Ten new paintings by Bochner get their premier showing here in Istanbul. The artist applied paint using a hydraulic press, writing synonymic words over horizontal blocks of colour, with the phrases tending to the profane towards the bottom of the work. Suzanne Egeran asked Bochner how he thought his works might be received in Turkey, displayed without translation. Would the more formal qualities take precedence for the local audience? He'd rather leave it up to them, said Bochner, and told the story of  an exhibition in France where a team of students were tasked with translating similar paintings into French for the gallery blurb. They consulted their dictionaries for equivalents for Crazy, Ga Ga and Loony and came up with Fou, Fou, and Fou. "I find their formal qualities interesting too," said Bochner, and – by the standards of most conceptual art – these paintings would be very easy to live with. The colours of the background and letters mix, forcing us consider the paintings as objects as much as texts. 

Mel Bochner: Recent Paintings is the calibre of artist and exhibition to be expected from Suzanne Egeran, who co-founded Mana last year, just around the corner from the new space, before parting ways earlier this year. Tophane is richer for having both venues. Egeran Gallery will have a gourmet cafe tacked on to the side of the exhibition space, though on the opening night there was just a chef turning out freshly made dürüms from huge pan outside. Although Egeran Gallery is clearly at the top end of the commercial art market, opening night was one of the more lively we've been to lately with a DJ, a live singer and a house-party atmosphere. We are looking forward to seeing what other surprises Egeran Gallery has in store.

Boris Micka, director of GPD Exhibitions & Museums who are behind the updated design and ipad app, says the aim is to engage young people with an art form they tend to consider boring and stale. Nazan Ölçer, director of the museum, points out that the alphabet reform in the early years of the Turkish Republic created a forced distance between modern Turkey and her Ottoman past, and hopes that new technology can help bridge the gap.

It would be a shame if visitors spend more time looking at their screens then the artefacts themselves, however. The exhibition is an intelligent exposition of the art of the calligrapher told through an incredibly sophisticated set of nearly 200 objects. Videos are used to good effect in the first room, showing the painstaking processes that go into traditional book-making. The information panels serve a serious student of Islamic Art – familiarising them with the technical terms for the part of a page, for instance – while a display of the tools of the calligrapher's trade features stunningly beautiful examples of woodwork and inlay. A room of large calligraphic panels provides a nice contrast from the intricate manuscript text, and from the digital reproductions on your iPad as a series of large sliding vertical drawers can be pulled out of the wall for a close-up look at their contents in the flesh, rather than on a screen.

The exhibition ends with contemporary artist Kutluğ Ataman's Mesopotamian Dramaturgies / Water, no. 5, in which the Islamic declaration of faith – 'There is no God but God and Mohammed is His messenger' – is written into a video of shimmering Bosphoros using video of the same scene taken at different times of the day. The repeated letter lam in the kufic script rendering of 'la ilahe illallah Muhammedun Resullah' creates a series of golden stripes over the water's surface. It is at once attention grabbing and serene.

On the back page of the exhibition catalogue an icon of the calligraphy in Ataman's work brings Mesopotamian Dramaturgies / Water, no. 5 onto your phone or computer screen when you show it to the device's camera via a page on the museum's website. Boris Micka says that exhibitions like this are the future, the start of a new direction in museum design. I am sure he is right, though both the technology and its execution need more work before they really add much to the experience. The Sakıp Sabancı Museum's foray into augmented reality is fine for keeping the kids entertained on a trip to the museum, but it tends to distance you from the actual artefacts around you, rather than bring you closer. It also raises a difficult question in the light of that perceived disconnect to the historical past: what does it mean when a hand-written, gold-leafed page that was worked on for several hours, if not days, is reduced to just zeros and ones on a chip and can be skipped over with the merest flick of a finger – in a museum that purports to bring the past to life?

