Exhibitions
Semiha Berksoy's expanded opera in art at Istanbul Modern
With Aria of All Colors — titled Tüm Renklerin Aryası in Turkish — Istanbul Modern presents the most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Semiha Berksoy (1910–2004), one of the most singular figures in 20th-century Turkish modern art and visual culture. This exhibition, open to the public until September 6, 2026, brings together more than 200 works that showcase the astonishing polyphony of her creative output: from drawing and painting to theater, opera, film, and literature.
Berksoy, considered not only Turkey's first great dramatic soprano but also a pioneer in fostering synergy between artistic disciplines, translated the intensity of the stage experience into visual art. Trained simultaneously in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, drama, and music, she also became the first Turkish woman to perform leading operatic roles on European stages. Her work challenges the boundaries between lived experience and representation: body, voice, and dramatic narrative intertwine with painterly gesture in a profoundly personal poetics.
The exhibition, curated by Öykü Özsoy Sağnak (Director of Exhibitions at Istanbul Modern), Deniz Pehlivaner and Yazın Öztürk, remakes the retrospective conceived at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2024–2025) under the title Singing in Full Color , expanding and reorganizing it to articulate a thematic discourse that runs through personal mythology, memory, identity and performance.
Instead of following a conventional chronology, the exhibition proposes symbolic nuclei, the most emblematic being the so-called "Red Room" — a space that evokes the theatricality of the stage and frames paintings inspired by operatic characters such as Tosca, Salome or Fidelio, figures that become extensions of Berksoy's own body and life experience.
Alongside these operatic paintings, the exhibition displays early drawings, self-portraits, and portraits, as well as his celebrated “sheet paintings”: works executed on everyday fabrics that reveal the intimate texture of his practice. This selection engages in dialogue with photographs, archival documents, sound recordings, and film fragments—including excerpts from İstanbul Sokaklarında, considered Turkey’s first sound film in which he participated—weaving a complex narrative where life and work reflect each other.
Aria of All Colors is a historical retrospective, and it is also an invitation to experience Berksoy's work as an act of aesthetic and vital resistance, where color, voice, body and stage narrative are interwoven in a visual symphony of unique vibration.
