Creative Resistance in the Heart of Istanbul

In the early 2000s, the seedy streets of Beyoglu in Istanbul were the heart of the city's contemporary-art scene. Small galleries, like NON and Pilot, thrived alongside institutional spaces, such as Arter and Salt, as well as independent workshops, including Hafriyat Karaköy and Karşı Sanat. When I moved to this bohemian enclave in 2009, I found a spirit of solidarity and collaboration among artists, curators and political dissidents. The neighbourhood captured my heart. Then, in the mid-2010s, big money arrived and Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accelerated the area’s gentrification. Rising rents pushed out smaller galleries and bookshops in favour of blue-chip behemoths, while affordable studios were converted into profit-making Airbnbs. In 2023, Istanbul Modern’s Renzo Piano-designed new building opened at the seafront mall Galataport where Swarovski and TAG Heuer shops now flank the museum. The spirit that had once drawn me to this part of town migrated to a complex in the city’s historic peninsula: the Istanbul Manufacturers Bazaar (İMÇ).

It is remarkable that the dilapidated İMÇ – Istanbul’s first shopping mall, and one of the city’s brutalist landmarks – has shepherded the most exciting contemporary art produced in Istanbul over the past 15 years. The complex couldn’t be less glamorous. Built in 1968 between the Golden Horn and the Valens Aqueduct – a fourth-century structure that once carried water from Thrace – İMÇ comprises a series of stepped concrete courtyards and six interconnected blocks of more than 1,000 units. From sewing machines to curtains, electronics and wallpaper, the mall’s tiny, box-like shops offer everything you didn’t know you needed. But today, many of the storefronts are empty, and the İMÇ sees less footfall from shoppers than it does from artists and art lovers.

Istanbul’s first shopping mall has shepherded some of the most exciting contemporary art produced in the city.

In 2007, Nancy Atakan – an artist, teacher and art historian who has been active in Istanbul’s art scene since the early 1970s – founded a non-profit workshop with the artist Volkan Aslan in a former sewing studio at İMÇ, once run by the Atakan family. ‘We’ve been here [for a] long [time],’ Atakan told me recently. A year later, Atakan and Aslan repurposed the workshop into an art venue called 5533. ‘I wanted a place where money wouldn’t be used at all,’ she reflected. ‘Nothing would be sold. Nothing would be purchased.’

This idea gets to the heart of 5533’s charm. Its vibe is more like a 1970s commune than a conventional gallery. Collectors and their advisors don’t dominate openings. Artists aren’t pressured to follow market trends. Works speak for themselves. And, as Erdoğan’s regime has intensified its legal, physical and psychological assaults on marginalized communities and political activists, 5533 has become, for many, a refuge.

Curated by Adnan Yıldız and Esther Lu, the inaugural exhibition, ‘Big Family Business’, which opened during the 10th Istanbul Biennial in 2007, set the tone for the venue. The show operated as a meeting point and an office, where artists made presentations and conducted debates. In this way, the former sewing shop became a critical and artistic centre rather than a white cube devoted to finished works of art. Berlin fashion designer Gerald Kidd produced a collection inspired by the Turkish flag – a project intended to address rising Turkish nationalism. In another early show, coordinated by Didem Yazıcı and Gökhan Toptaş, the curators asked the owner of a nearby tea house, Nuri Güleç, to pick the best artwork from a pool of 50 artists. His choice, a painting by İrfan Önürmen, defined one of the five ‘Store Window’ exhibitions at the venue. This led to some controversy, with a television channel running a feature titled ‘Can a tea maker work as a curator?’, which saw Turkey’s leading curators debate the question.

For Atakan, ‘collaboration and sharing’ are the key ingredients of her gallery’s success – and why she believes a tea maker is as valid as a critic as a professional curator. These same values have defined her practice since the 1990s. ‘5533 consists of this space and the people who come here to show work,’ she told me. ‘That’s it.’ There are no official employees at 5533. Instead, university students volunteer. The space doesn’t offer artists production budgets or technical help either, nor is it a patron of the arts in any meaningful sense. Rather, artists learn how to set up from scratch. The feeling, Aslan added, is one of ‘just starting out in art’ – an amateur spirit that he finds keeps his own practice fresh and interesting.

