Turkey’s emerging artists take center stage at BASE 2025
Also this week: Georgian flavors, Buyuktasciyan’s new show, and 40 films at the Crime & Justice Fest
Welcome to Al-Monitor Istanbul.
I am writing this week’s newsletter from BASE, where the country’s newest artists are showing their work to Istanbul’s notoriously picky art circles. With the Istanbul Biennial fading from the headlines, early-career creators are carrying the pulse forward, with playfulness, yes, but also with an edge honed by everything they have lived through: precarity, climate anxiety, shrinking cultural space, identity, gender violence and the ever-tightening competition for visibility. So this is our Youth Issue, dedicated to the young artists, chefs and creators who insist on shaping the city and the country in their own image.
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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: Boundaries, Possibilities, Whole Lot of Nerve
In “As If Present,” Aysegul Karababa sets empty glass shoes at the threshold, echoing her childhood ritual of staging her father’s return to make the house feel safe (BASE)
Step into BASE 2025 this weekend, spread across four floors of the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Fulya, and you walk straight into Turkey’s cultural future being negotiated in real time. Now in its ninth edition, BASE brings together 156 new graduates from 36 cities and 43 universities under the theme Boundaries/Possibilities, showcasing nearly 200 works in painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, glass, video, new media, graphic design and traditional Turkish arts. Add the six satellite exhibitions and the returning alumni, and the number climbs comfortably past 200 artists and 400 works. Please take time to see more works and artists in the link, as I had difficulty choosing.
At the opening, curator and academic Derya Yucel described this year’s show as “a shared ground where boundaries do not solidify, possibilities multiply and encounters become possible.” You feel that immediately: artists working with the precision of people who know the ground beneath them is not guaranteed.
BASE’s ecosystem is larger this year. Trendyol Sanat leads the sponsorship and casts a welcome spotlight on Romanian artists. Bilgili Holding provides the cavernous venue; Kale Tasarim ve Sanat Merkezi and Jumbo bring strong — and delightfully unorthodox — selections. But one partner stands out: Just a Step Foundation, which supports young women artists across Turkey not only with scholarships but with mentoring, portfolio development, exhibition support and direct access to professionals. Twelve of its grantees join this edition with works spanning drawing, relief, photography, video installation and digital design.
Neslihan Cakal’s “50th Wedding Anniversary,” – a lopsided look at her parents’ marriage, complete with a lace doily on top of the mirror. (Photo courtesy of Nazlan Ertan)
The range is enormous and occasionally dizzying. Muzaffer Tuna’s triptych “Bacchanalia” stages a perpetual feast oscillating between Dionysian abandon and Nietzschean futility. Kyrgyzstan-born Zanna Abasova’s hybrid-monster puppets unsettle without apology. Van-born Zeynep Seker’s Lucian Freud-adjacent pairing of an animal carcass and a naked female body walks the knife-edge between intimacy and brutality. Elsewhere, fragility emerges in tiny ceramic rooms where youth procrastinates forever, shattered plates dissect body image and scarcity in a dystopian future, and humor becomes a form of armor.
What binds it all is urgency. BASE 2025 is not a request to join the cultural conversation. It is a declaration: The new generation is already here, holding up a mirror, literally and figuratively, with a steadiness that owes nothing to reverence and even less to fear.
📍Where: Fulya, Hakkı Yeten Cd., 34365 Sisli
🗓️ When: Until Nov. 30
2. Word on the street: Shvili Georgian Bistro
Making khinkali, the Georgian dumplings. (Photo courtesy of Nazlan Ertan)
At Shvili, the new Georgian bistro steps from Sogutlucesme Marmaray station, everything arrives with bright, confident color, from the great borscht to the Georgian salad. The dining hall, both inside and out, stays lively, anchored by a young chef who performs the khinkali ritual in full view. The egg-and-cheese khachapuri lands puffed and molten, its edges blistered just enough to break with a spoon; the Georgian hummus, flecked with paprika and herbs, is silky and quietly addictive. Service is part of the pleasure: The waiters know the menu intimately and steer you with easy confidence.
📍Where: Kurbagalidere Cd. no:2/6, Kadikoy
3. Istanbul diary
Hera Buyuktasciyan’s “An Archipelago Fugue” (Photo courtesy of the artist, Green Art Gallery Dubai and Galerist)
• Arter presents Hera Buyuktasciyan’s “Phantom Quartet,” an ongoing, four-chapter exhibition curated by Nilufer Sasmazer that blends new and earlier works to explore how Istanbul’s ruptured histories, memories and landscapes echo through imagined spaces shaped by absence, transformation and time.
• IKSV’s SaDe artist support program gathers works of six young artists at Saint Benoit in Karakoy, presenting new works shaped with support from many mentors including art gurus Aslihan Demirtas and Nazli Pektas. Until Dec. 30.
• International Crime and Justice Film Festival (Nov. 27-Dec. 2) screens 40 films on global injustice, displacement and resilience — just the right topics after you have seen BASE works.
4. Film of the Week: ‘Snow and the Bear’
Frozen silence from “Snow and the Bear” (Film publicity photo)
Assuming you have already read Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” and watched Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep,” here is another kind of winter: Selcen Ergun’s “Snow and the Bear,” featuring a remarkable performance by Merve Dizdar. Winner of the New Directors Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the film follows newly arrived nurse Asli in a remote, snowbound town where a man’s disappearance exposes buried fears, shifting alliances and the thin seam between protection and control.
5. Istanbul gaze
“Domination,” staged photo with anonymous model (Photo courtesy of artist)
On Nov. 26, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the opening day of BASE, Sumeyye Akyol unveiled a staged portrait that landed with a jolt. Titled “Domination,” it uses hair as a manifesto of women’s rebellion. Akyol, born in 1983 in the conservative southeastern town of Batman, carries that symbolism in her own life. “I, as you see, cover my hair,” she told Al-Monitor in front of her work at BASE. “You do not. It is us who should decide what we do with a part of our body. No one else.”
Her path was shaped by Feb. 28, 1997 — the so-called post-modern coup — when headscarf restrictions pushed thousands of young women out of education. Akyol was among them. She eventually finished school and entered Batman Fine Arts Academy after marriage, supported by a husband who believed in her talent. “I know what domination means,” she says. “I grew up surrounded by economic, religious, psychological pressures, if not directly on me, then on those closest to me.”
6. By the numbers
• According to TURKSTAT'S Violence Against Women in Turkey Survey 2024, 28.2% of women aged 15 to 59 report experiencing psychological violence in their lifetime; 18.3% report economic violence; and 12.8% report physical violence — based on face-to-face interviews with 18,275 women nationwide.
• Over the past 12 months, 11.6% of women reported psychological violence, 3.7% reported digital violence (included for the first time), 3.2% reported economic violence, 3.1% reported stalking, 2.6% reported physical violence and 0.9% reported sexual violence, making psychological and digital violence the most common recent forms.
• Lifetime exposure to violence varies sharply by marital status: 62.1% of divorced women report psychological violence, 42.5% report economic violence and 41.5% report physical violence. Among never-married women, 25.7% report psychological violence, 14.2% report digital violence and 13.4% report stalking.