From fishing to food and migration to memory, the exhibition draws on traditions and practices rooted in Sinop, the coastal town that has hosted Sinopale since 2006. A former officers’ club serves as the main venue this year, its peeling plaster walls providing a backdrop to work by 23 artists from a dozen countries who explore what is passed down and adapted.

Turkey’s second-oldest contemporary art biennale, Sinopale brings artists to Sinop ahead of the exhibition to develop and make much of the work, creating a residency model that sets it apart from Turkey’s growing field of biennales. This year, two Turkish curators, Melih Görgün and Deniz Kırkalı, were joined by Marina Fokidis from Athens and Mariam Natroshvili of Tbilisi.

Sinopale’s curators discuss the show’s conceptual framework at the opening weekend. Left to right: Marina Fokidis, Deniz Kırkalı, Mariam Natroshvili and Melih Görgün

Serkan Aka (in red), Basma Seiba and Selim Cizdan perform with instruments made of found materials during Sinopale’s opening weekend.

'In a world where we are living through many crises … we can work together and learn from this town, its people, its crafts, its history and the sea,' Kırkalı said at the opening. 'The sea teaches us something in a way that another human does not.'

One lesson comes from listening to what the sea is already doing. In Swamp Archive (2023-), sound artist Serkan Aka secured PVC pipes, outfitted with whistles, in a revetment so that the wind and water play them. Aka first experimented with using waves to produce sound on the Greek island of Lesbos; at Sinop’s harbour, his instruments recall folklore in which ‘one goes and tells their secrets in a wetland. Reeds then grow there and give voice to those secrets in the wind,’ he says.

A still from Evrim Kavcar’s stop-motion video, Sea Leads filmed on the Black Sea

Evrim Kavcar 

Istanbul-based artist Evrim Kavcar boarded the Gezele, a traditional wooden sandal, or rowboat, to find the sense of balance required by the sea. Her stop-motion video of waves tapping the bow are accompanied by small paintings she attempted while rocking in the boat. 'You feel like a nutshell in a huge ocean. You must learn to move with it,' she says. The sandal, once ubiquitous along Turkey’s coastline, has been replaced by motorised, fibreglass vessels, prompting Kavcar to question consumption and loss in Sea Leads (2026), including the disappearance of monk seals from the Black Sea in the 1980s.

A jungle gym fashioned from fishing nets, plumb bobs and a rope ladder also throws viewers off-kilter in Knowing From Here, So Far (2026) by Ezgi Tok. Ceramic replicas of the inner ear guide viewers through the installation. 'It asks whether we can find a new balance … and bring the intuition of the sea with us onto land,' she says.

Men gather outside of Sinop’s historical City Club ahead of a curatorial discussion during Sinopale’s opening weekend

Loopntale Studio: Youngiu Kim and Hoyoun Cho

Ezgi Tok’s site-specific installation Knowing From Here, So Far

The north-easterly poyraz wind that blows down from Russia’s steppes churns debris onto Sinop’s shores, where residents collect driftwood to heat their homes. In After Washed Ashore (2026), Burak Kabadayı stacks charred firewood beneath a charcoal wall drawing of a windswept sea, demonstrating how local resourcefulness turns the detritus of a storm into energy.

A phoenix, a windswept sea and an explosion are among the motifs women in Sinop embroidered onto a tablecloth in Berlin-based Tanja Ostojić’s Menopausal Tea Party III (2026). The disparate experiences of menopause – a subject Ostojić found was not discussed openly in Sinop – became a form of connection through the textile, draped over metal rods to form gentle folds like waves.

Women from Sinop express themselves in Tanja Ostojić’s Menopausal Tea Party III

Introduction to the curators in the historic Hal Binası, (the old covered market) where the artist workshops were organised

Romanian artist Adina Mocanu’s Sténopé / Sinope plays on the resemblance between the French word for a pinhole camera and Sinope, the nymph who gave the city its ancient name. Participants from Sinop built simple cameras from boxes to photograph their windows, allowing light, movement and chance to shape the images.

Artists from the Black Sea region are particularly well-represented in this year’s roster, a focus that emerged organically, says Fokidis. 'Through the tensions and being close to one another, these artists understand each other and the conditions,' she says.

In Investigation Into the Sunken Village, Tbilisi-based artist Aleksi Soselia combines photographs of the Sarıkum Lake near Sinop with identikit-style drawings based on locals’ descriptions of the characters in a legend about a village said to have sunk at the site. Reconstructing a folktale as if it were a criminal inquiry blurs the lines between myth, memory and environmental change.

