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Roses, cabbage and Ottoman secrets: While the Biennial buzz fills Beyoglu and Karakoy, it’s worth slowing down for Lucian Freud’s “Girl with Roses“ at Pera Museum, Efendy’s duck pastilla and an alternative-history thriller.

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1. Leading the week: A rose by any other name

Lucian Freud’s “Girl with Roses” (Courtesy of the British Council Collection)

Let’s not have this great exhibition disappear in the Istanbul Biennial rush. Pera Museum’s "Feelings in Common," curated by Ulya Soley, brings punch and big names to Istanbul’s fall art scene. Drawn from the British Council Collection, a "museum without walls" that has been collecting since the 1930s, the show gathers 29 artists, from Lucian Freud to Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst to David Hockney, under one emotional roof.

Inspired by feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, the show argues that while emotion has long been treated as reason’s poor cousin, it flips that script, asking whether shared feeling might now hold the power to reconnect us after all.

Among the standouts, Lucian Freud’s "Girl with Roses" (main picture) is a haunting portrait of his young wife, Kitty Garman, newly pregnant, clutching a rose while another wilts in her lap. Nearby hangs Anya Gallaccio’s work of 500 red gerberas, left to decay throughout the show, paired with Graham Fagen’s bronze-enamel “Rose,” a nod to his Glasgow project inviting residents to name a new flower bred........

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