Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

The heat is on, and the city has emptied onto the coast, so this week we follow it. We begin in Bodrum, where Turkish art’s l’enfant terrible Bedri Baykam has hung 60 years of work, then climb the hill to a kitchen that charges 2,000 Turkish lira for the privilege of booking a table.

Back in town, Arter opens its garden, cinema diva Turkan Soray turns out to have been painting all along, and a Turkish name lands on the Booker longlist with a prison cell where the bathroom should be. We end in Ankara, with 12 yellow pawns and one restless knight — an artsy critique of the EU visa policies.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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

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1. Leading the week: Sixty years, all at once

Bedri Baykam, “Layers of Dreams, Traces of the Illusory” (Courtesy of the artist)

Bodrum in August is not where you usually go to look at paintings. The heat, the traffic on the Ortakent road, the general sense that everyone is somewhere with a view. Inspera Bodrum Kultur Sanat has been betting otherwise since it opened in 2024: a stage named after Zulfu Livaneli, an open-air stage, an art academy, a bookstore, a design store and two kitchens, all running until midnight. A cultural hub in the full sense, not a gallery with a cafe attached.

Its August headliner is Bedri Baykam. “Ayni Anda” (“All at Once”) gathers some six decades of output into the Art Space and refuses to line it up chronologically. About half the works were made this year and have never been shown in Bodrum; they hang against much older pieces so that the two argue rather than illustrate. One section comes out of “Baykam on Picasso,” his recent “Piramid Sanat” show in Istanbul — less a story of influence than a conversation between visual languages.

Bedri Baykam, “Intuitive Impressions of a Time Traveler” (Courtesy of the artist)

Baykam remains Turkey’s most productive one-man cultural industry: painter, novelist, polemicist, political activist and the former child prodigy/l’enfant terrible who has never entirely stopped being one. He moves between painting,........

© Al Monitor