A glassmaker at work in France in a still from Ali Kazma’s Crystal

Ali Kazma’s Crystal (2015), filmed at the Saint-Louis Crystal works in France, follows the highly choreographed labour of craftsmen making luxury glassware, part of Kazma’s body of work that he calls 'an ongoing atlas of the world and my times.” Saint-Louis, founded in the 16th century, reminds us that the tradition has all but disappeared in Sinop, where a soda and crystal glass factory trained a generation of artisans until the 1990s. “Industry, for all of its negatives like pollution, for a time brought about solidarity, unions, political awareness. When all of that leaves, there is a vacuum,' Kazma says.

Sinopale asks what art can learn from working with a place and its people, as well as the natural world. In a second installation, Aka transforms emergency thermal blankets into a shifting expanse as motors beneath the crinkled foil make the surface rise and fall, evoking a sea of ice or melting glaciers. Halfway There (2026) reminded Aka of efforts in the Alps to blanket glaciers and ski slopes in geotextiles to stave off rapid melting from climate change. “It speaks to that human confidence that we can solve problems through sheer intellect. And it is also an act of profound compassion,” he says.

Ali Kazma

Sinopale visitors participate in a performance of _Water from Hand to Hand to Water by artistic duo Collectif Masi, based in Athens and Paris_

Sinopale runs through 15 November. https://www.sinopale.org/sinopale-10

Things ‘kicked off‘ (as they say) with a cello solo that featured modal harmonies – a novel departure from pop concert tradition, I thought, but a most pleasing one. (There has always been a folk element in Mr Plant’s music, perhaps prompted by his love of the Welsh countryside, but this element has recently come to greater prominence: Saving Grace, his latest album, has been described as having ‘a roots-oriented sound inspired by folk and traditional blues’.)

Eventually, the man himself appeared on stage – to wild applause. He was accompanied by a young lady (Suzy Dian, with whom he recorded Saving Grace), and during their first duet (‘Win My Train Fare Home’) she left off singing to play a most impressive solo on the accordion. This lady is obviously a multi-talented musician, and her tasteful contributions both as a singer and as an instrumentalist played a large part in the evening’s success.

The second number (‘Down to the Sea’), in which the focus of the music shifted further East, had a palpable world music vibe. In the third (‘Higher Rock’), Mr Plant brought out his mouth organ, adding yet another – this time decidedly Western, and deliciously funky – flavour to the mix. At the end of this piece he addressed the audience, telling us “Just how magical it is [to be here], coming from England. I don’t know how much saving we can do tonight.” No doubt this was a reference to the title of his recent album, but saving from what? Better not ask the question, and definitely better not to answer it. Themes of doubtful political correctness continued with lyrics such as ‘My freedom I hold dear’, and I wondered whether Mr Plant was able to express such sentiments in every country in which he performs.

One of this concert’s outstanding features was its variety: at one point guitarist Tony Kelsey launched – very creditably – into song; later on, the versatile Suzy Dian laid down her accordion and took up a guitar; and Matt Worley, who had been providing backing vocals, gave us a moody banjo solo. Indeed, it was wistfulness – derived maybe from the Celtic element in the music – that came across most strongly in many of the numbers. In others, the overall tone was one of defiance. Some of this was undoubtedly political in nature, but it also had to do with thumbing a nose at Father Time: on one occasion Robert Plant (born in 1948) said: “I’m enjoying myself at this time in my life because I’m singin’ my ass off.”

The music, too, had its defiant aspect in that it eluded genre categorisation. In fact, Plant confirmed this, saying: “We thought we were a folk group, then a jazz group. In fact, we’re a psychedelic folk jazz group.” One thing I especially appreciated about this concert was the excellence of the arrangements: many of the songs featured at least one specific instrument, and each of these instruments was allowed to come out of the shadows and show itself in its true colours. (Listen to the cello solo in ‘For the Turnstiles’ at 56:17 in the recording below, and you will see what I mean.) Drummer Oli Jefferson, meanwhile, was the perfect diplomat, never overdoing the decibels except when a ratching up of the rhythm section was called for.

Videos exist both of this concert and of the one that took place in Ankara the following day (Google ‘Robert Plant with Saving Grace & Suzi Dian / Bilkent Odeon / Ankara / July 2016’.) Here is the video of the Istanbul gig:

The grand finale at the Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) was an all-Dvořák concert consisting of his Cello Concerto and his Symphony No. 9, the ‘New World’ – both written while the composer was in New York, where from 1892 to 1895 he served as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America.

