Curatorial Project — Upcoming Exhibition & Publication
The Nudes of Istanbul
A Fourteen-Year Project
A long-form studio practice in Istanbul, brought into public view.
Selected Works from the Exhibition
A preview of works by the fourteen participating photographers.
Exhibition
Krossener Str. 34, 10245 Berlin, Germany
Participating Photographers
Fourteen photographers from Istanbul, developed through sustained participation in curated studio sessions 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.
Model Contributors to the Publication
Two nude models who have worked in Istanbul across the period the exhibition covers contribute to the publication as commissioned authors. Their essays sit alongside the photographs as a structural component of the book — not supplementary commentary, but voices that the project is built on. The decision to include them as authors, rather than as subjects only, follows from the curatorial position that nude photography is a relationship between two people working with a third element — light — and that the model's account of that relationship belongs in the published record.
Publication
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 opens with an essay by Engin Özendes — founder of Istanbul Modern's Photography Department and one of the principal authorial voices in the historiography of Turkish photography — followed by a long curatorial introduction by Burak Bulut Yıldırım, a historical framing of nude photography in Turkey drawing on Modiano (2004) and Özdal (2011), the six-register taxonomy used to organise the work, and the two commissioned 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.
For pre-order, library distribution, or institutional purchase enquiries: info@burakbulut.info.
A Note on the Curatorial Position
Burak Bulut Yıldırım is the sole curator of The Nudes of 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 curated studio sessions and his own artistic practice. 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 studio sessions 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.
Curatorial Essay
The argument of The Nudes of 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: a thin publication record (one academic study and one book in twenty years), no dedicated gallery platforms, almost no exhibition history outside Turkey, and — until recently — an authorship that was exclusively male.The exhibition addresses that absence directly. Fourteen photographers, all of whom developed their practice through sustained participation in the curator's studio sessions in Istanbul, are presented together for the first time as a coherent collective practice on an international platform. Five of the fourteen are women — a fact that matters not only as a numerical correction to a record built almost entirely by men, but as a substantive shift in who decides how the body is seen, framed, and released into public view.The theoretical reading sits with three thinkers. Jean Baudrillard, for the recognition that the image has detached from the body it claims to depict — a question that has become especially urgent at a moment when AI-generated and synthetic intimate imagery circulates at industrial scale, with documented and disproportionate impact on women. Laura Mulvey, for the foundational critique of the gaze — held here not as a thesis to be applied to the work, but as the field within which every nude photograph in 2026 is made. 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.The exhibition also sits inside a wider Turkish discourse on body politics — work by artists like İpek Duben and Nilbar Güreş, who have for decades thought about gender, intimacy, and self-representation in visual culture. The Nudes of Istanbul does not claim continuity with those practices, which work in different mediums and registers; it sits alongside them as part of the same broader conversation about how the body is allowed to be seen, by whom, and on what terms. That conversation is also structurally constrained. In Turkey, public exhibition of nude photography has, for decades, operated under a combination of institutional reluctance and informal pressure — galleries declining to host, the displacement of work abroad (the kadıNgözÜyle collective's 2016 move to Galerie Neuf in Nancy is the most documented case), and individual photographers limiting their practice to private circulation. The pattern is not specific to one jurisdiction: in November 2024, İnci Eviner's video Harem (2009) was withdrawn by Qatar's Ministry of Culture from the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art exhibition Seeing Is Believing hours before opening, an event reported in The Art Newspaper, ARTnews, and Artforum. Read together, these are reminders that the politics of representing the body remain an active field, with its own structure in each setting.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. In these photographs the body is not a motif. It is the working material of the image and, at the same time, a person who has consented, posed, and held the room. The light is real light. The surface is real glass, real fabric, real pigment. The exhibition takes that as its ground.Curatorial Taxonomy
The works are organised across six registers of the photographed body. The sequence moves from abstraction toward psychological interiority — each register a different way of asking what a nude photograph can hold.
1. Abstract / Fragmented Body
Close framing, scale distortion, and high tonal contrast reduce the figure to compositional geometry. The body becomes landscape, topography, architectural detail. Identity is held deliberately at a distance.2. Material Transformation
Pigment, paint, powder, water, smoke, projected light — physical materials act on the body and are recorded in a single exposure. The skin is not represented; it is activated.3. Veil / Atmosphere / Uncanny
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. Spatial Dialogue
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. Kinetic / Performative
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. Inner Portrait / Vulnerable Body
The most intimate register of the exhibition. Close portraits, withdrawn gestures, the body in emotional weight. Where the other five registers work through transformation, this one works through quiet attention.Beyond the Berlin Presentation
The Berlin exhibition functions as an opening chapter rather than a closed event.
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.
Curatorial Methodology
The fourteen photographers in The Nudes of Istanbul were not selected through open call. They were invited from a community that has formed across fourteen years of curated studio sessions in Istanbul — small-group workshops, designed and led by the curator, organised around a shared lighting design and a single model. 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's exhibition history of nude photography — documented in Işık Özdal's 2011 academic survey for Süleyman Demirel University — runs from 1988 onward but consists almost entirely of solo presentations by individual authors, with no published volume on the subject since Modiano's 2004 book. Almost none of the participating photographers in The Nudes of Istanbul 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. Die Akt Galerie is among the rare professional Berlin galleries dedicated specifically to art-photographic practice on the body — a programmatic specialism that, in this case, is read as a strength rather than a niche: the project is shown in a venue whose curatorial focus matches its subject, alongside a publication that places the work within the wider conversation in contemporary photography.
