Art in Turkey

Contemporary art in Turkey is a private undertaking carried out in public. The museums that matter in Istanbul were built by industrial families. The biennial is run by a foundation chaired by an Eczacıbaşı and sponsored since 2007 by Koç Holding. The fair belongs to one man. The state’s own cultural energy goes mostly into archaeology and heritage, where it spends about $150 million a year, by The Art Newspaper’s account.

The thesis of this page is that this arrangement, which protected Turkish contemporary art for two decades, is now being tested from both ends. From one end comes the economy: consumer prices were rising 31.51% a year in August, according to Trading Economics, and the lira has lost about 18% against the dollar in 12 months. From the other comes politics. Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was jailed in March 2025 on charges he denies, and a law in force since December 2025 lets the central government take historic buildings away from municipalities, including some of the city’s newest exhibition venues.

In between sits the Istanbul Biennial, which drew more than 600,000 people to a free exhibition last autumn and then lost its curator, the third to go in three years. Its 19th edition, set for September 2027, has been given to the Beijing-based duo Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu.

None of this has emptied the galleries. Contemporary Istanbul grew to about 70 exhibitors in September, Yoko Ono is at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum until December, and Istanbul Modern has two exhibitions up in its Renzo Piano building. Turkish artists have long practice at saying things sideways. The question for 2027 is how much room the patrons can still give them. This page is free to read, like everything on Biennale.

No reliable figure exists for the size of the Turkish art market, and this page will not invent one. What can be measured is the climate. Since 2018 the country has lived through what The Art Newspaper calls an economic crisis of weakening currency and persistently high inflation. The dollar bought 49.1 lira on October 2, 2026, and the central bank’s policy rate stood at 37%, by Trading Economics’ tally. Foreign galleries price in euros and dollars. Local collectors earn in lira.

Contemporary Istanbul

The country’s leading fair held its 21st edition from September 23 to 27 at Tersane Istanbul, a restored Ottoman shipyard on the Golden Horn. Pre-fair reporting gave more than 70 galleries from 24 countries with 17 newcomers, among them Pearl Lam, Whitestone, Michel Rein, and Galerie Tanit; the newspaper’s report after the fair counted about 70 exhibitors on a single 6,000-square-meter floor. That is up from 51 galleries in 2025. The fair says it has cut exhibitors’ costs with a bond agreement and a shipping partnership with Turkish Airlines.

The fullest set of figures came afterward from the state news agency: 38,500 visitors, 70 galleries from 16 countries, 22 of them new to the fair, and 1,372 works by 736 artists, with international attendance up 50%, Anadolu Agency reported on October 1, 2026. Its country count differs from the pre-fair figure above, and the two have not been reconciled here. The agency added that the 22nd edition, in 2027, will carry a Focus Germany section.

Results are harder to come by. No sales total was published. The 2025 edition offers the nearest evidence: collectors asked for discounts, foreign galleries reported sales at the lower end, and the prices that were disclosed ran from €9,500 to €50,000, The Art Newspaper reported, with inflation then above 30% and the economy growing 4.8%.

Tax and the next move

The fair’s founder and chairman, Ali Güreli, told the newspaper he is in talks with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism about a reform modeled on Italy’s recent cut in the tax on art purchases to 5%, and wants incentives for companies to collect. He also plans a second fair on the city’s Asian side, with no date or venue given. Current Turkish rates on art sales could not be confirmed for this page.

The galleries

The domestic trade is concentrated in a few Istanbul galleries that also travel: Zilberman, Pi Artworks, Galeri Nev Istanbul, Anna Laudel, Sevil Dolmacı, and Pilot were all on the fair’s floor this year or last. Auction data in English are scarce, and the directory does not yet hold a Turkish auction house.

Shiva Zahed Gallery opened in the Pera district on February 28, 2026, as an outlet for Iranian artists, after delays caused by communication blackouts in Iran. Sanctions, shipping, and visas remain obstacles, The Art Newspaper reported in April.

Three powers shape culture in Turkey. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism, under Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, runs the state museums and an archaeology program of about 800 active excavations, and reported nearly 1,200 objects repatriated in a single year. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, known as İKSV and founded in 1973, organizes the biennial, the design biennial, the film, music, jazz, and theater festivals, and Türkiye’s pavilion in Venice. The third power, until last year, was the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

The municipality and the law

Under İmamoğlu, whose party is in opposition nationally, the city restored a string of historic buildings and opened them as public venues. He was detained on March 19, 2025, on corruption and terrorism charges that he denies, setting off the largest protests in more than a decade. Nearly 50 others were jailed with him, among them Mahir Polat, the art historian who had led the city’s heritage department since 2019 and who was later moved to house arrest, as The Art Newspaper’s Ayla Jean Yackley reported. At least seven photographers were arrested covering the demonstrations.