Although this was an extremely creative period for Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), he was constantly struggling with homesickness for Bohemia, and his mental state was not improved by financial difficulties. The attractive salary he had been promised – many times more than he could have earned in Europe – failed to materialise, the US having been plunged into economic depression by the Panic of 1893, in which more than 500 banks collapsed. As a result, the Conservatory cut his salary from $15,000 per annum to $8,000. However, his upbringing in a less-than-wealthy home (his father ran the village inn and butcher’s shop) had taught him to live frugally, and he stuck it out for three years.

At the concert in the AKM, the solo part was played by the Austrian-born Iranian cellist Kian Soltani, who was trained in Basel, at the Kronberg Academy in Germany and in Liechtenstein. Although I could not hear particularly well from my seat at the back of the auditorium (the pianissimo parts of both the concerto and the symphony were well nigh inaudible – so much for the concert hall’s acoustics), I can say with absolute certainty that Soltani plays with total commitment. The Washington Post once praised his tone in glowing terms: ‘His cello sound,’ they said, ‘has the fuzz and richness of caramel, and he plays with an easy warmth.’ He also looks up at the ceiling now and then – at what, I do not know. Co-ordination with the orchestra was somewhat ragged in the first movement (although I very much enjoyed some perfect woodwind entries and a lovely horn solo), but the soloist really came into his own in the second – the slow movement, where he played with obvious feeling; it was as good a display of getting behind the music and giving it your all as I am ever likely to witness.

For a detailed account of the Dvořák Cello Concerto and its composition, see Marc Mandel on the website of the Boston Symphony Orchestra – the outfit that gave the work its first American performance in December 1896.

Here is Soltani performing the concerto with the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Elisabeth Fuchs. For some reason they play the slow movement first, but no harm in that – it immediately establishes a mood of relaxation.

Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 in E minor, Opus 95 (the ‘New World’ Symphony), was written earlier, in 1893. This four-movement work displays the results of his interest in African-American music. At the National Conservatory, an African-American student by the name of Harry T. Burleigh had sung traditional spirituals to him. The Wikipedia entry gives a blow-by-blow – not to say ‘bow-by-bow’ – account of the symphony, followed by a fascinating description (in the ‘Influences’ section) of his reactions to the music he heard, and the scenery he observed, in the United States. The symphony’s premiere, at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893, was one of the greatest triumphs of the composer’s career, with thunderous applause at the end of every movement.

In Istanbul, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra demonstrated its quality in their performance of this work: their co-ordination was impeccable throughout, and I especially appreciated some rollicking brass fanfares. For their encore, they gave us one of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances – the one in E minor, Opus 72 No. 2. It was beautifully played, and brought tears to my eyes, thus bringing the 2026 İKSV Istanbul Music Festival to an emotional close. And why not?

First, the orchestra accompanied the Paris-born Chinese pianist Bruce Liu, currently resident in Montreal, in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Opus 37. (His Chinese first name is not Bruce, by the way, but Xiaoyu – which can mean ‘light rain’, ‘dawn rain’ or ‘little jade’, depending on the characters used.) The orchestra’s quality was apparent from the outset, especially in the perfectly co-ordinated woodwind entries. The soloist, meanwhile, impressed with his sensitivity in the first movement (it was not for nothing that he was declared the winner of the 18th International Chopin Competition in 2021), though I thought his attitude could have been a tad more forthright – especially in the cadenza, which was played with a softness I do not usually associate with Beethoven. (On second thoughts, though, maybe it was the Atatürk Cultural Centre’s dodgy acoustics that damped him down.)

That same sensitivity stood him in good stead in the slow second movement, however: here, he achieved just the right balance between delicacy and solemnity. The orchestra, meanwhile, demonstrated its ability to provide mousey-quiet accompaniment while co-ordinating seamlessly with the soloist. The third movement was agreeably energetic and upbeat, and we heard some nice fanfares from the horns. This time, the pianist gave the cadenza a good deal more oomph, and I was pleased to see him abandon his former reticence. Here is a 19-year-old Bruce Liu giving a confident performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3 during the Sendai Competition in Japan. 

