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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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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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........

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