In December 2025 parliament changed the law on vakıfs, the charitable foundations that hold much historic property. The central government can now reclaim a historic building from a local authority if it was once endowed to a foundation, and pass it to a state-run one. The properties at stake, according to the newspaper’s February report, include the Basilica Cistern, the Art Nouveau Casa Botter, the gallery ArtIstanbul Feshane, and Tersane, the 15th-century shipyard on the Golden Horn. The report did not record any transfer as completed.

The bill’s sponsor, the ruling-party lawmaker Adem Çalkın, described its purpose as safeguarding a legacy entrusted by the nation while allowing cities to develop. Opposition deputies read it as a seizure. A deputy chair of the main opposition party in Istanbul predicted the state would close the venues or rent them out.

Heritage as statecraft

Heritage for the Future, the program President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fronts himself, was launched in 2023; the number of active excavations has grown by more than a third in a decade, and state museums take in an average of 25,000 objects a year, by The Art Newspaper’s account. Critics cited in that report worry about tourism pressure on fragile sites and about political influence over research priorities.

Restitution belongs to the same policy. Canada returned 11 Ottoman-era manuscript pages and calligraphic works on March 30, 2026, which Ersoy called the first official repatriation from that country, the newspaper reported.

The biennial’s three curators

İKSV is private, and its difficulties have been of its own making. In 2023 an advisory board chose Defne Ayas to curate the next biennial; the foundation set the choice aside, a decision widely attributed to her 2015 Venice pavilion, which addressed the Armenian genocide, a term Turkey contests, and appointed Iwona Blazwick, who had sat on that board. Advisers resigned, an artist boycott followed, Blazwick stepped down, and the 2024 edition was postponed, as ArtReview and ArtAsiaPacific have recounted. Christine Tohmé of Beirut was brought in to steady things with The Three-Legged Cat, planned in three legs to 2027.

The first leg ran from September 20 to November 23, 2025, in eight venues, free of charge, with more than 600,000 visitors. The money had grown with the plan: the budget for the 18th edition rose to €6.5 million from €2 million, with Koç Holding as primary funder, and six of its 47 artists were Turkish, The Art Newspaper reported as it opened. On December 29 the foundation announced that Tohmé had stepped down “due to personal circumstances” and that the edition would end there. No further explanation has been given by either side. The advisory board named Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu on April 24, 2026.

The government’s answer, in Çalkın’s words to the same newspaper: “Safeguarding the legacy entrusted to us by our nation and preserving the fabric of our cities while enabling development is our most fundamental priority”.

The private museums are the infrastructure. Istanbul Modern, which calls itself Turkey’s first museum of modern and contemporary art, opened in 2004 in a warehouse on the Karaköy waterfront and moved in 2023 into a 15,000-square-meter building by Renzo Piano on the same site, as The Art Newspaper reported while it was going up. Arter is the Vehbi Koç Foundation’s contemporary art institution. The Sakıp Sabancı Museum, part of Sabancı University, sits in a garden above the Bosphorus at Emirgan. The Pera Museum was founded by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation. Eczacıbaşı, Koç, Sabancı, Kıraç: the names behind the museums are family names from Turkish industry.

The public comes when the door is open. The biennial’s 600,000 visitors paid nothing. Pera charges 450 lira for a full ticket and admits students free on Wednesdays. The Sabancı Museum’s Yoko Ono exhibition, on view from June 25 to December 27, 2026, invites women to contribute written testimonies and photographs to her work Arising.

Beyond Istanbul

The more surprising development is in the provinces. In Merzifon, a town of 70,000 northeast of Ankara, a century-old power station reopened in June 2025 as Motorhane, an arts center backed by a €3 million European Union grant administered through Ortaklaşa, a cultural development program run by İKSV, The Art Newspaper reported. At Troy, the archaeology museum hosted its first contemporary exhibition in 2025, by the artist Vuslat, who paid for it herself.

The 6th Mardin Biennial, held from May 10 to June 10, 2024, and curated by Ali Akay, was criticized by local artists and journalists who said it exoticized the city and left Kurdish and Arabic out of its texts. Its coordinator, Canan Budak, replied that the event makes artists in the region visible to galleries and collectors, Hyperallergic reported.

Artists under pressure

Artists describe a narrowing. The visual artist Ali İbrahim Öcal told The Art Newspaper in April 2025 that artists were now obliged to follow events and to answer them with criticism. Marcus Graf, a professor at Yeditepe University, told the same paper that censorship in Turkey is nothing new and that caution about religion in particular has grown. The April report also recorded criticism of the large institutions for keeping quiet, with small independent spaces carrying most of the risk. It carried no response from the government. Evidence on new or younger collectors is anecdotal, and this page does not characterize them.

