Protocinema Founder Mari Spirito on the Manifold Challenges Facing Istanbul’s Art Scene

Conceived as an artistic wormhole connecting New York and Istanbul,Protocinema is the highly unconventional brainchild of the equally unconventional curator Mari Spirito, a former 303 Gallery dealer who in 2011 decided to parlay her voluminous Rolodex of art connections into the kind of free-floating, no-holds-barred platform that artists dream of. Now nearing its fifth anniversary, the […]

Anish Kapoor: Mirror Stages

Mirrors can invert, distort, reveal and register experiences. Sculptor Anish Kapoor’s reflective work Non-Object (Pole) (2008) refracts a spectacular view of the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus Sea from the marble terrace of the Sakip Sabanci Museum in Istanbul. The mirror, in this case, operates as a kind of cultural and pictorial index, recording not […]

Sculptor Anish Kapoor brings new stone works to old Istanbul

For his first major show in Turkey, famed Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor brought huge works that have never before been exhibited to a gallery that ripped down walls to accommodate him. Massive slabs of rough-hewn slate, polished Iranian onyx and rough sandstone, weighing a combined 110 tonnes, dominate the galleries at Istanbul’s Sakip Sabanci Museum.