Photographic Lineage
The work in The Nudes of 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
A Turkish lineage of nude photography exists, but it has been intermittent rather than cumulative. The exhibition record, traced in Işık Özdal's 2011 academic survey for Süleyman Demirel University (Türk Fotoğrafında Nü Sergilerin Analizi), runs from Çerkes Karadağ's Nüans (Cologne 1988, Istanbul 1989) — the first nude photography solo exhibition in the Turkish canon — through the experimental practices of Mehmet Koştumoğlu (Polanü 1995, Gri 2001, Bodygram 2004), Levent Öget (Unnu 1999), İbrahim Göğer (Gıyabında 1997 and Red 2002, the first male-nude exhibition in Turkey), Orhan Alptürk's Öteki Denizler (2003), Saygun Dura's Benim Gerçeğim (2005), Cem Boyner's Uzaktaki Yakın, Yakındaki Uzak (2005), and Niko Guido's Çıplak (2011). Earlier figures — Baha Gelenbevi, Mustafa Kapkın, Şahin Kaygun's Polaroid work of the 1980s, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's late-1980s constructed photographs — sit upstream of this exhibition history.
Özdal's survey identifies four conditions that have shaped the field. The published record is thin: Alberto Modiano's Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak (Bileşim Yayınevi, 2004) remains the only book-length treatment, and no comparable volume has appeared in the twenty-two years since. The practice has been individual rather than collective: each exhibition is the work of a single author, with — in Özdal's words — “no successors or reinterpreters.” Authorship has been almost exclusively male: the exhibition record up to 2011 contains no female photographers. The work has rarely engaged contemporary art photography directly: with isolated exceptions (Koştumoğlu's Bodygram, Çakar's Cam Evlerin Kadınları), the field has stayed within studio-formal idioms.
The fifteen years since Özdal's survey have not produced a different overall picture, but a handful of exhibitions are worth holding in view. In 2011 — the same year Özdal published his survey — CANAN's Türk Lokumu at X-ist used the artist's own body in a five-channel video installation reanimating Ingres's Grande Odalisque, Matisse's Odalisque on a Turkish Sofa, and Renoir's Odalisque — the most direct dismantling of the Orientalist nude in Turkish contemporary art. Sarp Kerem Yavuz's Maşallah series — Ottoman ornament projected onto male nude bodies, a queer reading of the Orientalist tradition — entered Istanbul Modern's permanent collection in 2013 and culminated in Muhteşem Yüzyıl at Anna Laudel Istanbul in 2023. In 2015–2016, the most substantial Turkish institutional engagement with the nude appeared not in photography but in painting: curator Ahu Antmen's Üryan, Çıplak, Nü: Türk Resminde Bir Modernleşme Öyküsü at Pera Museum (25 November 2015 – 7 February 2016) traced the historical formation of nude as a genre in modern Turkish art and theorised — through her catalogue essay — how the nude has been culturally legitimised in an Islamic context as “a sexually neutralised artistic perception.” Antmen's frame is the closest Turkish-language curatorial reference to the position this exhibition takes. In 2016, the kadıNgözÜyle collective — twenty-two Turkish women photographers — exhibited a male-nude series at Galerie Neuf in Nancy after Turkish galleries declined to host the work; the displacement to a French venue prefigures the structural condition this exhibition also responds to. In 2021–2022, İpek Duben's retrospective Ten, Beden, Ben at SALT Beyoğlu brought her Manuscript 1994 photographs of her own nude body into a major Istanbul institution for the first time. And in 2025–2026, Nilbar Güreş's Kadife Bakış at Arter became the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Turkey, opening the same season she was selected for the 61st Venice Biennale Turkey Pavilion. These are punctuations rather than a continuous tradition. Read together they confirm Özdal's picture rather than soften it: institutional uptake remains rare and late, women's authorship enters the record very recently, and projects that engage the body directly still travel abroad — Nancy, Düsseldorf, Berlin — more easily than they exhibit at home.
The Nudes of Istanbul is positioned in relation to those four conditions. The accompanying publication appears as one of the very few book-length projects dedicated to nude photography in Turkey since Modiano's 2004 volume. It presents a sustained collective practice rather than a single author. Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women, against an exhibition history that, until recently, had none. And it organises the work explicitly through six contemporary registers — abstraction, material transformation, atmosphere, spatial dialogue, kinetics, inner portrait — that engage current frameworks of art photography rather than retreating from them. The exhibition does not claim to close any of these gaps. It claims to mark the point at which a different conversation becomes possible.
That conversation has, in this publication, an explicit interlocutor. The book opens with an essay by Engin Özendes, founder of Istanbul Modern's Photography Department and one of the principal authorial voices in the historiography of Turkish photography. Her contribution places the project, in her own reading, into the same trajectory that runs from Modiano (2004) through Özdal (2011); the curatorial introduction by Burak Bulut Yıldırım then takes up that thread from the position of the practice itself.
Theoretical References
The curatorial framework draws on the following primary references.
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
- Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, 1972.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2012 (1945).
- Modiano, Alberto (ed.). Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak. Bileşim Yayınevi, Istanbul, 2004.
- Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16:3, 1975.
- Özdal, Işık. “Türk Fotoğrafında Nü Sergilerin Analizi.” SDÜ ART-E, May 2011.
- Özendes, Engin. Türkiye'de Fotoğraf. Yapı Kredi Yayınları, Istanbul.
- Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
The full bibliography — including primary sources for the post-2011 exhibitions discussed above — appears in the publication.
Press & Institutional Enquiries
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.
Curators, art critics, and academic researchers working in contemporary photography, nude art, Turkish visual culture, or body politics are particularly welcomed. Reading copies of the publication can be provided in advance of the opening.
Curatorial statement
Photographer biographies
Press release