On July 11, 2024, a district governor’s notice shut the exhibition Turn and See Back: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Turkey at Depo, citing alleged incitement to hatred; Depo said it would appeal, The Art Newspaper reported on July 18, 2024. The same report noted that Depo’s founder, Osman Kavala, was serving a life sentence. His status since then has not been verified for this page.

This autumn the pressure reached music and the press. Prosecutors have drawn up an indictment seeking the trial of the singer Mabel Matiz under Article 226, the obscenity provision, over a music video, bianet reported on October 1, 2026; its report carried no statement from the defense. On September 30, 2026, an Istanbul judge ordered the news site T24 blocked, describing 118 of its columns as LGBTI+ propaganda, the same outlet reported. Bianet is a rights-focused news site, and both accounts rest on it alone.

Turkey’s contemporary art map is one large dot and several small ones. Almost every institution named on this page is in Istanbul, most of them in Beyoğlu. The small dots are worth knowing because they are where the new things are happening.

• Istanbul Modern. The modern and contemporary museum on the Karaköy waterfront. On view: Semiha Berksoy to November 22 and the collection show Panorama to October 18, per the museum.
• Arter. The Vehbi Koç Foundation’s institution in Dolapdere.
• Sakıp Sabancı Museum. Calligraphy and painting collections, and major temporary exhibitions.
• Salt. Free-admission venues in Galata and Beyoğlu, marking 15 years in 2026. Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times runs from September 16, 2026, to March 14, 2027, per Salt.
• Pera Museum. Collection displays that include Osman Hamdi Bey, and Frank Bowling in the current program.
• İKSV. The foundation behind the biennial, the festivals, and the Venice pavilion.
• Contemporary Istanbul. The fair, and the company that runs it.
• ArtIstanbul Feshane. A 19th-century fez factory reopened by the municipality as a gallery, and named in reporting on the foundations law.
• Tersane Istanbul. The restored shipyard complex where the fair is held.
• Motorhane, Merzifon. The newest regional arts center.

People

• Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, Minister of Culture and Tourism.
• Bülent Eczacıbaşı, chair of İKSV.
• Ömer M. Koç, chairman of Koç Holding, the biennial’s sponsor from 2007 to 2036.
• Kevser Güler, director of the Istanbul Biennial.
• Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, curators of the 19th Istanbul Biennial.
• Ahu Antmen, director of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum and a member of the biennial’s advisory board.
• Ali Güreli, founder and chairman of Contemporary Istanbul.
• Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayor of Istanbul, arrested in March 2025 on charges he denies.

Roles as given by Hürriyet Daily News, Al-Monitor, İKSV, and The Art Newspaper.

When. September is the month: the fair falls in its last week, and in biennial years the exhibition opens just before it and runs into November. The next such autumn is 2027. Begin with the Istanbul city page. Turkey sits on three of the regional maps, so see Biennales in Europe, Biennales in the Middle East, and Biennales in Asia for neighbors worth combining.

How. Most of what a visitor wants is on the European side between Karaköy and Dolapdere, with the Sabancı Museum a longer ride up the Bosphorus. Prices in lira move, so check admission on the day. Start a trip on My Biennale to hold flights, tickets, and notes together, and compare fares on the flights page.

What to know. Venues named in the foundations law may change hands or hours with little notice, so confirm that a municipal venue is open before crossing the city for it. Book museum entry through Tickets where it is offered, and read Biennale Traveller for the general craft of traveling for art.

Papers. Holders of ordinary US passports can enter without a visa for up to 90 days in any 180-day period, as can British tourists and citizens of EU and Schengen states such as Germany, France, and Italy, per the Turkish foreign ministry (checked October 2026). The ministry states a general expectation of six months’ passport validity from arrival. Turkey is outside the Schengen area, so the EU’s ETIAS and Entry/Exit System do not apply to arrival there.

On a layover. A long connection at Istanbul Airport can hold one museum or one monument, rarely both. The New York Times reported on March 16, 2026, that the M11 metro reaches Gayrettepe from the airport in about 32 minutes for about 35 lira, with a taxi on to Sultanahmet at 350 to 500 lira, and that the Blue Mosque closes to visitors at prayer times and does not open until 2:30 p.m. on Fridays. Those fares are as of March 2026; leave a wide margin for the ride back.

1. The 19th biennial. A title, a venue list, and whether a full edition opens on September 18 as announced.
2. The venues. Whether Feshane, Casa Botter, or the Basilica Cistern is transferred under the foundations law, and what happens to programs there.
3. Tax. Whether the ministry takes up the fair’s proposal for an Italian-style cut on art purchases.
4. A second fair. Güreli’s plan for the Asian side, so far without a date.
5. The courts. The cases against İmamoğlu and Polat, on which the city’s cultural administration depends.