Spring Unfolding in Bright Strokes
The first week of April brought a noticeable shift. Pink buds appeared on the Judas trees along the Bosphorus, and the city seemed to exhale into spring. The energy was lighter, the light a little longer, and I found myself meandering more—taking the long way to galleries, letting myself get a little lost on purpose. This week was about brightness, texture, and finding joy in unexpected corners.
“The Skin We Live In,” Koray Ariş at Arter
December 12, 2024 – August 3, 2025
I finally made it to Arter to see The Skin We Live In, Koray Ariş’s expansive exhibition — and I’m so glad I did. It’s not often you get to see such a deep dive into one artist’s inner architecture, let alone one who has shaped the very language of sculpture in Türkiye. With over 300 works spanning decades, this show didn’t feel like a retrospective so much as a living anatomy of his practice.
Walking through it, I had the sensation of being inside Ariş’s mind — or maybe inside his hands. So much of the work is tactile, even when it’s abstract. Leather, metal, cord, wood — these are not neutral materials in his world. They carry memory, sensation, tension. Many of the forms hovered somewhere between the mechanical and the organic, like limbs that could also be tools, or cocoons mid-transformation.
The title, The Skin We Live In, echoed for me throughout the show. There was an intimacy to the way these sculptures inhabit space — not intrusively, but with quiet presence, as if each had its own breath. I kept thinking about the idea of skin as boundary and threshold, how it defines but also conceals. Ariş’s work doesn’t shout. It insists — gently, relentlessly — that we pay attention to what lies beneath the surface.
By the time I left, I felt altered in some small but lasting way. I can still feel the curve of one piece in my mind, like a muscle flexed and stilled. This was sculpture not as monument, but as memory: precise, vulnerable, and deeply alive.
Address: Arter, Irmak Cad. No:13, Dolapdere, Istanbul
Yıldız Park in Early Spring
Ongoing
I went midweek, early, when the park was still waking up. Dew on the grass, birdsong overhead, and gardeners quietly trimming hedges. The old Ottoman pavilions shimmered in soft light, and I watched couples on benches and aunties with flasks of tea. A walk through Yıldız Park feels like slipping out of the city without ever leaving it.
Address: Yıldız Mah. Çırağan Cd., Beşiktaş
This week reminded me that spring doesn’t need a grand entrance. It arrives quietly—through a warm breeze, a pink blossom —and suddenly, you realize you’ve turned the page.
Why Turkiye? 
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