Welcome to Al-Monitor Istanbul.

This week’s dispatch explores the legendary artist Omer Uluc’s boundary-pushing universe at Istanbul Modern, spotlights jazz greats on summer stages and charts the rhythms of the city as it sizzles.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: “Spiral, Not Static”

Omer Uluc, “The Submarine and the Bird.” (Photo: Nazlan Ertan)

Few artists in modern Turkish art have wrestled so openly with chaos, myth and material as Omer Uluc. The Istanbul Modern has brought together more than 300 of Uluc’s works in a rare, full-spectrum retrospective that shows him to be an artist who never settled, neither stylistically nor geographically. Curated by Oyku Ozsoy Sagnak and Nilay Dursun, “Omer Uluc: Beyond the Horizon,” presents the artist as a rigorous experimentalist — a painter, sculptor and visual thinker whose practice blurred abstraction, figuration and performance into a singular, evolving grammar.

Born in Istanbul in 1931, Uluc studied engineering before fully........

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