After the interval, the orchestra played Schubert’s four-movement Symphony No 9 in C major, D 944, sometimes described as ‘the Great’. This is the last symphony the composer completed before his death in 1828. Robert Schumann, who visited Vienna in 1838, discovered it in a pile of manuscripts shown to him by Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, and took a copy back with him to Leipzig, where it was finally given its first performance by the Gewandhaus Orchestra under the baton of Felix Mendelssohn. However, owing to its lengthy parts for the woodwinds and strings, the symphony was found to be difficult to play, and when Mendelssohn took it to Paris in 1842 and to London in 1844, orchestras flatly refused to play it. In fact, it took until the early years of the 20th century for the work to become part of the standard repertory. 

In this long and not a little taxing symphony, the second movement, in particular, is somewhat over-generous in the duration department; to my shame, I had to pinch myself repeatedly to stay awake. That is not to say, of course, that the orchestra was anything but magnificent: they negotiated the technical challenges – such as the accelerandi (i.e., gradual speedings-up) and the abrupt changes of tempo – with perfect aplomb. Meanwhile, the conductor maintained the music’s forward momentum with a commendable display of athleticism on the podium. In the following rendition of Schubert’s Symphony No 9, we hear the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada.

The encore, a piece for pizzicato strings, was a textbook example of perfect co-ordination in an area traditionally regarded as dangerous, and for good reason: one mistimed pluck, and the effect is ruined. How long will it be, I wondered, before Turkish orchestras are able to bring off a feat of this nature? Fortunately, given the way things are going, I can confidently predict that it won’t be all that long. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, our reeds resonant, our mouthpieces moist and our bows bobbing busily up and down until then.

I was wrong.

I discovered that in a neighborhood movie theatre in Istanbul.

A few days after Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey premiered, I went to a Sunday morning screening. I chose the first showing because I've never liked crowds. It was not even an IMAX theater. I remember that detail because it now seems strangely important. I wasn't there for the spectacle. I simply wanted to see how one storyteller had approached another.

The cinema was cool, dark, and almost empty. There couldn't have been more than a dozen people. As the lights faded, I found myself slipping into a familiar habit. I quietly whispered the names of the characters as they appeared on the screen.

Telemachus.

Penelope.

The suitors.

I wasn't trying to impress anyone. If anything, I was reassuring myself that I still knew this world.

Then, without warning, I began to cry.

Not because of one particular scene. Not because of one line. The tears came quietly and stayed with me through almost the entire film.

Even now, I cannot point to the exact moment when they began.

The obvious explanation is that only a few days earlier I had experienced a painful loss. Not in death, but in life. I had lost someone I deeply loved. Of course that mattered.

But I don't think it tells the whole story.

For more than 30 years, I have been a guide in Turkey. I've quoted Homer beneath the walls of Troy, spoken of Odysseus while crossing the Dardanelles, and watched travelers discover these poems for the first time. Somewhere along the way, Homer's stories became part of my own vocabulary. I thought I understood why they had endured for nearly 3,000 years.

I grew up in İzmir, the city that still remembers its older name, Smyrna. Whether Homer was born there or not hardly matters anymore. As a child, I had no idea that I would spend my life telling his stories. Looking back now, it almost feels as though they had been waiting for me.

That Sunday morning, however, something changed.

For the first time, I wasn't telling Homer's story.

He was quietly telling me mine.

In the days that followed, I kept returning to the same question.

Why had I cried?

The recent loss was part of the answer, but only part.

There were older losses too. The death of my father. Relationships that had changed me. Friendships that had quietly slipped away. Regrets that still visit from time to time.

None of those memories appeared on the screen.

Yet somehow they were all there.

Perhaps that is what great stories do.

They don't tell us what to feel.

They recognise feelings we have carried for years without fully understanding them.

When I first read Homer, I admired the adventure.

This time, I recognised the longing.

I recognised the impossibility of returning to the life we once knew.

I recognised the quiet hope that something lost might still be waiting for us.

When I left that little cinema, I found myself thinking about Christopher Nolan's film. Not because it had modernised Homer, but because it had reminded me how astonishingly modern Homer already was. Long before cinema, he understood flashbacks, delayed recognition, shifting perspectives, and the rhythm of a story that reveals itself slowly. More importantly, he understood people.

For years, I believed I had been introducing travellers to Homer.

That Sunday morning, I realised Homer had patiently been waiting to introduce himself to me.

The poem had not changed.

I had.

Yiğit Tahtalıoğlu

The first item on the programme was Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis (1897), a set of three songs for mezzo-soprano and piano. These are settings of prose poems, written in the manner of Sappho, from a collection published by Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925). The author claimed they had been discovered on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, having been penned by Bilitis, a courtesan who was a contemporary of Sappho, and the forgery was so successful that even some experts were taken in.

