Istanbul has never just been a city. It has always been much more — a stage and a muse, for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who awakes in Istanbul and finds herself transformed, for James Bond in his high-stakes chases along the Bosphorus, and for many others. Istanbul continues to be imagined, reimagined, and immortalized in literature and on screen. “The Story Unfolds in Istanbul,” Mesher’s latest exhibition, has stitched the city’s narratives together as if a well-thumbed novel.
Curated by Ebru Esra Satici and Seyda Cetin, the exhibition draws from the private collection of Omer Koc, an art collector and the chairman of Koç Holding, to present 300 rare books, manuscripts, film posters, and ephemera anchored in Istanbul. Among them are Pierre Loti’s handwritten harem tale “Aziyade,” posh adventuress (and Woolf muse for Orlando) Vita Sackville-West’s “Poems of West and East,” and Eric Ambler’s “The Light of Day,” the inspiration for the cult-classic heist film “Topkapi.”
In the exhibition, the “Orlando” poster faces a particularly decadent relic — a bejeweled cigarette case gifted to Loti by Sultan Abdulhamid II. More modest curiosities include a French cigarette jar named the “Tete de Turc” (Turk’s head) and figurines of two jolly Janissaries.
Mesher has long explored shifting reflections of Istanbul in the Western imagination. “Istanbul as Far as the Eye Can See” (2023) visually captured five centuries of the city’s identity with panoramic depictions spanning from 1493 to the early 20th century.
This year, the curators have swapped sweeping cityscapes for the written word — grand epics, intimate diary entries and overlooked gems by the literary greats, including Jules Verne’s “Keraban, the Inflexible.”
Date: Through July 13
Location: Mesher Gallery
