Jamie Leptien on the Pera Museum’s homage to Parajanov
By Jamie Leptien | February 9, 2019
Sergei Parajanov’s ‘Repentance (Variations on themes by Pinturicchio and Raphael)’, 1989 (courtesy of the Pera Museum) Occupying the fourth and fifth floors of Istanbul’s Pera Museum until March 17,
Parajanov with Sarkis is an...
Posted in
Exhibitions, Film, Where the Art is
Musical Shares: Gilad Atzmon, Sarp Maden and Friends play Istanbul’s newest jazz venue
By John Shakespeare Dyson | February 3, 2019
The Gilad Atzmon / Sarp Maden Quartet – with Gilad Atzmon (above) on saxophone, Sarp Maden on guitar, Ercüment Orkut on piano, Eylem Pelit on bass guitar and Derin Bayhan on drums – performed in a curtain-raising event at Istanbul's new jazz club Touché, located beside the PSM (Performance Arts...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Jazz, - Musical Shares
Find us this week at LARTA, the fabulous antique rug and textile art fair in Battersea Park
By Cornucopia | January 23, 2019
_x_620_414_85.jpg)
You can find Cornucopia at LARTA, the London Antique Rugs and Textile Arts Fair, this week, marooned in a lagoon of glorious textiles in Battersea. LARTA shares the Battersea Park venue with the Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair. The two fairs continue until Sunday. E-tickets are available to subscribers (write...
Posted in
Textiles
The bright and melancholy photographs of Stefano Benazzo
By Cornucopia | January 19, 2019
In the Rahmi M Koç Museum on the Golden Horn, an institution that has rescued so many from the wrecker's yard, it is salutary lesson to see what might have been: vessels that have succumbed to the vicissitudes of time and tempest. Stefano Benazzo – photographer, sculptor, model maker (both...
Posted in
Main Featured Turkey
The Levantine adventures of an Italian small-town lawyer
By Cornucopia UK | January 17, 2019
Author John Mole set the clock back to the times of Chaucer in his Anglo-Turkish Society/Royal Anthropological Institute lecture in Bloomsbury last night as he described a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St Catherine in Egypt and the holy sites of Jerusalem undertaken by an Italian lawyer. So short in...
Weaving order into chaos: the kilims of Belkıs Balpınar
By Cornucopia | January 17, 2019
In New York's Ethan Cohen Gallery opens its first solo exhibition of her work, the Turkish textile artist, Belkıs Balpınar, pioneer of the contemporary art kilim, asks her weavers to defy gravity, and space, by introducing curvilinear shapes and vortexes into her flatweave designs. In this short essay the gallery...
By John Shakespeare Dyson | January 17, 2019
After a hiatus caused by a stay in delectable Tameside for the run-up to the festive season, I am back in Istanbul. On Saturday, January 12 I braved the appalling weather (almost as cold, wet and dismal as Manchester in August) to listen to a recital by Freddy Kempf (pictured...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Classical Music, - Musical Shares
The Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) names Cornucopia title
‘Best Book of the Year’
By Roger Williams | January 13, 2019
Cornucopia Books has taken its place in publishing history by winning the 2019 Felicia A. Holton Book Award, the top award from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the Society for Classical Studies. Described as a ‘major work of nonfiction, representing the importance and excitement of archaeology to the...
Posted in
Archaeology, Books
A Conversation With Ill
By Evin Ashley Erdoğdu | December 22, 2018
All photos copyright Evin Ashley Erdoğdu and used wıth permission Thousands of years ago, our paleolithic ancestors had the impulse to create art, adorning the Lascaux cave walls in paintings of animals, human figures and abstract signs. Their art remains on those walls today, marking the birth of the human...
Posted in
Contemporary Art
By Emily Arauz | December 13, 2018
On December 11 the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) announced the title and theme of the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent. Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the upcoming biennial, described the inspiration for the exhibition and title at a press conference held at the Lycée Français Privé Saint-Joseph...
Posted in
Contemporary Art
Now that was a party. The Freelys and Cornucopia celebrated the launch Stamboul Ghosts with a time-bomb of a cocktail…
By Maureen Freely | December 7, 2018
They were serious romantics, the adults who brought me up. They came to Robert College in the decades after the Second World War not just to teach, but to explore Istanbul, forgotten by the world in those days, and to them a revelation. They took us children with them on...
Posted in
Books, Culinary Arts
By Cornucopia | December 5, 2018
A highly atmospheric take on Constantinople (Italian School, c1600) – every detail an Oriental Christmas card waiting to to be made, this monumental oil painting is being offered by Christie's London in its Old Masters evening sale (December 6, Lot 26, est £100,000–150,000). An inscription at the back of the...
By Jamie Leptien | November 30, 2018
The 2019 Istanbul Theatre Festival rolls into its final weekend, and for the first time in three years, I didn't miss it all. This past Thursday I joined a full house in the Zorlu PSM Main Theatre for the second of two four-dance performances given by Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT)....
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts
By John Shakespeare Dyson | November 23, 2018
The second in the series of Istanbul Recitals for the 2018–19 season was given by the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Emirgan on November 13. For this recital the usual concert hall – The Seed – was not available, so the performance had to take...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Classical Music, - Musical Shares
Cornucopia and Turkey’s finest photographer
By Cornucopia UK | November 12, 2018
Writing in the current issue of
Cornucopia (No.57), Andrew Finkel penned a portrait of Turkey’s most famous photographer, whom he had known. The Ara Güler Museum had recently opened in Bomontiada, on Güler's 90th birthday. "If you close your eyes a try to recreate a post-war Istanbul,” Finkel wrote, “it...
By John Shakespeare Dyson | November 11, 2018
The next concert in the current series organised by Talent Unlimited, a British charity that supports young musicians and gives them a platform on which to demonstrate their skills, is to be given in St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London, on Thursday November 29 at 7 pm. On the programme are...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Classical Music, - Musical Shares
Touting for the history traveller at WTM
By Cornucopia UK | November 6, 2018
Heritage is a central theme of Turkey’s stand at this year’s World Travel Mart in East London, which opened yesterday. ‘Home of Göbeklıtepe’ was a typical banner and the ‘Home’ theme continues with 'Home of Rumi', 'Home of 'Haghia Sofia' and so on. Tourist numbers have been up this year,...
Autumn colours from the Tekfen Philharmonic and the brilliant Omar Tomasoni
By John Shakespeare Dyson | October 30, 2018
The Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra has recently enlivened our late-October evenings with a series of concerts in Ankara, Mersin and Istanbul entitled
Autumn Classics. The one I attended on Friday took place in the Lütfi Kırdar Concert Hall, Istanbul. The first half was largely devoted to works showcasing the talents of...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Classical Music, - Musical Shares
Musical Shares continues with a concert on Heybeliada
By John Shakespeare Dyson | October 27, 2018
_620_418_85.jpg)
In September I attended a concert in the old Greek seminary on the island of Heybeli (photographed here by Monica Fritz). Heybeli has always been my favourite among the Princes’ Islands, those oases of peace and quiet in the Sea of Marmara that face the beskyscrapered coastline stretching eastwards from...
Posted in
Music & Performing Arts, - Classical Music, - Musical Shares
New galleries at the British Museum make the connections
By Cornucopia UK | October 22, 2018
These exquisite pages depicting a woman in a bathhouse, with cut-outs of cyclamen, lilac, roses and tulips, are from a 'Persianate' Costume Album commissioned by Peter Mundy, an employee of the Levant Company in Istanbul from 1617 to 1620. It is just one on many fabulous items on show at...
