Pera Museum opened the new season with two new exhibitions. The exhibitions titled "Behind the Scenes of the Republic" and "Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction, with the Intervention of Francis Bacon and Victor Willing" were introduced at a press conference held in the museum building. Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Culture and Art Enterprises General Manager Özalp Birol, Istanbul Research Institute director Gülru Tanman, Pera Museum Temporary Exhibitions Manager Begüm Akkoyunlu Ersöz and curators Alistair Hicks, İdil Çetin and Ahmet A. Ersoy attended the meeting.
The Behind the Scenes exhibition of the Republic, prepared by curators İdil Çetin and Ahmet A. Ersoy from the Press Photos Archive in the Istanbul Research Institute's Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection, examines Istanbul in the period from the 1920s to the early 1950s through the invisible face of the photographic archives.
THE 'REPUBLIC' OF THE REPUBLIC
The main source of the exhibition is the Press Photograph Archive consisting of 90 thousand 52 negatives. The exhibition includes 20 thousand 683 glass and acetate negatives selected from this archive. Pointing out that the collection, which was known as the "Selahattin Giz Archive" for many years, does not only consist of Giz's works, the curators state that the archive also includes the productions of different photojournalists of the period. The selection also includes the works of Namık Görgüç, Giz's colleague and "mentor" in our newspaper Cumhuriyet; It presents a wide social landscape ranging from political developments to urban life, from poverty to entertainment culture, from women to child labor.
In the photographs in the exhibition, it is seen that the "republic" of the Republic, that is, its people, is at the center. The archive where it is possible to come across photographs of Atatürk, Yunus Nadi, Nazım Hikmet and Muhsin Ertuğrul; While it offers a wide visual field ranging from political news to urban life, from judicial events to sports and entertainment, it also makes visible the lives that are beyond the known about the early Republican Istanbul.
Curator Ahmet A. Ersoy states that the exhibition opens up established perceptions to rethinking. Offering the opportunity to read extraordinary situations, the unknown and contradictions from life and history from the archive, the exhibition invites the viewer to look behind the visible, behind the camera.
“BAD” PHOTOS OF THE ARCHIVE
One of the striking aspects of the exhibition is that it includes "bad" photographs, which are often eliminated in the history of photography. Blurry, damaged, out-of-frame, technically defective or unpublished frames make visible the process of the photograph before it turns into a newspaper page. Curators state that a significant portion of these photographs have survived to the present day thanks to Selahattin Giz's strong passion for archiving and collecting. Thus, the exhibition opens up discussion not only about early Republican Istanbul, but also which photographs were recorded in history and which were eliminated.
OVER 60 YEARS OF BOWLING'S PRODUCTION
Pera Museum's other new exhibition, "Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction, with the Intervention of Francis Bacon and Victor Willing", brings together the works of Frank Bowling, one of the important names of abstract painting, with art lovers for the first time in Turkey.
Frank Bowling
Pera Museum's other exhibition, "Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction, with the Intervention of Francis Bacon and Victor Willing", brings together three important names of British painting in the same context. In the exhibition curated by Alistair Hicks, Bowling's production over 60 years is discussed together with the works of Francis Bacon and Victor Willing.
In the exhibition, which also includes four important Francis Bacon works borrowed from the Sainsbury Center collection, Bowling's life from Guyana to London and his relationship with issues of migration, colonialism and belonging come to the fore. Bacon's tension between figure and space, Willing's life and artistic production constitute the other axes of the exhibition.
Francis Bacon
In addition to Bowling's works such as My Guyana, Map Paintings and Cathedral Window, his latest works titled Map (2025), Exile (2025) and Revisiting My Mother's House (2026) are also included in the exhibition. It was stated that approximately 25 collections were consulted during the preparation process of the exhibition and a long-term study was carried out to bring together the works.
The exhibitions Behind the Scenes of the Republic and Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction, Francis Bacon and Victor Willing Intervention can be visited at Pera Museum.
