporary art.

“It’s another kind of wave,” she says. “These Turks represent the upper middle class; most of them are highly educated and come with global networks. Among them are many artists and many from the LGBT community.” Bafra notes that London is an especially welcoming destination for artists, partly because of the UK’s Global Talent visa.

Turkish curator Gigi Surel says she sometimes hears “more Turkish than English” spoken in her neighbourhood of Battersea, London. Surel is part of the collaborative art space Flatmates 37, where work by Turkish artist Cansu Yıldıran is currently on show in SOFT SERVE, the space’s inaugural exhibition.

Yıldıran, a visual artist working across photography and film, is now based in Basel, Switzerland, and says she often thinks about whether to return to Turkey. “I am connected to the region; my practice grows from there. I find it hard to find new stories in Europe,” she tells me.

After photographing Istanbul’s Pride march in June 2025, Yıldıran was detained and given a travel ban, shortly before she was due to leave for her master’s degree in Basel. The ban was lifted, but she laments that others have not been so lucky. “I only spent one night in jail but, in this instance, it does not feel good to be privileged. Others are still there. I have lost so many friends from Istanbul who had to go abroad,” she says.

Leaving Turkey changed the way Yıldıran approaches her practice. She had always felt it was her artistic duty to document histories outside the dominant narratives. “I like to take photos of the joy queer people can feel in Turkey, of how happy we felt with each other,” she tells me. But after leaving, her subject turned inward: “Before I was telling a collective story of Turkey, but now I am telling my story.”

Istanbul Modern by Another Believer, Creative Commons, Via Wikipedia.

While the emigration of a country’s educated class can damage fields such as medicine or engineering, Bafra sees a different effect on the art market: much of the work made abroad finds its way back to Istanbul.

Rising visibility for the diaspora – she points to Bengi Ünsal, director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) – and the relocation of collectors are having “a positive effect on galleries representing Turkish artists”, she says.

One of Istanbul’s leading contemporary art galleries, Dirimart, opened its first space outside Turkey in London last year. It followed Pi Artworks, which became the first Turkish gallery to expand into the UK in 2013. Levent Özmen, director of Dirimart London, says he hopes the new location will act as a bridge between Turkey and the international artworld, as many of the artists represented by Dirimart are based abroad.

Özmen sees Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires as a landmark event for Turkey’s art scene. Although the exhibition concludes in 1922, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, he sees its survey of Istanbul’s cultural origins and the scholarship behind it as an important source for contemporary artists.

Turkish contemporary art resists easy definition. Özmen says it operates at a crossroads, much like Turkey itself: a place of “people living very close to one another, but in different worlds”.

“Is it part of European art history? Asian art history? Does Turkish contemporary art even have its own history? Those are still questions to be answered,” he says. He has noticed that while older generations were perhaps more in line with Western art, younger artists are looking to what he calls a “more traditional, more Turkish tradition”.

Dirimart London. Courtesy Dirimart

When asked what a ‘Turkish tradition’ might mean, Bafra points to the artist Elif Uras. Uras’s installation The Wheels Are Barely Turning is part of Istanbul Modern’s current exhibition, Beneath the Same Blue, which traces the evolution of the country’s modern and contemporary art from the 1940s to today.

Uras, a painter and ceramicist, draws inspiration from historical sources across Turkey’s Ottoman past, including Iznik tiles and Islamic geometry. Educated in the US, she now works between New York, Istanbul and Iznik, the renowned ceramics centre of the Ottoman Empire.

‘Having studied art and art history in the US, with its Eurocentric point of view, I was not aware of what a significant achievement Iznik pottery was, even though I grew up surrounded by it,’ Uras said in a 2023 interview with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for the museum’s installation Dialogues: Modern Artists and the Ottoman Past, which marked the centenary of the Turkish Republic.

Iznik ceramics and the city’s significance also feature in Constantinople to Istanbul. The exhibition feels emblematic of a broader shift in how Western institutions are categorising Turkish art.

A legacy of its prosaic undervaluing surfaces when the exhibition suggests that, if you have tile walls in your bathroom, you are ‘an heir to Ottoman Istanbul’. Yet it also acknowledges the debt the V&A owes to Istanbul, noting how Byzantine mosaic-making skills were adapted ‘in the decoration of this museum…and still add to the building’s beauty’.

The most striking moment of Constantinople to Istanbul, though, lies in a three-minute black-and-white silent film near the exhibition’s close, rather than in any of the objects on display. It shows men wearing the fez, the traditional Ottoman hat; women with faces obscured by scarves; and others with visible, radiant smiles beneath bell-shaped caps. Groups of children appear, some shy and suspicious, but most smiling and waving, excited to be recorded.

Only when you examine the film’s label – in French, without an accompanying English translation – do you understand the significance of when it was shot: ‘Excerpts from Constantinople: street scenes, French soldiers; and Constantinople during the French occupation. The Ramadan holidays. May and June 1919. By Marco Carini’.

Istanbul in 1920 by the newspaper Hakimiyet-i Milliye. Scaned from newspaper Cumhuriyet by Public Domain. Via Wikipedia Commons.

1919 marked the start of the Turkish War of Independence, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Allied powers, including France and Britain, which ended with the founding of the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire officially ended three years later, in 1922.

The world’s last Ottomans look at you from Istanbul’s cobbled streets, from the Galata Bridge and outside mosque courtyards. Could any of them comprehend the historical moment they were living through?

The film is so reminiscent of today’s city that I can point out exactly where my apartment would have been – only a short century ago by Istanbul’s timeline. The streets are now filled with different characters: there are still veiled and unveiled women, but no fez. The city’s population has also ballooned, from just under a million residents in 1950 to more than 15 million today. Alongside them are rows of cars and clusters of skyscrapers, yet a precarious future remains.

This past September, when police targeted Istanbul’s LGBT community in mass arrests, Yıldıran says she had a visceral feeling of wanting to return as she watched the news, finding it hard to be away from home. “Being away doesn’t really keep you away," she says. "My mind is always there.”

Bafra agrees. Istanbul’s art scene has become increasingly mobile, but those who leave can never truly leave the city, she says, citing a famous Turkish proverb:

Bir ayağı sılada, bir ayağı gurbette: One foot in the homeland, one foot in a foreign land.

Beneath the Same Blue, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, 8 September 2026 – 31 December 2027

Soft Serve, Flatmates 37, London, 25 September – 14 November

Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires, V&A South Kensington, London, 7 November 2026 – 9 May 2027