Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

Late September is when Istanbul is at its best, and this year the calendar is so crowded that the only sensible advice is to drop everything, work included, and head “into the polis.” Art lovers from across Turkey are doing just that, converging on Tersane Istanbul for Contemporary Istanbul, where more than 70 Turkish and international galleries from 24 countries bring out their best until Sept. 27.

We start at Galerist, which turns 25 with a show about love and labor, and end in the 1930s with the press photographers who worked behind the scenes of the young republic.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: A matter of the heart

An installation view of “Labour of Love.” (Photo courtesy of Galerist)

Some galleries are white boxes. Galerist, arguably the best-located gallery in Beyoglu, is a sequence of moods. Housed in Passage Petits-Champs, a 19th-century building in Tepebasi, its rooms move from bright halls with the old painted plaster left exposed to small, dark, square chambers where a single work is lit like a relic. For its 25th anniversary, the setting has become a mirror.

“Labour of Love” (in Turkish “Gonul Isi,” roughly “a matter of the heart”) gathers nearly 50 artists who have shaped the gallery since 2001, pairing works from the gallery’s history with pieces made for the occasion. Each work is asked to act as a self-portrait: not necessarily a face, but a gesture, material or obsession that defines a practice. Together they form a portrait of the gallery itself.

The result is fiercely modern and oddly intimate. Semiha Berksoy, the opera diva turned painter, sets the tone with “Death Due to Love” (1998). Nil Yalter revisits “Skin Story” two decades later, Hussein Chalayan contributes a new “Airmail Dress” and Huseyin Bahri Alptekin’s........

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