While Beyoğlu’s stylish galleries and museums tend to have their eye on market trends, 5533 – and İMÇ more broadly – doesn’t owe its success to Erdoğan’s patronage. Instead, it is sustained by a queer, revolutionary proposition: resistant to political influence, the former sewing shop exists in a state of flux, operating according to the vision of its participants. Artists I’ve met at 5533 always act like they own the place, because, in a way, they do. Yet, while artists dominate 5533, the space has also hosted many shows organized by Turkey’s most brilliant curators, including Fulya Erdemci (1962–2022), Özge Ersoy and Kevser Güler.

I’ve visited Atakan and Aslan’s space hundreds of times for interdisciplinary exhibitions, talks and film screenings. Exhibition openings at İMÇ start around 1pm and continue until 6pm, the hour most events begin in Beyoğlu. Instead of alcohol, İMÇ visitors are served tea from the nearby tea house – the same one whose owner stirred so much controversy for curating a show at the gallery. Small, subtle gestures have defined the venue over the years: consider Can Küçük’s Entree (2021), a bell the artist placed above the entrance to 5533, causing the door to ting each time someone entered. Having heard Atakan once compare 5533 to a pickle jar that artists fill up with ingredients, Küçük opted to make the body of the bell from a teaspoon left at 5533 by a tea house employee – a gesture embodying the venue’s site-specific, DIY spirit.

In recent years, some of Turkey’s dwindling independent exhibition spaces have followed 5533’s example. In 2021, artists Merve Denizci and Doğancan Yılmaz rented a nearby shop at 6637, founding their own art space called Non.Sight. Their aim is to enable artists to play a supportive role in building an inclusive art environment. According to the website, Non.Sight is a space for ‘living, making, presenting and encountering’, providing artists with time and resources. Just around the corner, at 5541, is another independent venue rooted in similar values: İMALAT-HANE, devoted in the words of its mission statement to ‘knowledge-sharing and use by art and culture producers’. The space furnishes artists with ‘a basis for the production and research processes of different practices in contemporary art’ by enabling new collaborations.

5533’s vibe is more like a 1970s commune than a conventional gallery.

İMÇ inspires in unexpected ways. Walking around the compound, visitors encounter several mid-20th-century public artworks: Füreya Koral’s ceramic panel Abstract Composition (1965); Kuzgun Acar’s wall sculpture The Birds (1967); Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and Eren Eyüboğlu’s mosaics İstanbul and Abstract Composition (both 1965); an untitled fountain statue (1965–67) by Yavuz Görey; and an untitled wall relief (1965) by Ali Teoman Germaner. Installed on the facade of the complex, these bold modernist works remind me of the collective spirit of earlier decades, which the contemporary spaces occupying the building now try to sustain.

The spectres of those artists were on my mind this March when Erdoğan arrested Istanbul’s progressive mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and Mahir Polat, leader of his arts and culture team, who fund public art projects and work on heritage restoration. Many analysts considered these arrests a pivot from competitive authoritarianism to full-blown autocracy. I watched students from various colleges and art workers employed at mainstream museums and galleries flock to Saraçhane, a major district in the old city, to protest this latest assault on their independence and future. Passing İMÇ on the Atatürk Boulevard, they cried out for freedom, before heavily armed police fired water cannons and used pepper spray to disperse the protesters. Wandering the halls of the brutalist building, where the crowd's cheers echoed, I thought about how İMÇ’s unfussy, nonhierarchical structure had allowed creativity to speak for itself: artwork as collective production, aware of its hand-crafted status, displayed alongside curtains, headscarves and nails. Not overhyped, but condensed to the essentials; firm on its feet, embracing humility and modesty; extracting its power from this equalizing vision. A tinkling bell that is a metonym of a plurality comprising innumerable small acts. To my eye, the marching art workers and students – whether they were aware of it or not – carried in them something of İMÇ: that ungovernable spirit of collaboration and solidarity.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Against Despair’

^{Main image: Exhibition sites for the 10th Istanbul Biennial at İMÇ (detail), 2007. Courtesy and photograph: © Haupt & Binder}