Progetto curatoriale - Prossima mostra e pubblicazione
I nudi di Istanbul
A Fourteen-Year Project
A collective work from Istanbul's nude art workshops.
Opere selezionate dalla mostra
Un'anteprima delle opere dei quattordici fotografi partecipanti.
Mostra
Krossener Str. 34, 10245 Berlino, Germania
Fotografi partecipanti
Fourteen photographers from Istanbul, developed through sustained participation in nude art workshops designed and directed by the curator over the past fourteen years. All works in the exhibition were made in Istanbul. Five of the fourteen participants are women — a notable proportion in a context where women's authorship in Turkish nude photography has been historically thin. The curatorial framework, the theoretical reading, and the six-register taxonomy through which the works are organised are presented in the sections that follow.
Modello di contributo alla pubblicazione
Two nude models who have worked in Istanbul across the period the exhibition covers have written essays for the publication. Their texts sit alongside the photographs as a structural part of the book — not as supplementary commentary, but as one of the voices the project is built on.
Pubblicazione
The exhibition is accompanied by a hardcover photobook published with ISBN registration and international distribution. The book is printed in English and is designed to function as an autonomous record of the project, independent of the exhibition. Each of the fourteen participating photographers is represented through a dedicated selection. The publication also includes a long curatorial introduction by Burak Bulut Yıldırım, a historical framing of nude photography in Turkey, the six-register taxonomy used to organise the work, and the two essays by Zeynep Renda and Su Yeşil.
The book will be available for pre-order before the exhibition opening and will be distributed through international art book channels. Library acquisition enquiries — university libraries, museum libraries, independent art libraries — are welcomed.
Per richieste di pre-ordine, distribuzione in biblioteca o acquisto istituzionale: info@burakbulut.info.
Una nota sulla posizione del curatore
Burak Bulut Yıldırım is the sole curator of I nudi di Istanbul and does not exhibit his own photographic work within the selection. His contribution to the publication takes the form of the curatorial introduction: a long essay that frames the project historically, theoretically, and within his fourteen years of nude art workshops and his own artistic practice. This essay may reference a limited number of his own images as part of that framing, not as exhibited works. The fourteen photographers named above constitute the exhibition in full.
At the same time — and this is said for the record rather than to qualify the exhibition — the workshops in which these photographs were made were designed and directed by the curator. Concept, lighting, set, and the artistic premise of each session were his. The exhibited photographs were taken inside that structure and shaped, in their final form, by the eye of each photographer. The exhibition holds those two layers as one.
Saggio curatoriale
L'argomento di I nudi di Istanbul begins with a contradiction many viewers will not expect. Istanbul — a city presented in Western media largely through the lens of religious conservatism — has produced, over the past two decades, a sustained and technically accomplished body of nude photography. This work has not reached European audiences at scale, and the reasons are structural rather than artistic: no publication infrastructure, no dedicated gallery platforms, no academic attention.The exhibition addresses that absence directly. Fourteen photographers, all of whom developed their practice through sustained participation in nude art workshops in Istanbul, are presented together for the first time on an international platform. Five of the fourteen are women — a proportion that matters in a field where, in Turkey, women's authorship has been historically almost invisible.The theoretical reading sits with three thinkers. Jean Baudrillard, for the recognition that the image has detached from the body it claims to depict — useful at a moment when AI-generated nudes circulate more widely than photographed ones. Laura Mulvey, for the foundational critique of the gaze: not applied prescriptively here, but acknowledged as the field every nude photograph in 2026 is made inside. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for the phenomenological attention to the body as the place where perception happens — not an object viewed from outside, but the very ground of seeing.What the exhibition finally argues is this. The photograph of the nude — made in-camera, with physical intervention, in a studio where the body is actually present — remains a serious artistic act in a moment when most body imagery is algorithmically produced. The body in these photographs is not a motif. It is the material. The light is real light. The surface is real glass, real fabric, real pigment. The exhibition takes that as its ground.Tassonomia curatoriale
Le opere sono organizzate in sei registri del corpo fotografato. La sequenza si muove dall'astrazione verso l'interiorità psicologica: ogni registro è un modo diverso di chiedere cosa può contenere una fotografia di nudo.