During the annual April Tulip Festival a staggering 1.8 million tulips are planted within the borders of Emirgan Korusu. This means that the park has been unusually crowded with people lately, especially on the weekends. A weekday visit is much more relaxed. The Ottoman stables in the park have recently been nicely restored by the local government for use as an exhibition space. They're worth looking around, but the only exhibition so far isn't really up to much. That said, with the Sakıp Sabancı Museum practically next door (with its own excellent grounds), you needn't want for culture.

An unexpected oasis in hectic Beşiktaş; Yıldız Park is located on the hillside above the coast road towards Ortaköy. The park was part of the grounds of Yıldız Sarayı - one of the last residences of the Ottoman sultans. Wonderful examples of late 19^th century architecture abound. On top of the hill stands the Yıldız Şale (Chalet), the largest and most impressive building in the palace complex, completed by Raimondo D'Aronco, the renowned Italian Art Nouveau architect. Many of the trees were gifts from various ambassadors to Sultan Abdülhamit and botanists can find rare wild flowers here too. The best view is from the café of the Malta Kiosk (keep right when you get to the top of the hill). For the full 19th-century Ottoman palace experience, of course, you have to stay in the Çırağan Palace Hotel, just opposite the park.

Fenerbahçe Park is probably the best kept secret of the Anatolian Side. It has the perfect seaside location on a small peninsula behind the marina. There are lots of little pergola-cafés and an impressive pavilion full of song birds and antique kitchenware. There used to be a palace here. When the park was first opened to the public in the 19th century it immediately became a hugely popular spot but suffered years of neglect before being re-opened in 1991.

No botanist should visit Istanbul without calling in on the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden in Ataşehir. To commemorate his late wife, Ali Nihat Gökyiğit started planting and reforesting a 35-hectare area of land between motorway intersections, leased from the Roads Directorate, in 1995. It was officially opened to the public as a Park in 2002, becoming a Botanic Garden the following year. It has mushroomed into many islands of themed gardens including collections of native irises and crocuses the envy of Kew. Black Sea rainforest and salt-desert gardens and formal Ottoman parterres flourish against a backdrop of futuristic tower blocks and constant motion.

Special offer: Save 30% when you buy three beautiful issues with inspiring garden features. Cornucopia Issues 13, 18 and 29. List price £50. Offer price £35

For the first time these Hıdrellez celebrations were a ticketed event. For 12 years, until 2010, the party was held for free in Ahırkapı, at the tip of the historic peninsular, and while the 20TL admission seemed not to bother many in the crowd at Parkorman, a rival gathering showed not everyone was happy with this commercialisation of the festival.

Despite the move to Maslak, videos posted online show Ahırkapı alive with the sound of clarinets and violins, drums and tamborines, with spontaneous singing, dancing and clapping stopping the traffic. The Facebook group for the event stated that the organisers are against not just a more mainstream Hıdrellez, but a pattern of forced eviction, demolition and gentrification which seems particularly to effect Istanbul’s Romany and village migrant communities. They warned that without more awareness Ahırkapı could soon go the way of areas like Sulukule, Suleymaniye, Balat and Tarlabaşı, and – in their opinion – see a part of Istanbul’s history and culture destroyed in the name of ‘urban renewal’. Like the organisers of more fenced-off festivals, they asked guests not to bring their own food and drink into the area. The difference here, of course, is that there is a local community to provide it.

By the end of the night in Parkorman trees were festooned with pieces of cloth and hand-written notes. Elsewhere in Turkey scraps of paper are thrown into rivers or lakes: Hıdır is associated with nature’s abundance and the water of eternal life; it is said that whatever you wish for on Hıdrellez will be granted. And while I wouldn’t want the hopes and dreams of the festival-goers in Maslak to come to nought, I can’t help hoping that the wish voiced in Ahirkapi on Saturday night is heard in the right places.

