Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

This week, pain sets the tone. In Turkish, “aci” means both pain and spice — from what is felt to what is tasted. In Beyoglu, two young artists trace how pain settles into the body, returning in quiet waves; across the city, spring arrives on schedule, softening the edges as tulips bloom with almost defiant regularity. At the table, Hatay’s layered cuisine reminds us that what burns can also bind, lingering longer than expected.

If you want to receive this newsletter or our other new weekly City Pulse newsletters — for Doha, Dubai and Riyadh — sign up here.

Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

P.S. Have tips on Istanbul’s culture scene? Send them my way at nertan@al-monitor.com.

Also, don’t forget to follow us on Instagram: @citypulsealm

1. Leading the week: Moment of pain

“The hole in the sky” by Asli Çelikel (Photo courtesy of Offgrid and the artist)

Independent art space Offgrid, known for pairing unorthodox young artists in tightly curated duos, takes a quiet but stubborn position on pain with its latest exhibition, “A Matter of a Moment,” by Asli Celikel and Kubra Su Yildirim.

Curated by Melis Bektas, the show rests on a simple but uneasy premise: pain is not a chapter you close, but a rhythm you learn to live with. In a culture increasingly fixated on recovery — faster, cleaner, preferably Instagrammable — this lands as a quiet provocation.

“‘A Matter of a Moment’ approaches pain not simply as an individual emotional state, but as a shared experience of our time — one that is increasingly rendered invisible, yet continues to seep into every layer of life,” Bektas told Al-Monitor. “One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths is that it neither dramatizes pain nor attempts to resolve it. Instead, it turns its attention to the altered inner rhythm that follows loss, as well as to objects, absences and silence.”

Yildirim’s paintings lean into this elasticity. Cartoon figures hover somewhere between presence and disappearance, their tension rendered in soft but insistent gestures. Celikel’s photographs, by contrast, are all restraint — the........

© Al Monitor