1. Corpo astratto / frammentato
L'inquadratura ravvicinata, la distorsione della scala e l'elevato contrasto tonale riducono la figura a geometria compositiva. Il corpo diventa paesaggio, topografia, dettaglio architettonico. L'identità è tenuta deliberatamente a distanza.2. Trasformazione dei materiali
Pigmento, vernice, polvere, acqua, fumo, luce proiettata: i materiali fisici agiscono sul corpo e vengono registrati in un'unica esposizione. La pelle non viene rappresentata, ma attivata.3. Velo / Atmosfera / Perturbante
Fabric, translucent materials, controlled haze, and atmospheric light produce images in which the body is neither fully visible nor fully absent. The viewer is held between the two.4. Dialogo spaziale
The body inside specific architecture — domestic interiors, abandoned structures, urban recesses. The environment is not a backdrop but an equal element in the composition.5. Cinetico / Performativo
Long exposure, choreographed movement, dance. The body is photographed in duration rather than the frozen instant. What the image records is a passage, not a pose.6. Ritratto interiore / Corpo vulnerabile
Il registro più intimo della mostra. Ritratti ravvicinati, gesti ritirati, il corpo nel suo peso emotivo. Mentre gli altri cinque registri lavorano attraverso la trasformazione, questo lavora attraverso l'attenzione silenziosa.Oltre la presentazione di Berlino
La mostra di Berlino funziona come un capitolo di apertura piuttosto che come un evento chiuso.
After the Berlin presentation, the publication will continue its life as an autonomous record through international art book channels, university and museum library acquisitions, and direct distribution. Reading copies are available to curators and academic researchers in advance of formal release.
Future presentations of the project — including potential exhibitions in other European cities and academic programming around the publication — are in development. Institutions interested in hosting the exhibition or organising public programming around the book are welcome to enquire.
Metodologia curatoriale
I quattordici fotografi di I nudi di Istanbul were not selected through open call. They were invited from a community that has formed across fourteen years of nude art workshops in Istanbul, designed and led by the curator. Selection criteria were: sustained authorial development across years rather than single sessions; technical and conceptual coherence within each photographer's own body of work; and a contribution that could be read meaningfully alongside the others rather than in isolation.
The aim was not to assemble a representative survey but to identify a coherent collective practice that has come out of a specific working environment in Istanbul. That working environment is part of the project's identity: the curator's concept, lighting and staging on one side; the photographer's eye and decision on the other.
The decision to bring this work to Berlin rather than to present it first in Istanbul reflects a structural condition of the field. Turkey lacks dedicated gallery platforms for nude photography and has not produced a substantial publication on the subject since Modiano's Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak (2004). Almost none of the participating photographers have ever exhibited nude art photography in their home country, despite having worked in this discipline for over a decade.
The Berlin presentation is therefore not a relocation. It is the first international platform for a body of work that has been made entirely in Istanbul and held there, with limited public visibility, for years.
Photographic Lineage
The work in I nudi di Istanbul is read against an international body of photography. The curatorial taxonomy is mapped here onto the photographers whose practice each register draws from, argues with, or extends.
Abstract / Fragmented Body
Bill Brandt · Edward Weston · Ruth Bernhard
The lineage of the body read as geometry, landscape, and architectural detail. Brandt's Perspective of Nudes (1961) established the wide-angle nude as a study in form rather than figure; Weston's late prints insisted that flesh, pepper, and rock could share a single optical grammar. The works in this register inherit that discipline.
Material Transformation
Prue Stent & Honey Long · Carmen Winant · Sarah Charlesworth
Pigment, fabric, paint, water, and projected light enter the frame as active surfaces, not props. The Australian duo Stent & Long and the American post-archival practice of Carmen Winant offer the closest contemporary readings of bodies altered by physical material in front of the lens — a register in which the curator's own work with UV pigments and broken-mirror surfaces sits.