Visiting Christie’s just before the sales is always thrilling. The high-ceilinged rooms respond particularly well to being hung thickly with carpets and kilims, alongside elegant Iznik bowls sitting grandly in their display cabinets. On the ground floor a collection of works on paper from India and the Islamic world made a light and airy foil to the heavy Caucasian rugs hung around the main staircase.

The real gems, however, were to be found at Sotheby’s. Their Bond Street showroom's Islamic Week is composed of a series of sales: Turkish Modern and Contemporary Art, Orientalist Paintings, ‘An Eye for Opulence’ – a private collection of Islamic art – and, finest of all, Arts of the Islamic World, which contained a series of remarkable objects.

This 16th-century Ottoman talismanic shirt (above) is covered in a variety of astonishingly intricate scripts, including Muhaqqaq, Naskh, Ghubar, Thuluth and square Kufic. Paper-thin, it would have conveyed a spiritual protection to the wearer far more powerful than any chainmail. This shirt, with its decoration, parallels a group of similar Ottoman shirts in the Topkapi Saray Museum, all dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, with the crescent moon and cypress trees so common in 16th-century Ottoman styles (shown above from the front, below from the back).

Next, a Fatimid rock-crystal jar (below), converted into a reliquary (probably) in Italy in the 15th century – a charming example of the complex histories of many of these objects. Fatimid rock crystal was produced by a royal workshop during the Egyptian dynasty’s apogee in the late 10th and early 11th centuries, but was scattered as the dynasty collapsed between 1061 and 1069 and the the royal treasury was looted. Here the Islamic origins of rock crystal have not stood in the way of its conversion into a Christian object.

The sale’s most exciting piece is arguably this Artuqid silver-inlaid brass basin (below) made for Sultan Qara Arslan ibn il Ghazi in the second half of the 13th century. Truly a historical piece, its lineage has been meticulously traced. What is so exciting is that this bowl is, according to Sotheby's meticulously researched catalogue, 'one of a very small number of pieces of Islamic metalwork recorded in Western Orientalist literature prior to the mid-19th century', that it is also one of only a few vessels bearing the name of a ruler from the Artuqid dynasty, and the only one not in a public collection. The International Herald Tribune’s art-auction columnist, Souren Melikian, who originally published the bowl, does an excellent job of telling the bowl’s story in his article for the Tribune.

The Orientalist sale featured an Osman Hamdi Bey painting, which excited art historians, as his work tends to do, but unfortunately failed to sell. The real surprise was the astonishing price fetched by a huge Ayvasofsky, 'View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus', which sold for $5,215,556 – far exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $1,943, 530 as five would-be owners battled it out.

Back at Christie’s there were sales of Oriental Rugs and Carpets, a Private Collection of Islamic and Indian works of art on paper, and Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds. Particularly successful sales were a large late Mamluk brass basin (above) estimated at £40,000–60,000 that realised £277,250, a late-16th- or early-17th-century Selendi prayer rug from West Anatolia (below), which was estimated at £80,000–120,000 and realised £229,250.

Finally, a silk and metal-thread Koum Kapi carpet from Istanbul, c 1920 (below) which was estimated at £120,000–£180,000 and eventually sold for £217,250.

But these were the exceptions that proved a disappointing rule – that the market’s appetite for Islamic art seems to be waning. In the seven sales making up Islamic week, not one reached its lowest estimate. Indeed up to 50% of lots remained unsold. Sotheby’s in particular has made much of Turkey and the Middle East in recent years – notably spearheading sales of contemporary Turkish art. With such disappointing results, it seems that the boom has, at the very least, begun to slow down.

By the time Fransisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746 - 1828) learnt the technique of lithography he already had an impressive career as a court painter behind him. Yet in the several series of prints that make up the bulk of this exhibition at the Pera Museum, the rebelliousness that defined the Spanish master's earlier work remains very much intact.