Feride Büyükdenktaş proved to have a fine, powerful voice; however, it was only in ‘La chevelure’ (‘The Mass of Hair’), the second item in the set, that she truly came into her own. This song is actually about an orgasm (no surprise there – Louÿs was writing erotic poetry even on his deathbed), but although I acknowledge the fact that this was the first item on the programme and the singer had yet to warm up, I thought the process of building up to the climax could have been a tad more unbuttoned. ‘Le tombeau des Naïades’ (‘The Tomb of the Naiads’), the last of the three songs, has some exquisitely lush piano chords, especially in the bars following 1:29 in the recording below. Here, I greatly enjoyed the atmosphere the performers created, and of course the ending – one of my all-time favourites. The following rendition of the Chansons de Bilitis is by the celebrated French soprano Régine Crespin (1927-2007) and the distinguished American accompanist John Wustman, who died in April this year. For some reason they perform the last song first, but I am so entranced by this singer’s voice that I don’t mind.

Saskia Giorgini then played three pieces by the highly prolific French lady composer Mélanie (‘Mel’) Bonis (1858-1938). The three we heard were ‘Desdémona’, ‘Mélisande’ and ‘Ophélie’, from her cycle Femmes de légende (‘Women of Legend’). The pianist’s arpeggios were even and well-controlled, and ‘Mélisande’ – the most harmonically interesting of the three – was played with all the fragile sensitivity the piece demands. In this recording, we hear the whole cycle played by Anna Shelest.

Next, Feride Büyükdenktaş and Saskia Giorgini gave us three songs by Robert Schumann’s better half Clara – ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’, ‘Die Lorelei’ and ‘Sie liebten sich beide’. Their excellent rendition brought out all the emotional honesty of these well-crafted pieces. Here is Anne Sofie von Otter, accompanied by Hélène Grimaud, in ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (‘If Your Love Is For Beauty’).

Following this, tenor Ian Bostridge made his appearance. What an amazing career this man has had! Having first taught political theory and 18th-century British history at Oxford, at the age of 27 he took up professional singing, soon establishing himself not just as a leading interpreter of Schubert, Schumann and Britten but also as a presenter and writer on music. This being said, the first thing I noticed about his performing style was the somewhat eccentric gestures: he frequently leaned on the piano, sometimes pressing down on it quite hard. In no way, however, did this detract from my appreciation of the power and directness of his singing. Before the interval we heard Robert Schumann’s Fünf Lieder, Opus 40, and after it his song cycle Liederkreis, Opus 24. In the first group, ‘Der Soldat’ – the third item in the set – was sung with admirable drama and commitment, and in the second, ‘Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen’ (‘I Wandered Among the Trees’ – again the third item) was a masterly display of suppressed emotion. In this recording, Ian Bostridge is singing Liederkreis with pianist Julius Drake.

The final item on the programme – Schumann’s Vier Duette, Opus 78 – was a series of vocal duets that involved all three performers. These lieder have oodles of warmth and lyricism, and in my opinion embody Romanticism at its finest. The YouTube recording of Ian Bostridge singing them – together with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and pianist Graham Johnson – consists of four individual items. Firstly, here is ‘Tanzlied’.

Secondly, ‘Er und Sie’.

Thirdly, ‘Ich denke dein’.

Fourthly and lastly, ‘Familien-Gemälde’.

This set of songs made a great ending to the recital. The two voices were perfectly matched; meanwhile, Giorgini’s accompanying skills were most impressive, as indeed they had been throughout the concert. Especially in No. 3 (‘Ich denke dein’ – ‘I Think of You’), I was so thrilled by the performance, which featured exemplary coordination between the three musicians, that I felt a tingle along my spine. Did I feel regret, at that moment, for the fact that the audience for this concert was so sparse? Not at all – I was too carried away by the sweep and surge of the music.

The first item on the programme was an orchestral work – Haydn’s four-movement Symphony No 64 in A major, Hob. 1/64. It was subtitled Tempora mutantur (‘Times change’) by the composer, this being a quotation from a Latin adage that goes as follows: ‘The times change, and we change with them. How? Time passing makes mankind worse.’ I noticed that although the number of stringed instruments in the orchestra was quite small (for instance, there were only nine violins), the wind section was comparatively well represented; as a result, the winds sometimes overpowered the strings. This made for a certain novelty, however, and I soon got used to the unusual balance of instruments.

Here is a performance of the Haydn symphony by the Schlierbacher Chamber Orchestra. I think the frequent stops and starts in the second movement sound really weird, but please judge for yourself.

