#aylin-tezel

#aylin-tezel

"Most people don't stop to observe the crews' work or the infrastructure they uncover," Tentler-Krylov said. "But these unseen things keep the city going."

Ilker Catak's Yellow Letters and Emin Alper's Salvation, two politically outspoken films that examine Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's autocratic regime, shared the top prizes at this year's Berlinale: the Golden Bear for Catak and Silver for Alper. These striking works share a lot more. Both titles are co-produced by Liman, an indie film company from Turkey.

The Lower East Side institution's OMA-designed, $82 million expansion debuted this week to mixed reviews, reflecting a range of opinions on its new look and functionality.

There is a scene in "Morgenkreis | Morning Circle" (2025), a 16-mm film by Berlin-based Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif, that unfolds at the threshold of a daycare center. A young boy clings to his father, his fists locked into the fabric of his coat, his arms wrapped tightly around him. The father gently tries to pry himself free while a daycare worker crouches nearby, attempting to distract the child and coax him inside. It is an ordinary moment, one that anyone who has ever been a child - or cared for one - recognizes instantly, as well as the gut-wrenching feeling it provokes.

A new law empowering Turkey's central government to seize historic properties from local authorities is raising fears that heritage sites are becoming the latest front in a wider campaign against opposition-led municipalities. Among the sites at stake are cultural venues run by the Istanbul municipality, whose mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu launched an ambitious conservation drive and expanded cultural programming before he was jailed last year after announcing plans to run for president.

There's this push and pull between feeling unease and discomfort, the nature of the spaces, and why they feel uncomfortable. But there is also tenderness and warmth, people adapting to these spaces and finding ways to make them comfortable.

On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.

An intact mosaic from Late Antiquity discovered during restoration of a historic municipal building in Istanbul is now a floor again, covered in plexiglass and welcoming visitors to the new Zeytinburnu Mosaic Museum. Visitors of Turkey's newest museum move across elevated glass walkways, suspended right above the original floors themselves. The mosaics are not relocated fragments mounted on walls, but surfaces that remain exactly where they were first laid, preserving their context for all to see.

Weeks in a relationship or life blur together. You remember birthdays and trips, but the quiet in‑between time mostly stays invisible. We track deadlines and appointments on digital calendars, but rarely see the whole arc of a shared life at once, the years you've already moved through and the ones still sitting empty ahead. There's something oddly powerful about seeing every week you have, and have had, laid out in one place on a wall.

In Arash Nassiri's new moving-image commission, an insect puppet drags itself across an empty marble floor, cast in eerie blue evening light. The scene is diffused through an enormous frosted-glass cubicle, refracting and distorting the images. That sense of distortion pervades the Tehran-born, Berlin-based Nassiri's first institutional solo exhibition, A Bug's Life, which opened last weekend at London's Chisenhale Gallery-and comprises a film set within a sculptural installation.

The project, titled 'From Desert Sand to Alpine Snow,' centers on twenty hand-knotted fiber panels first commissioned for the Tanweer Festival in 2025. Installed in a 10 by 10 meter steel frame rising six meters high, the work stood directly on desert ground, its saturated colors vibrating against the pale sand and rocky escarpments of Mleiha.

These clothes are not secondhand, says Yin Xiuzhen, the Beijing-born artist known for creating large-scale installations out of found garments and keepsakes. I prefer to call them used' or worn', she explains. Clothes that have been worn' carry a lot of information like a second skin, imprinted with social meaning. In some of Yin's works the clothes are her own, telling a personal story. In others, the clothes are collected, stained and stretched across towering steel frames resembling planes, trains or organic forms.

Monia Ben Hamouda's work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt.

find one another in the dark,

While Armenia has long been recognized for its rich and storied historical art and culture, the country's contemporary art scene is emerging as one to watch on a global scale. Armenian artists stand out for their ability to synthesize their own cultural heritage with avant-garde approaches to contemporary artmaking, bridging tradition with self-expression. Paralleling broader rising critical and market interest and investment in regions outside of the West, ARAR Gallery of Utrecht, the Netherlands, is at the forefront of Armenian art's mounting international presence.

For their most ambitious exhibition to date, Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 transforms Tramway's vast exhibition hall into a submerged cosmology shaped by ancestral mythologies, Daoism, collective ritual and multispecies kinship. In this phantasmagoric aqueous environment⁠-the most recent project in Song's ongoing world-building practice⁠-life is understood as cyclical, relational and continuously in flux. Titled '*~TUA~* 大眼 *~MAK~*', the exhibition comprises newly commissioned works in sculpture, textiles, printmaking, sound, light and moving image,

Regina Silveira has spent the better part of three decades considering the relationship between media and meaning, particularly as it relates to Latin America. First presented in 1997, "To Be Continued..." features 100 black-and-white reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, propaganda, advertisements, and more. Silveira nests each image into an oversized puzzle piece, which cuts off faces and scenes to leave fragments of pop culture icons, flora and fauna, and even the occasional mugshot spliced next to one another.

"The show is about giving the pen back to the writer, giving the paintbrush back to the artist, during this time of genocide," the Ridikkuluz told Hyperallergic in an interview at the gallery. "And when there's been so much censorship, these are artists that might not have been able to do this anywhere else."