Dispatch from Contemporary Istanbul

Last week, a white cat crawled into the 19th edition of Contemporary Istanbul, sneaking through the QR code check along with the Turkish elite clad in cocktail attire. It was the art fair’s pre-VIP day, which is fittingly called At First Sight, where collectors locked their eyes on their future objects of affection. The fair’s founder Ali Güreli launched Tuesday’s pre-preview day with an appearance by the Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu while the crowd filled the Bosphorus-viewed aisles where 53 galleries hailed from 14 countries, with a generous portion from Latin America and Spain. 

The unveiling had its particular thrill for being the fair’s first edition at the recently-completed convention center inside the Rixos hotel at Tersane, the 500-year old Ottoman-era shipping yard with towering brick arches. The imperial complex that overlooks the majestic Golden Horn silhouette is going through an urbanization project after being inaccessible to the public for decades, with two contemporary art museums designed by Grimshaw architects and DP architects opening next year, in addition a performance venue and hotels. During Contemporary Istanbul’s six-day affair, the art crowd had its sneak peek into the mega compound while savoring the art which seemed to put emphasis on material play and the body’s positioning in times of technology. 

At OG Gallery’s booth, Yaz Taşçı’s two softly-colored paintings illustrated a woman’s face and feet in a powdery dreaminess, facing Sine İçli’s fired clay flat buttocks in various colors, and shapes. A similar haziness prevailed at Ferda Art Platform’s grouping where İnci Furni’s large-scale painting Olympics (2024) showed bodies tangled with nature’s flora in a weightless breeze. 

W—Galería from Buenos Aires placed the New York-based Argentinian artist Nicolás Guagnini’s three torso sculptures in vitrified glazed ceramic in the center of its presentation. Rendered in a fiery orange, the upper-body forms with incomplete arms were punctured by large holes on their chests, like signs of an emotional void. Berke Yazıcıoğlu’s two black-and-white ink on paper drawings of men, mysteriously titled Bruno I and Bruno II (2024), focused on the hunky subjects’ faces amidst an orgasmic euphoria, leaving the rest to the kinky mind of the beholder at Dirimart’s booth. The body appeared in another form of imaginary regimen at Zilberman’s presentation, in which Memed Erdener’s duo of acrylic on paper paintings of larger-than-life figures were illustrated with an informative precision and decked with Turkish affixes. 

There was a familiar sighting at Sevil Dolmacı’s booth, where two Peter Halley paintings radiated with the New York artist’s signature fluorescent and pastel-washed allusive geometry. Gülden Bostancı gallery offered a sultry encounter at its booth, with the back wall reserved for Cem Adrian’s black-and-white portraits of faces swapped with anuses and vaginas. The musician, who has a cult following in Turkey, blows up the typical portraiture scale to a confrontational dimension while subverting the nostalgia of black-and-white imagery. 

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Some through humor and others with jabs at malleable social dynamics, the art did not shy away from explosive colors and funky scales, including a neon pink Ugo Rondinone sculpture gazing at the Bosphorus’s friendly seagulls and zigzagging ferries. The arrival of the after hours at the pre-VIP day brought a crudo-laden, Champagne-soaked evening at Rixos’s soaring lobby. The picturesque bash blended international collectors and Istanbul’s art world fixtures with the nocturnal view of the Hagia Sophia and the generously lit boats dotting the calm Golden Horn water.