Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

May Day rarely arrives quietly in Turkey. It brings with it a familiar choreography: sealed-off streets, suspended ferries and moments between celebration and control. 

This week, we focus on labor and resistance in the world of culture: A new exhibition at Terakki Vakfi turns attention to the act of making itself, tracing the line between craft and collective memory. In Kadikoy, a century of political satire reminds us how dissent once found its sharpest voice in print. And across three cities, a film festival gathers stories of resistance that continue to echo far beyond the screen. We finish with statistics on child labor.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: Form, Craft, Activism

Bilal Yilmaz’s “Revolution is here” (Terakki Vakfi)

Labor tends to disappear just as it becomes most essential. We admire the finished object, rarely the hours, repetitions and negotiations that brought it into being. Bilal Yilmaz’s new exhibition, “Form-Craft-Activism,” insists on reversing that instinct.

Yilmaz, an Istanbul-based interdisciplinary artist trained across engineering and design, has long worked at the intersection of material, system and society. His practice draws on light, sound and movement, but also on something more stubborn: the persistence of craft as both knowledge and social memory. His exhibition, which opens on May 7 and runs through June 7 at the Terakki Vakfi Sanat Galerisi, reads as an active setup, where thinking, making and testing remain in view rather than neatly resolved.

The exhibition’s conceptual spine rests on the tension between analytical thought and material behavior. That tension produces objects, but also questions. What does it mean to think through making? And who gets to be visible........

© Al Monitor