Young artists pull traditional Turkish art into zeitgeist

At first glance, "Here 2025: A World Unmade" appears to tread familiar ground: young artists engaging with angst and dystopia. But look closer, and something far more unexpected emerges. Miniatures, tiles, carpets and tapestry — media long associated with calm, order and a certain ceremonial politeness — are being retooled to express environmental anxiety, social miscommunication and the general woes of modern life.

The exhibition, curated by Nil Nuhoglu, can be found at the Offgrid Art Project, a small but increasingly influential space in Istanbul's Beyoglu district. It is the work of "Here,” an initiative launched in 2023 by students and new graduates of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. What began as an improvised gathering has grown into an effort to bring traditional Turkish techniques into the present tense and out of what several artists describe as the "gilded cage of nostalgia."

As miniaturist Cagri Dizdar puts it, "Traditional Turkish arts cannot be locked into romanticization, Orientalization or old forms. Imagine asking painters today to work in the style of the Renaissance. If we cannot ask that, why ask miniaturists or tile-makers to do the same? Why should I be expected to spend my life drawing pomegranates and the seven hills of Istanbul?"

Dystopia became the group's chosen theme at a time when wildfires, earthquakes and political drift were already shaping studio conversations. Nuhoglu urged them not to frame it as spectacle but as a slow seep, a condition that settles in while life continues.

"Dystopian worlds do not emerge from sudden disasters but from slow, almost imperceptible collapses," she told Al-Monitor. "They arise where instability disguises itself as progress, and where the familiar begins to crack." Against such a backdrop, traditional forms built on repetition and symmetry become unexpectedly sharp tools for exploring what it feels like when authority becomes brittle, certainty thins and communal ties loosen in ways we sense before we fully understand.

Several works make the point with disarming clarity. In one, Zeynep Akman constructs a perfectly classical Ottoman miniature page, only to place at the center not the sultan but an enthroned frog whose "laws" scatter across the surface as ticks, fleas and small biting creatures — a little grotesque and unmistakably critical. Beside it hangs Akman's second work, a ferman — a royal edict of Ottoman times, when the ruler could dictate his will — in which the letters have been replaced by tiny mosquitoes. The effect is a visual itch: authority rendered as irritation.

On the same wall, Dizdar's diptych "Nobodies" stretches across a horizontal panel of gouache, pencil and 22-karat gold. It is exuberant at first glance — patterned trousers, stylized beasts, bright geometry — until you notice the hollowed heads, masks with nothing behind them, figures comparable to T. S. Eliot's "Hollow Men." Dizdar and textile artist Isra Dogan Umdu extend the theme with four small puppet-like figures suspended in front, half-human and half-folkloric, as if mid-gesture in a conversation where no one is actually listening. "In moments of disaster, people talk past each other," Dizdar says. "Everyone performs; no one listens."

Adding to the atmosphere is textile artist Dilara Altinkepce Arslan’s griffin: a 21st-century guardian stitched together from a mole’s tail symbolizing drought, cockroach wings for radiation-proof resilience, a cheetah’s body for relentless consumption, a raven’s head for willful ignorance and the eyes of a gorilla hinting at displaced humanity. Two video clips of idyllic nature and post-apocalyptic dystopia projected on each wing, the hybrid creature stands in the uneasy balance between worlds that may no longer fully exist.

Second-year student Azra Celik takes yet another route, staging a classical Iznik-tile inflected idyll — floating figures, cloud bands, a stylized gate of paradise — and tucking a QR code discreetly inside it. Scan it, and the scene flips into a darker twin: Colors deepen, curves sharpen into eyes, innocence becomes scrutiny. "Two realities live on the same plane," Celik says. "What you see is not what you get."

Azra Celik's gates of hell with traditional tile motifs (Photo by Baris Ozcetin/Offgrid)

This emerging wave of repurposing traditional motifs does not appear in a vacuum. Artists such as Gazi Sansoy, who merges Levni's gravure language with pop-art distortion, and Murat Palta, who reframes global pop-culture mythology through Ottoman miniature conventions — from gangsters to galactic villains, have long demonstrated how inherited forms can deliver contemporary commentary. And Elif Uras, whose ceramics draw on tile traditions to explore gender roles, has pushed the medium into conversations it rarely leads. Their work forms a recent lineage in which Burada's artists take their place.

Still, structural barriers persist. Miniaturists, tile-makers and book-arts practitioners remain largely peripheral to group shows and fairs dominated by painting, sculpture and photography. 

"The so-called modernists distance themselves from us because we are traditional arts," Dizdar notes. "And when we do something different, we are criticized by traditionalists for distortion."

This tug-of-war animates the field more broadly. "Any artist can use any medium to express herself," says Burcu Pelvanoglu, professor of art history at Mimar Sinan. "The question is whether it is creative and authentic work." For her, the binary between traditional and modern is mostly artificial, both in art history and actual practice. 

There are signs of movement. BASE, one of Turkey's largest platforms for young artists, has increasingly folded ceramics, glass and traditional-arts practices into its exhibitions. Kale, the tile-and-ceramics company known for supporting artists, has backed a parallel exhibition under the BASE roof featuring experimental clay and mixed-media works that engage with climate stress, urban precarity and social fragmentation. Such partnerships hint at a broader shift: a slow widening of what contemporary art spaces are willing to host and what collectors are willing to consider.

Nuhoglu argues the market must shift, too. “We need courageous galleries and buyers who are open to the new,” she says, meaning collectors also have a role to play in looking beyond the familiar names and styles they already own.

Whether the wider ecosystem is ready remains uncertain. But for now, in Beyoglu, courage and tradition have briefly aligned.