Istanbul Modern, Turkey’s leading museum for contemporary art, will be opening its new building to the public on May 4, after five years of construction. The new building is located on Istanbul’s Karaköy waterfront, where the Bosphorus Strait and Golden Horn estuary meet, in a historic district where the museum’s original location was erected in 2004. The building, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, boasts a footprint of 110,000 square feet and features dedicated space for temporary and permanent exhibitions, educational programs, film screenings, and a café.
The new museum’s ground floor is walled with glass, offering a glimpse of two of the institution’s prized artworks – Richard Wentworth’s False Ceiling (2005) and Olafur Eliasson’s three-part, site-specific installation Your Unexpected Journey (2021), commissioned by the museum for the new space. A terrace atop the building hangs over a reflection pool and offers a panoramic view of Istanbul and its waterways.
The building’s silhouette recalls ships of different sizes, paying homage to the location’s long history as a harbor for travelers moving between Europe and Asia. The façade is adorned with scores of aluminum panels that glitter in the light like the scales of fish.
Istanbul Modern’s new building is designed to be transparent and accessible, reflecting the museum’s ethos of offering visitors a multifaceted experience with audience-oriented exhibitions and programs inspired by the artistic diversity of the present day.
The new building will debut with five exhibitions, each accompanied by a catalog. One of them is “Always Here,” a presentation of 17 works by women artists acquired by the museum since 2016, while another is “Floating Islands,” a show of 280 works that’s billed as the Modern’s most comprehensive collection exhibition to date. Works by Turkish artists including Ayşe Erkmen, Nil Yalter, and Fahrelnissa Zeid, as well as international figures such as Mark Bradford, Alicja Kwade, and Haegue Yang, will be displayed in the exhibition.
The project is part of the $1.8 billion Galata Port development plan to revamp the cultural and historical sites in Istanbul’s Karaköy neighborhood. Other new attractions to the site include restaurants, hotels, and a cruise ship terminal. After the closure of its former location in 2018, Istanbul Modern had relocated to a temporary location in the nearby Union Française building while construction of its new building continued.
With the opening of its new building, Istanbul Modern aims to solidify its position as Turkey’s premier institution for contemporary art and attract a larger audience of art enthusiasts and tourists alike.