Veil / Atmosphere / Uncanny
Francesca Woodman · Marianna Rothen · Juno Calypso
The body half-given, half-withheld. Woodman's late-1970s Rome and Providence photographs remain the foundational reference for atmospheric concealment; Rothen's cinematic reconstructions and Calypso's pink, claustrophobic interiors carry the line into present-day practice.
Spatial Dialogue
Arno Rafael Minkkinen · Lee Friedlander · Lucas Samaras
The body in negotiation with architecture, landscape, and historical space. Minkkinen's fifty-year project of self-portraiture in landscape, Friedlander's Nudes (1991) inside ordinary American interiors, and Samaras's Polaroid figure-and-room compositions of the 1970s mark the three coordinates this register works between.
Kinetic / Performative
Eadweard Muybridge · Étienne-Jules Marey · Viviane Sassen
The body recorded as duration. Muybridge and Marey's nineteenth-century chronophotography established the kinetic frame as a legitimate subject of the medium; Sassen's contemporary choreographic dance and shadow work updates the same proposition for the present.
Inner Portrait / Vulnerable Body
Nan Goldin · Elinor Carucci · Paul Mpagi Sepuya
The most intimate register of the exhibition. Goldin's autobiographical practice from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency onward, Carucci's close-quarter family and self-portraiture, and Sepuya's fragmented studio mirrors give this register its three principal contemporary anchors.
Cross-Register Anchors
Two figures sit across the taxonomy rather than inside any single register. Robert Mapplethorpe — for the formal-classical discipline that runs from Abstract / Fragmented Body through Spatial Dialogue — and Zanele Muholi — for the identity-political reading that connects Inner Portrait to the staged self-presentation of Spatial Dialogue. Both are present in the curatorial introduction as transverse references.
The Turkish Genealogy
The genealogical question this exhibition opens — whether a Turkish lineage of nude photography can be named — has, in the published record, a single anchor. Alberto Modiano's Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak (Bileşim Yayınevi, Istanbul, 2004) remains the only book-length attempt to write that history; no comparable volume has been published in the twenty-two years since. I nudi di Istanbul is built on the claim that a second coordinate now exists: a sustained collective practice formed in Istanbul over the past fourteen years, shown together for the first time in Berlin and accompanied by the second book-length publication on the subject.
Riferimenti teorici
Il quadro curatoriale si basa sui seguenti riferimenti primari.
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacri e simulazione. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
- Berger, John. Modi di vedere. Penguin Books, 1972.
- Brandt, Bill. Perspective of Nudes. Bodley Head, 1961.
- Goldin, Nan. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Aperture, 1986.
- Mapplethorpe, Robert. The Black Book. St. Martin's Press, 1986.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Fenomenologia della percezione. Routledge, 2012 (originariamente 1945).
- Modiano, Alberto. Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak. Bileşim Yayınevi, Istanbul, 2004.
- Mulvey, Laura. “Piacere visivo e cinema narrativo”.” Schermo 16:3, 1975.
- Sontag, Susan. Sulla fotografia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
- Woodman, Francesca. Francesca Woodman. Phaidon, 2006.
Ulteriori riferimenti storici e contemporanei sono riportati nell'introduzione curatoriale della pubblicazione.
Richieste della stampa e delle istituzioni
Press materials — high-resolution images, curatorial statement in English, German, and Turkish, photographer biographies, and a factual press release — are available on request. The exhibition is open to journalist previews, interview requests, and academic visits during the exhibition period and by arrangement for scheduled press days.
Curatori, critici d'arte e ricercatori accademici che si occupano di fotografia contemporanea, arte del nudo, cultura visiva turca o politica del corpo sono particolarmente benvenuti. Copie di lettura della pubblicazione possono essere fornite prima dell'inaugurazione.
Dichiarazione curatoriale
Biografie dei fotografi
Comunicato stampa