Welcome back to Al-Monitor Istanbul.

Have you, like me, started longing for sunshine? Here is an exhibition that offers a little warmth and a gentle rehearsal for a blue-green summer. This week, our selection lingers on light as a mood: from a painterly pause in Cihangir to a revived Beyoglu address shaped by fire and memory, and from pop nostalgia to an ancient landscape under pressure. Consider this your midwinter invitation to look again and dream ahead.

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Thanks for reading,

Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: A ‘Claire’ view of the world

“Green Reflection.” Oil on canvas. By Claire Arkas. (Photo courtesy of the artist)

There is a certain tyranny to the big statement in contemporary art. Izmir-born and Paris-educated Claire Arkas has never been particularly interested in it. In “The Interval of Light,” her 14th solo exhibition, now on view at Ark Kultur in Cihangir, she turns instead to the minor, the fleeting, the almost missed — not the city at its full volume, but its quieter moments.

That preference for understatement runs through Arkas’ life as much as her work. The daughter of Lucien Arkas, one of Turkey’s most prominent art patrons and a larger-than-life businessman, she has long chosen to live and work away from the spotlight, often exhibiting beyond the family’s Izmir base. I first encountered her paintings not in an Arkas gallery, but in a sunlit space in Istanbul. From the Aegean to southern Europe, Arkas has gravitated toward places where light is not decorative but structural — a condition of seeing.

She held her first solo exhibition in the early 2000s, developing a painterly language anchored in color, pattern and surface. Her work recalls the dense, intimate visual fields of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, post-Impressionist painters who treated interiors and fragments of daily life as serious sites of perception rather than grand narratives.

Curator and art writer Karoly Aliotti, who wrote the text for the exhibition, describes Arkas’ approach as marked by restraint rather than withdrawal. “There is something reminiscent of a Sufi intuition in this modesty and silence,” he noted. “When the painter withdraws, the world gains space to appear.”

The exhibition brings together 37 works that move fluidly between nature and the........

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