Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

June 5 is World Environment Day, so this week we follow the city's four-legged, feathered and finned inhabitants, from a group exhibition that asks who really owns the urban space, to a cafe named after a Bosphorus diving bird, with stops at Istanbul Modern, Baruthane and the opening night of the music festival.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: Shelter … from us

Tugba Oztopcu’s “Calm.”  (Courtesy of Muze Gazhane)

The title of the exhibition carries just as much weight as the works displayed. "Bari-n/m-ak," with its fractured, hyphenated letters, simultaneously holds the Turkish words for "shelter" (barinak) and "to take shelter" (barinmak). Curated by Hicran Aksoz, the group show brings together 27 contemporary artists at Muze Gazhane, the former gasworks on the Asian side that IBB Kultur has been steadily converting into one of the city's more serious exhibition venues. The premise is animal rights, but the exhibition resists the temptation to become a rescue campaign with canvases attached. The question it actually poses is urban: Who gets to inhabit the city, under what conditions, and who decides?

Works range across painting, sculpture and mixed media. Baysan Yuksel's acrylic animals carry a strange, tender authority; Erkut Terliksiz places a fox beside its hunter in sheer irony; and Tugba Oztopcu's oils hold a stillness that feels almost liturgical.

The show has a social architecture as well as an aesthetic one. At its close, artists will offer works directly to collectors, with proceeds going straight to Besiktas Municipality shelters and Angels Farm's emergency supply list — art as logistics, for once,........

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