#emirhan-demircan

#emirhan-demircan

The aim of this case is not to seek the truth or to ensure justice, but to escape the anxiety of electoral defeat. The behind-closed-doors trial was the product of a corrupt mindset that is mortally afraid of free and fair elections and has taken refuge behind the judiciary to eliminate its political rival.

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.

"In 'break bad (freddy flexing)' (2021), a slim man's attempt to exert physical strength instead displays his fragility. A gentleness in his eyes suggests truer strength beneath the performance."

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Five bronze towers soar 400 feet above Saadiyat Island, the ever-expanding cultural district just off the coast of Abu Dhabi. The structures-which recall the wings of a falcon, a highly prized symbol in the United Arab Emirates-are the architectural signature of the Zayed National Museum, which opened in December. Two weeks before, another vastinstitution, the Natural History Museum, debuted. They will be followed later this year by the most ambitious of all-the late Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

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.

At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the props, costumes, and set pieces of the musical are staged in vignettes throughout a large hall: a life-sized horse sculpture in a pink clearing surrounded by dirt, a curtained cart set up as a stage with a figure on its steps, two life-sized human figures in animal masks perched in a high window, as if observing the events.

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.

the artist's newest body of work responds to an urgent question precipitated by the catastrophic events of the past year: What does one do when the world collapses? The works attempt to make sense of her experience of the fire and its enduring aftermath, while continuing her exploration of the poetics of loss, displacement, and migration. Kahraman views these works as an offering, a libation, to a burning world.

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.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.

Tracey Emin is internationally renowned for her coruscatingly confessional art, which for over three decades has chronicled an often tumultuous life in various media, including painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture and installation. Born in Croydon, London, and raised in the seaside town of Margate, Emin first attracted widespread attention when, as a Turner Prize nominee in 1999, she exhibited the now notorious work My Bed (1998) provoking fierce critical debate on what art could-or should-be.

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,

The Mela comprises a series of themed and solo exhibitions, by international and Bangladeshi artists at venues across downtown Dhaka. Until 2024, Bangladeshi artists had to contend with the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's authoritarian government, which monopolised access to funding and foreign collaboration. Many arts institutions were turned into propaganda machines, as Hasina's cultural officials 'just wanted to please the national leader,' one Bangladeshi artist told the Financial Times last year.