Goya began his career painting cartoons for the royal tapestry factory, a position he thought beneath his ability. He began to gain recognition as a painter and received commissions for frescos, but he clashed with other artists and the administrators who commissioned him. He was repeatedly censored and once famously painted a clothed version of a reclining nude in response to the reaction against the original. Posters of the two appear side by side at the Pera, the seductiveness of the Clothed Maja in no way hidden by her new garments. 

The first series of engravings at the Pera, The Caprichos, satirise the society Goya saw around him with the vehemence of a political cartoonist in an especially dark mood. Their original advertisement pronounced:

'[Goya] has chosen as subjects for his work, from the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, the concerns and common lies, authorized by custom, ignorance or interest, those that he believes most apt to supply material for ridicule, and at the same time exercise the artist's fantasy.'

They show a horrific dream-world of corruption and degradation populated by half-human figures, more unsettling than simple allegory. In one, plucked man-chickens are herded outside by two young women wielding brooms, each shadowed by a bent and wrinkled vision of herself, as a feather-winged cherubim looks the other away. Years later, Baudelaire would write: 'Light and darkness, reason and irrationality are confronted in all these grotesque horrors...!'

The curator, Marisa Oropesa, contrasts these small prints with two large oil portraits, one of King Charles IV, the other of Maria Luisa de Parma. At first sight they seem to by another artist. But the depictions of the faces reveal a common thread: a sheer lack of flattery, and an interest in the tragi-comic follies of humanity. The courtier in her finery is the very image of impatient discomfort.

The first floor of the exhibition (as usual at the Pera one starts at the top and works downwards) ends with a timeline showing Goya's life and major works against a background of the intense political and social upheavals and dramatic artistic changes taking place in Europe. Goya the man is in the midst of the enlightenment whirlwind, yet his art is consistently ahead of the curve. Professor Morales y Marin writes: 'Goya has to be contemplated from a timeless dimension, from his colossal, almost biblical influence as a prophet of modernity in the widest interpretation of the term.'

On the next floor, engravings continue to make up the bulk of the exhibition, this time from the Disasters of War series showing the 1808 Spanish War of Independence. The shocking subject matter – brutal, violent scenes of battle, not on an epic and celebratory scale, but in small clusters of people, calling to mind terrorised villages and rogue, blood-lusty soldiers – does not make it any easier to focus on the small monochrome prints, but they reward a close examination. Goya was a superb portraitist, and he manipulates human form into striking compositions of groups and crowds without compromising individuality and action. Downstairs, another engraving series of bullfight scenes demonstrate the same skill. Goya loved the sport, but as in the war prints he focused on raw, unsanitised drama rather than on spectacle. The prints did not sell well in Spain at the time.

Elsewhere, children play, wrestle and tussle outdoors in a small series of oil paintings. But it is not all fun and games. One of them, Children Playing Leapfrog, features seven boys, the same number as Goya's children who died before growing up.

These paintings, and three more oil portraits – of Goya's brother, of a friend, and of a bullfighter – enliven the exhibition, which unfortunately has too many engravings really to generate much of a wow factor. But Marisa Oropesa and the Pera Museum have succeeded in telling a story not only of the era that Goya witnessed, but of the perspective through which he saw it.

I left imagining him as Morales y Marin's timeless figure transplanted to our own era: a foul-mouthed photographer, angry and bitter, compelled to capture our modern follies, not averse to a well-paid society assignment, but also captivated by the horror of our wars. No doubt the genius Goya would have pushed the boundaries of that art too in a way we cannot yet imagine.

Raven Row is a stunning contemporary exhibition centre, all white walls and stripped floorboards, and usually home to exhibitions showcasing the bleeding edge of contemporary art. The elegant 17th-century houses it occupies were originally home to Huguenot silk-merchants, an aspect of the building’s history on which this latest exhibition riffs.
The curators of The Stuff That Matters have self-consciously departed from the norms of textile display to create a beautiful and unconventional show that revels in the decorative elements of the textiles, all of which come from the collection of Seth Siegelaub. Alongside them are stunning examples of Siegelaub’s parallel collection of books on textiles, forming indispensible visual and textual crutches for the visitor.

