Layers of Color, Layers of Time
This week was a blur. Reentry after being away is usually like that. I visited an exhibition, an unexpected open studio, and a couple of places that reminded me how many versions of Istanbul there really are, always overlapping, always alive.
Bir Arada II: Fulya Çetin & İlhan Sayın” at Yapı Kredi Gallery
May 9, 2025 – January 4, 2026
On a humid summer afternoon in Beyoğlu, I stepped into the cool, hushed space of Yapı Kredi Gallery to see the second edition of Bir Arada, this time featuring Fulya Çetin and İlhan Sayın. Both artists have been active since the 1990s, and while their visual languages are distinct, the exhibition draws a gentle thread between them—through nature, resistance, and a shared sensitivity to the seen and unseen.
Çetin’s Daydreams is tender, luminous, and layered with ecofeminist meaning. Her depictions of women and nature feel like small acts of reclamation. There’s no aggression in the work—but there is insistence, a refusal to separate the human from the vegetal. I found myself leaning in to catch the quiet details: a leaf, a gaze, the curve of something not quite named.
Sayın’s The Night of the Deer brought a different kind of stillness—more shadowed, more architectural. His reflections on nature’s quiet endurance, set against time and manmade structures, carried a meditative weight. Deer, ruins, and fragmented forms all seemed to speak of what outlasts us.
Together, the artists offer a vision of a non-anthropocentric universe—one where humans are not at the center, but among many living forms. The exhibition layout, designed specifically for the Yapı Kredi building, encourages slow movement and soft attention.
Bir Arada II is both political and poetic, and in its refusal to shout, it somehow resonates more deeply.
Yapı Kredi Gallery is located at İstiklal Caddesi No:285, Beyoğlu, Istanbul.
Balat – Layers of Faith and Color
Ongoing
I spent a morning wandering Balat, beginning at the Bulgarian Iron Church and ending with a slice of cake at a corner café. Pastel facades, crumbling archways, an old man playing a flute to himself in a doorway. I peeked into antique shops and got mildly lost down a steep side street filled with drying laundry and bird cages. This neighborhood is a living museum—but also a home. That tension is what makes it special.
Address: Balat neighborhood, Fatih (start near Mürselpaşa Cd.)
This week was full of old walls, soft music, and vivid textures. It reminded me that Istanbul is best understood not by the skyline, but by its surfaces—those small, beautiful things up close.
Why Turkiye? 
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