CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Turkish Art
Art made in Turkey since the 1980s, as painting, installation and video took on identity, migration, politics and memory.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Contemporary Turkish Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Modern art in Turkey grew from the Ottoman fine arts academy founded in Istanbul in 1882 and from the Republic's turn towards Western models after 1923. From the 1980s a new generation pushed further. Bedri Baykam made loud, politically charged paintings and performances, and Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin built installations from signs, hotel names and photographs gathered on his travels, exploring migration and informal economies. Kutluğ Ataman's multi-screen video portraits gave long, patient hearings to people on the margins.
The Istanbul Biennial, first held in 1987, strengthened exchange with artists abroad. Painters reworked history too: Taner Ceylan paints with photographic precision, restaging Orientalist scenes to question how European artists pictured the Ottoman world. Tomur Atagök, an artist and teacher, was an early voice for feminist art in Turkey. The filmmaker and photographer Nuri Bilge Ceylan frames Anatolian towns and steppe in long, still takes that bring cinema close to photography.
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