In some ways it almost feels as if the show is more about Siegelaub than about his textiles, and certainly, as a collector he makes a fantastically interesting specimen. Siegelaub is arguably more famous for his position at the forefront of the conceptual art scene in New York in the 1960s and 1970s than for his textile collection, and the curious combination of conceptual art and antique textiles lurks a little uncomfortably in the background of the pristine spaces.

On a purely decorative level, the show is stunning: from small Coptic fragments to heavy velvets from early modern Europe and African and Asian headdresses. For those with their eyes on things Turkish, the Venetian and Italian textiles show strong and pleasing Ottoman influences; here and there Islamic textiles can be found. But there are many question marks surrounding the provenances and dates on the simple white cards that lie next to each fragment. Even with question marks, many of the datings and provenances are guaranteed to raise an eyebrow or two amongst the more expert visitors.

The lack of a strong and committed art-historical approach is certainly distracting – noticing a pristine pre-Colombian headdress I was astonished to read that it was supposedly 2000 years old – but it is the playfulness of this exhibition that makes it so charming. Siegelaub has an enduring interest in the commerce of textile, in its role as a commodity, its social meanings, as well as its decorative functions. And the books that pepper the display cases pose questions for the visitor about how to approach the fragments of fabric: as archaeological artefact, objet d’art or just a scrap of vestment.

Weaving together text and textiles, this is a show that plays to its decorative strengths, eschewing the strictures of an overly historical approach in favour of a social, cultural perspective that revels in the multiple meanings fabrics carry for the wearer, viewer and collector.

Images: Exhibition view, The Stuff That Matters. Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT, Raven Row, 2012, Courtesy the CSROT Historic Textile Collection at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam, photo: Marcus J. Leith

All the book reviews are available to read online now.

Tim Stanley finds a positive outcome to a disastrous trip to Bulgaria in 1989 in the pages of Nurhan Atasoy and Lale Uluç's Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe, Cornucopia's book of the month for April.

Scott Redford is hungry for more publications about the architecture of the Beylik Period after reviewing a book on the recently restored Balat Ilyas Bey Complex, edited by M Baha Tanman and Leyle Kayhan Elbirlik: 'Imagine Venetian Gothic profiles and muqarnas carved out of antique marble in the same mosque and you have a sense of the wonder of this period.'

The historian David Barchard examines the under-appreciated British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Sir Henry Layard, via an edited version of his memoir and his wife's diaries, published by Sinan Kuneralp and the Isis Press. The Layards were in Istanbul during the 1877-1878 war with Russia. The Crimean War of 21 years earlier has been expertly tackled by Orlando Figes in Crimea, The Last Crusade, also reviewed by David Barchard for Cornucopia.

Meanwhile, Thomas Rouéché has been reading about The Last Sultan, at least by Robert Greenfield's reckoning: Ahmet Ertegun, pop music mogul and founder of Atlantic Records. 

In fiction, Barbary Rogerson reviews An Evil Eye, the latest in Jason Goodwin's series of Ottoman detective stories, and The Story of the Damascus Drum. This first novel by Cornucopia's food writer Christopher Ryan, is a fabulous adventure story set amongst the historical monuments of Syria. 

Elsewhere in the magazine we have mouthwatering watermelons, Turkey's finest wines, 26 pages on the hidden charms of Ankara, the late Josephine Powell's remarkable photographs of Anatolian nomads, and a history of Dutch-Turkish relations.

Many of the highlights come from the international contingent. On June 1 the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras come together for a performance of concertos by Mozart and Rihm, led by the violin virtuoso Anne-Sophie Mutter. Deutches Symphonie Orchester Berlin will perform with conductor Sir Roger Norrington on June 16, and the Vienna Chamber Orchestra close the festival on June 29. There will be two performances by Zurich Ballet: Heinz Spoerli's '...und mied den Wind' on June 4 and 'In den Winden im nichts' the following evening. Both performances will take place at Hagia Irene, an 8th-century Byzantine church.