The seven musicians appeared in order of age, starting with the youngest. First up was Aktan Odabaşı, a cellist from Ankara (seen below). An outstandingly proficient technician for his 12 years, he gave a confident performance of the first movement of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 1, followed by Popper’s Hungarian Rhapsody. 

Accompanying him and all subsequent performers who were not pianists was Çağdaş Özkan, who last year released an album of his own compositions and arrangements entitled Anatolian Piano.

We then heard the 13-year-old pianist Elif Naz Ertuğrul (pictured above), who is currently undergoing training at the Salzburg Mozarteum and is also a composer, play the first two movements of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 1. This was followed by Chopin’s Fantasy-Impromptu in C sharp minor, in which although not totally in control, she nevertheless impressed with her technique.

She was followed by Eren Parmakerli, a 15-year-old (seen below) who gave us the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 3, then Chopin’s Ballade No 3. Among all the young performers we heard, he was one of those who struck me as having the highest degree of maturity and musical sensitivity to complement his unquestionable technical competence.

Since the age of ten, Parmakerli has been receiving tuition at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe. He is also being coached by Gülsin Onay. Judging by the quality of his musicianship – in particular, the excellence of his phrasing and his understanding of dynamics – it is not difficult to predict that we will soon be hearing him on the concert platform.

Nil Canbaz, the fourth performer (seen above), was a 16-year-old clarinettist who is a student at the Dokuz Eylül University State Conservatoire in Izmir; she first played Weber’s Clarinet Concertino, then the feisty No 3 of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke. Despite a few squeaks here and there, she negotiated the transitions between registers with ease, overcoming the considerable difficulties in both pieces with panache. (Here, Çağdaş Özkan deserves an honourable mention for coping successfully with Schumann’s virtuosic piano accompaniment.)

Next came violinist Zehra Deniz Coşkun (pictured above), who played Paganini’s Caprice No 24 and the third movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, largely maintaining her pleasing tone and the accuracy of her intonation despite the enormous challenges presented by these pieces.

The sixth young musician to take the stage was flautist Maya Devrim Tanyılmaz. She played Doppler’s Fantaisie pastorale hongroise and Fauré’s Fantaisie, impressing not just with her rapid-fire arpeggios but also with her graceful movements as she swayed in time with the music.

Lastly, violinist Naz İrem Türkmen gave us Tchaikovsky’s Mélodie and Waxman’s Carmen Fantasy. As a result of her training in Istanbul (where she was a pupil of the late Ayla Erduran, 1934-2025), as well as in Munich and Salzburg, she has acquired a formidable technique and a superb tone. Unsurprisingly in view of her outstanding abilities, she has already begun to appear on the concert platform.

Thus this jaw-dropping display of youthful talent came to an end. As Cihat Aşkın explained in his initial speech, this was the sixth time a Gala Concert of this kind had been held. The members of the jury, besides Aşkın himself, were viola-player Efdal Altun, pianist Gökhan Aybulus, conductor Mehmet Girgin, pianist and composer Fazıl Say and cellist Dilbağ Tokay.

Here is the YouTube video.

I hope you enjoy the concert as much as I did! Keep an eye on the Cornucopia Arts Diary for the next Gala Concert.

The first item on the Trio’s programme was Beethoven’s single-movement Allegretto for Piano Trio in B flat major, WoO 39, written in 1812. Their rendition of this piece began in a somewhat inauspicious manner with yells from a baby. However, her father soon took her out for a walk, and the musicians settled down; I noticed that the pianist was swaying in time with the music, obviously enjoying himself. Here is a performance of the work by Wilhelm Kempff (piano), Henryk Szeryng (violin) and Pierre Fournier (cello).

We then heard a piano trio by Professor Yalçın Tura (1934-), the distinguished nonagenarian founder of the Musicology Department at the Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ) Turkish Music State Conservatoire. Despite his advanced age, he continues to compose even today, being known chiefly for his music for films and the theatre. The thing I liked about his Piano Trio was its use of traditional Turkish aksak rhythms, which provide the music with an edgy bite. But the chief drawback to this work (in my opinion) was its harmonic style. The way of harmonising Turkish folk melodies that was adopted by Turkish composers of Western-style music of the 1920s and 1930s was not a particularly subtle one, but it is still, unfortunately, with us. Possibly as a result of the influence of Bartók, who used open fourths and fifths in his settings of Hungarian folk tunes, Turkish composers of the period relied too heavily on these intervals. Personally, I am looking forward to hearing something a little more original in the harmony department after all these years. But I have had my say – back to the concert.

