Breathing room: Mehtap Baydu at Arter

Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

This week, we step inside the breath-filled glass room of Mehtap Baydu at Arter, where desire and suffocation turn out to be close neighbors. Elsewhere, a husband-and-wife team in Sariyer quietly holds its own against Istanbul’s gastronomic tide, Turkey’s modernist masters resurface in a Sisli gallery and TurkStat confirms what anyone who has tried to book a theater ticket lately suspected. 

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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: ‘Loving you is so hard!’

Works from “Loving You is So Hard!” (Photo courtesy of Kayhan Kaygisiz / Arter 2026)

Mehtap Baydu’s first solo show at Arter comes trailing a decade’s worth of intrigue. I first encountered her work in the early 2010s at Galeri Nev Ankara, in the form of several pairs of golden lips pressed against a whitewashed wall, pinched together and unsettling. The encounter stayed with me in the way only genuinely strange work can, along with a nagging feeling that the artist’s work would soon become unaffordable for a modest collector.

Born in Bingol, a small city in eastern Turkey, Baydu studied sculpture at Hacettepe University in Ankara before decamping to Berlin, where she has lived and worked ever since. She is, in curator Selen Ansen’s words, someone who “pastes different lives onto her own,” forging a relationship between the artwork and the act.

The exhibition entitled Loving you is so hard! brings together new and recent work across performance, sculpture, photography, video and ceramics. Its title, deliberately kitsch — especially with its exclamation mark — sets the tone. Ceramic body fragments draped on a washing line, a bronze spine assembled from casts of the artist’s own body, a video of arms moving between tree trunks: Baydu’s materials are always specific. Desire, the work suggests, is inseparable from distance and tension; proximity is never complete.

Baydu’s “Art of Defense” (Photo courtesy of Galeri Nev)

At its center is “Atem" (German for "Breath"), first performed in a Berlin storefront in 2019 and presented here for the first time inside an art institution. Baydu sits in a glass-enclosed space of exactly 16 square meters and inflates a balloon until it matches the room’s volume. As the balloon expands, her room to maneuver shrinks. Eventually she must leave — but her breath remains. “My own breath comes back to me as a threat,” she has said. “It leaves me no room to live.” Viewed from the other side of the glass, it is one of the more quietly devastating things you can do on a sunny afternoon in Istanbul.

Location: Arter, Irmak Caddesi No: 13, Dolapdere

Date: until Nov. 15

2. Word on the street: Herise Istanbul

Traditional flavors (Photo courtesy of Herise)

In Istanbul’s brutally competitive restaurant scene, survival usually demands volume, visibility or a backer with deep pockets. Herise Istanbul has none of these. What it has instead is Asude and Bahadir Bogatir, a husband-and-wife team who have quietly become two of the city’s most compelling ambassadors for Anatolian cuisine. He runs a single set menu built around traditional ingredients and flavors: tomatoes, peppers and dried figs dressed with Aegean olive oil, followed by a rice dish perfumed with rosewater, saffron and currants. She runs the room, explains the concept and brings mocktails to the table; the restaurant serves no alcohol.

Location: Kongre Caddesi No: 15/A, Resitpasa, Sariyer (closed Mon-Wed)

3. Istanbul diary

Sevket Dag’s “Topkapi” in “Aesthetic Memory” (Photo courtesy of Terakki Vakfi)

“Aesthetic Memory,” at Terakki Foundation Art Gallery in Besiktas, brings together 39 paintings and five sculptures from the Terakki Foundation’s collection — Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu, Fikret Mualla, Abidin Dino, Sevket Dag and Komet, among them — tracing Turkish modernism from the late 19th century to the present. Until July 17.

“Sweden & Istanbul: Encounters and Interactions Across Centuries,” at Metrohan, follows diplomatic and cultural ties between the two countries from the 1600s to today, with landscapes by Anders Zorn, photographs by Guillaume Berggren and material tracing the journey of King Charles XII.

Pink Martini, the self-described “music archaeologists” who perform in more than 20 languages, bring their Francophone chansons, Cuban rhythms and Brazilian street songs to Harbiye next month as part of “Uskudara Gideriken.” Tickets here.