Hagia Irene is the venue again on June 11 when a brand-new symphony by the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, commissioned especially for this festival, will have its world premier.

Another world first will take place on June 23. Celebrated pianist and composer Fazıl Say's new work 'Mesopotamia' will be performed by Say and the Borusan Philharmonic Orchestra at the Golden Horn Congress Centre in Sütlüce.

For those with an interest in music history, we recommend the Kudsi Ergüner Ensemble and the Doulce Mémoire Ensemble performing two different schools of 15th- and 16th-century music together. Kudsi Ergüner's is the third generation of a family of accomplished neyzens (ney players) while the Doulce Mémoire Ensemble explore Renaissance music. The amalgamation of the two promises to reveal unexpected meeting points between Eastern and Western musical traditions.

One imagines a more modern atmosphere will be evident on June 9. The garden of the Dutch Consulate will be swinging to the sound of saxophones as the Amstel Quartet perform their own arrangements of a wide range of classical compositions by the likes of Brahms and Bach as well as Michael Nyman, Samuel Barber and Tan Dun. Perfect entertainment for a warm summer's evening.

See the IKSV website for full listings. Tickets available from Biletix.

The main contributors, by country:

Afghanistan
TURQUOISE MOUNTAIN
Wood carving, jewellery and calligraphy
Pakistan
POLLY & ME
Luxury, hand-embroidered leather handbags, clutches and purses made in Chitral
Bangladesh
SOPHIE PATTINSON
Hand-embroidered bedcovers, cushions and throws
India
BONITA AHUJA
Luxurious one-off textiles for fashion and interiors
NIGEL ATKINSON
Design-led handmade textiles from artisans of West Bengal and Assam
MANDY BARBER
Quilted silk jackets, hand-embroidered bed linen, antique sari shawls
CONSCIOUS FOOD
Indian fair-trade organic snacks
EMMA CHAPMAN JEWELS
Designer gemstone jewellery hand-crafted in India
ANTONIA GRAHAM
Jewellery and jackets from Rajasthan; decorative home furnishings from India, Kashmir, Thailand and Vietnam
JOSS GRAHAM
Antique and contemporary Asian textiles, costume and jewellery from India and Central Asia
KATHERINE KHADI
Handmade clothes and silk shawls from India; India-inspired artworks
MEMSAHIB
Classical jackets hand-embroidered by skilled artisans from Kashmir
EMILY SHOEHORN
Handbags designed and made in India with charm and fine craftsmanship, accented with glamour.
SWEETLIME
Silver, semi-precious gemstones, fabric, unusual keepsakes and vintage gems from India and Bali
Cambodia
CHILDREN OF THE MEKONG
Hand-woven silk scarves for men, women, and children
Indonesia
RON SIMPSON
Traditional tribal textiles; costume and jewellery; bags and baskets from South West China,
Indonesia and Thailand
RICHARD SAVAGE
Hand-dyed, hand-woven cloth and associated artefacts from the outer islands of Indonesia
Japan
MARY DEEMING
Traditional Japanese woodblock prints and textiles
FUJI KIMONO
Vintage kimonos, antique Japanese costumes and textiles
China
CHANGS
Indigo textiles from Yunnan, Guizhou and Zhejiang, China also Northern Thailand and Laos
Central Asia
TREASURES FROM THE SILK ROAD
Antique textiles, silk and velvet robes, kelim rugs, cushions, bags and slippers from Central Asia and Turkey
Iran
JANET RADY FINE ART
Contemporary Iranian artists

Cornucopia will be there too, along with our good friends at Eland Books, HALI, Asian Art Newspaper and Steppe magazine