The last piece on the programme was the Piano Trio in A minor by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). During the summer of 1914, Ravel (whose mother was Basque) went to Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a seaside town in the French Basque country, to compose. At the same time as he was writing his Piano Trio, he was also working on a piano concerto entitled Zazpiak Bat – Basque for ‘The Seven Are One’. The concerto was eventually abandoned, but it left its mark on the Trio’s opening movement, which uses a Basque dance rhythm. The Piano Trio in A minor is a work of considerable difficulty, and I was delighted to see the members of the Bosphorus Trio rise to the occasion. The players’ technical excellence came across immediately in the first movement, which draws on the zortziko, a Basque dance form: the opening theme is in the same rhythm – a bar of eight beats divided 3+2+3 – as that of the Zazpiak Bat piano concerto that Ravel never completed.

This performance of his four-movement Piano Trio in A minor is by violinist Janine Jansen, cellist Torleif Thedéen and pianist Denis Kozhukhin. Ravel’s music has sometimes been criticised for being emotionally disengaged; however, his cold craftsmanship produced some cracking crescendos – just listen to the one that starts at 25:34.

The exhibition this year reaches beyond the city centre into the surrounding landscape with installations at the millennia-old Deyrulzafaran Monastery, the Roman fortress city of Dara and a disused hammam in Kızıltepe, a town just north of the Syrian border. For curator Çelenk Bafra, moving between the venues helps reveal the region’s sometimes contrasting realities.

“There's a utopian, idealised, exoticised aspect to Mardin, but when you dig a little deeper and examine it, you come across the hard ground of truth,” she said. “Art offers a means to learn something new, to look at events from a different perspective … like the swallows we see rising and descending through passing clouds above.”

Curator Çelenk Bafra, at the Deyrulzafaran Monastery, where the bienniale appears for the first time. 

The Mardin Biennial, running through 21 June, has grown into one of the country’s most important contemporary art events outside of Istanbul. This year, more than 40 artists from across the world are showing work in SKYground. Almost a quarter of them have their roots in the region, and at least half of the artists are women.

The region’s art community embraces the Mardin Biennial as a rare and vital opportunity to connect local production with national and international audiences. Parallel events with work by 165 artists have sprung up in spaces across the city, many organised by the artists themselves.

“In this part of the country, beyond Istanbul, the biennale generates significant impact and resonance for artists, creating ripples and waves of influence,” said Rıdvan Kuday, who owns the sole contemporary art gallery in the region’s largest city of Diyarbakir. He is showing work by 18 artists in parallel with the biennale.

Mardin's Ulu Cami's magnificent stone ablution fountain.

Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, born in Thessaloniki and working between Cairo and Paris, meditates on the “in-between state of what we are and what we want to be” in her fabric and audio installation The Bird, the Thread and the Open Sea. 

Kosmatopoulos's vibrant wings and blue sails render the 13th century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds into a physical space to wander through, much as the birds in the Persian allegory search for a truth they ultimately find within themselves.

A pair of snow leopards crouch on the wall of the Deyrulzafaran Monastery in Swarm Works, by Malatya-born and New York-based artist Vahap Avşar. Created for last year’s Bukhara Biennial, the beasts are carved of 200-year-old wood salvaged from the columns of demolished buildings in the Silk Road city. Avşar borrowed a colony from a local beekeeper to implant in the leopards’ torsos. “It is a living sculpture … about empathy, camaraderie and community,” he says.

A still from Basim Magdy’s The Birds Choose the Cards offers an absurdist reflection on a world shaped by war, algorithms and uncertainty. The 2016 film moves through a disquieting sequence of loosely connected images, places and events that Magdy describes as a deliberate “level of ambiguity, even confusion … to open the doors to think about this moment based on people’s own experiences.”

Mardin's persistent winds and terraced houses make kite flying a favourite pastime, and 32-year-old kitemaker Zahit Mungan uses local symbols, such as the benevolent serpent queen Shahmaran and the sacred peacock, to elevate the craft to an art form.

Mungan's House of the Scorpion is a yellow arachnid - both a familiar menace in the arid climate and a local folklore motif - hovering from the ceiling at the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum.

Athens-based Maro Michalakakos worked with local artisans to produce The Journey, which transforms the braid of a woman’s hair, called kezi in Kurdish and a source of feminine pride, into a large-scale, serpentine weave that recalls the biennale's themes of pilgrimage and self-discovery. The saffron-coloured fabric alludes to Deyrulzafaran, named for the golden tint of its walls that is said to come from saffron mixed into the mortar.

A visit to West Africa inspired Jakup Ferri to transpose his miniature drawings onto textiles. Since 2011, he has worked with Kosovo and Albanian embroiderers who use traditional techniques to create joyous, almost psychedelic tapestries in which animals, humans and imaginary life forms exist on equal footing. 

We,We, from 2022, hints at Ferri’s interest in naïve art. “You have to forget everything you know to make a new image because we are so full from phones,” he says.

Suspended between two columns in Dara’s underground cistern is Turkish artist Alper Aydın's System Failed. The four-metre-tall sculpture captures the moment a serpent devours an angel, a vision of innocence overcome by darkness in a space locals call "the dungeon" after it was used to imprison Armenians before their deportation to the Syrian desert during the First World War.

Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić sits among the ruins of Dara on Agape Bench, inscribed with words for love from different languages. The forged-metal sculpture posits that understanding comes not from perfect translation but through the act of gathering. After the exhibition closes, the bench will remain in Mardin as a permanent gift to the community.

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For Michael Rakowitz, art is a way of restoring what history has tried to erase. In an address at the biennale’s opening, the Chicago-based artist of Iraqi Jewish descent described how the identity he grew up with has been contested since Israel's founding. “I feel a volatile and unjust pressure to admit I’ve made a mistake in identifying as an Arab Jew and for the work I do, as if I should apologise for who I am,” he said. 

A visitor poses besides Rakowitz's papier-mâché surrogate of a relief from the 3,000-year-old palace of Nimrud, destroyed by the Islamic state in Iraq in 2015. It is part of the ongoing project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist that looks at what has been lost by war, exile and cultural theft. 

Carlos Aires stands before the Ateş Beyler Hamam, where his video Sweet Dreams Are Made of This shows riot police dancing a tango to a cover of the 1980s Eurythmics song. The 2016 video matches coercive power with choreographed performance and was made despite Spain’s “gag law” restricting the dissemination of police images. 

Presenting Sweet Dreams Are Made of This in a former bathhouse, a traditional space of male socialisation, echoes tango’s origins as a dance performed between men. At the opening in Kızıltepe, young viewers approached Aires to say the work resonated with them. “All art is political,” the artist says. “It is impossible not to be political while living in the reality of our time.”

Hilal Can stands before Hilmeran, a mythical figure from her sprawling A Place for Those Who Look Within, which unfolds across the chambers of the former hammam. Commissioned for the biennale, the textile mural work reflects SKYground's attempt to bridge seemingly opposing worlds, proposing that the earthly and the cosmic coexist in each of us.

Fatma Alara Akgün and Senem Râbia Sekban of the artist collective Bi Acayip Hane stand by What You See in the Sky Are Not Stars; The Firmament Is Pierced Here and There.The seven-tiered sculpture’s thin layers draw on the Anatolian folk artist Aşık Veysel’s I’m on a Long and Narrow Road about the life-long quest for truth, while fragmentary scenes can be glimpsed within the object through small apertures.

Hüseyin Aksoy, who is from Kızıltepe, builds an intricate, Escheresque world rooted in archaeology and mythology in A Review on a Creation of a Civilization (2026), rendered in walnut paint and watercolour.

Among dozens of parallel events coinciding with the Mardin Biennial is an exhibition of photographer Amar Kılıç’s monochromatic landscapes from remote corners of southeastern Turkey, many long difficult to access for security reasons, alongside his delicate cyanotypes cast onto fabric.

Work made by children participating in Fotohane Darkroom, a community photography programme run by Kılıç and Serbest Salih, are also on display at the studio situated in a historical Mardin stone house.

“I wanted to take a real piece of the plain and force people to look at it,” says Mahmut Akdemir of No Phoenixes Remain in the Plain to Rise From the Ashes, a charred patch of earth blanketed in styrofoam eggs atop a roof to show the harm of stubble fires on the grasslands below. The 31-year-old Mardin artist’s is also showing his pixelated mosaic glasswork at a parallel gallery event.

A balloon seller waits outside of Dara's ancient necropolis.

Mardin Biennial is on till 21 June. Several flights a day leave from Istanbul Airport and Sabiha Gokçen. https://en.mardinbienali.org/

Read 'Mardin: City of Labyrinths' in issue 68 by Barnaby Rogerson, photos by Monica Fritz.