Located in the fancy Pera neighborhood in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district, the Pera Museum is currently hosting two exhibitions: "Look at Me!: Portraits and Other Fictions from the 'la Caixa' Contemporary Art Collection" and "RE/FRAMING LOUIS KAHN: Photographs by Cemal Emden - Drawings and Paintings."

The exhibition "Look at Me!: Portraits and Other Fictions from the 'la Caixa' Contemporary Art Collection," examines portraiture, one of the oldest artistic genres, through a number works that define our times. Paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos shape a labyrinth of gazes that invite spectators to reflect themselves in the social mirror of portraits.

The other exhibition, "RE/FRAMING LOUIS KAHN: Photographs by Cemal Emden - Drawings and Paintings," features drawings and photographs of the architectural wonders created by Louis I. Kahn, the architect, thinker, artist and "architectural guru," who is considered among the leading figures of 20th-century architecture.

Curated by N. Müge Cengizkan, the exhibition's focus on Cemal Emden's photographs that reframe Kahn's buildings through different themes. Sponsored by Seranit Group and supported by Arçelik, the exhibition also offers new insights into Kahn's ideas through his visionary writings, which have been translated into Turkish for the first time.

RE/FRAMING LOUIS KAHN

Set to run until March 4, 2018, "RE/FRAMING LOUIS KAHN: Photographs by Cemal Emden - Drawings and Paintings," consists of drawings and photographs of key buildings and sites in Pennsylvania, where Kahn spent his whole life, worked, taught and practiced, as well as in Dhaka and Ahmedabad. It also features Kahn's own sketches, drawings, and paintings.

The photographs revisit Kahn's works from the perspective of "tectonics through light," "constructing the place," and "assembling the program," constitute the backbone of the exhibition, which also includes short films where architect-instructors from Middle East Technical University (METU), University of Pennsylvania, and Kahn's Master's Studio talk about this extraordinary man. Selections from Kahn's books can also be found in the exhibition.

Edited by N. Müge Cengizkan and designed by Bülent Erkmen, the exhibition's catalog features Kahn's texts that have never been translated to Turkish before, including "Silence and Light", "The Room, The Street and Human Agreement", and "Law and Rule in Architecture." It also includes a selection of articles by N. Müge Cengizkan, Jale Erzen, Ahmet Gülgönen, Gönül Aslanoğlu Evyapan, Neslihan Dostoğlu, Cengiz Yetken, Yıldırım Yavuz, and Orhan Özgüner.

Architecture and Biographical Sketches

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 in Parnu, Russia (present-day Estonia), far from Philadelphia, where he spent his whole life, worked, fell in love, and took his last breath. He began to win his first awards with his paintings at a young age. In 1920, with a full scholarship offered by the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn enrolled in the School of Fine Arts, which offered the best architectural program in the U.S. at that time. He graduated in 1924 with the Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize, awarded to students for their "outstanding achievements."

In April 1928, he traveled around Europe for two years with the money he had spared and did numerous drawings and sketches. His itinerary started from London and continued to Amsterdam, then to the northern cities of Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Riga, and then to Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Munich. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, "There ... I met with the kind of architecture I was looking for."

Kahn left Yale University in 1955 and started to work at the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts, where he continued teaching until the end of his life. He became the most important figure in what would later be called the "Philadelphia School." In his "Master's Studio" offering a graduate degree in each of the two semesters during one academic year, Kahn left behind an astonishing legacy of teaching and advising to approximately 425 students from 40 countries.

Kahn's first solo exhibition was opened in White Art Museum (currently Johnson Art Museum) in 1964. Two years later, Kahn was at New York's Museum of Modern Art, with 186 original drawings, 22 models, and 69 large-size photographs. They were featured in the retrospective exhibition titled, "The Architecture of Louis I. Kahn."

Kahn participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1968 with his installation titled "Ambiente." A year later, his "Palazzo Dei Congressi," his only building project in Europe, was exhibited in an exhibition in Venice.

In his later years, he worked on some of his iconic buildings like the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Kimbell Art Museum, Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Indian Institute of Management, Yale Center for British Art and the Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. He also designed the National Parliament Building of Bangladesh, which is considered Kahn's magnum opus.

On his way back to Philadelphia from Ahmedabad, Louis Kahn suffered a heart attack and died at New York Train Station on March 17, 1974.

LOOK AT ME!

"Look at Me!: Portraits and Other Fictions from the 'la Caixa' Contemporary Art Collection" are set to run until March 4, 2018.

As Nimfa Bisbe Molin, the curator of the exhibition and the head of "la Caixa" Banking Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, mentions in her article, "Portraiture today encompasses multiple ways of producing images of the human condition and exploring the complex notion of identity."

Divided into four thematic sections titled "Spotlight on Emotion,""The Conventions of Identity," "The Memory of the Face," and "Masks and Other Fictions," the exhibition presents the works of Janine Antoni, Eduardo Arroyo, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christian Boltanski, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Esther Ferrer, Günther Förg, Curro Gonzalez, Stefan Hablützel, Roni Horn, Sharon Lockhart, Pedro Mora, Vik Muniz, Oscar Munoz, Bruce Nauman, Carlos Pazos, Cindy Sherman, Antoni Tapies, Gillian Wearing, and Sue Williams.The "la Caixa" Contemporary Art Collection ranges from the European post-war period to the present day and includes representatives of every country, style and movement.

The works assembled in this exhibition examine concepts of truth, appearance and representation, besides memory and fiction. Some put the normative canons of portraiture to the test, revealing its ruses and the conventions of society.

Painting exposes masks and make-up, whereas photography experiments with the potential of fiction to produce disconcerting effects of reality. Some artists are interested in the anonymity of portraits, while others dissect social roles and address the problems of representing identity. Some works define a figure or a face, while others depict some of the distinctive symbols of our society.

The portrait is a compendium of matter and spirit. Hopes and desires clash with the conventions and stereotypes of portraiture. Time, history and post-truth splatter and soak the contemporary interpretation of the portrait and self-portrait in our modern-day world, so complexly crammed with images. Visibility and opacity are inseparable in the current definition of the portrait. Studying and seeing the world through portraits is a real and fascinating possibility.

For all its seeming clarity and formal transparency, a portrait is a dark place that beckons, a labyrinth full of possibilities and paths that inevitably draw the curious spectator inwards.

The "la Caixa" Contemporary Art Collection

The "la Caixa" Contemporary Art Collection was established in 1985 and now has nearly one thousand works, which serve as the basis for thematic exhibitions that address universal issues and current concerns. The collection ranges from the European post-war period to the present day and includes representatives of every country, style, and movement. Its projects are characterized by a cross-cutting approach that aims to highlight commonalities and affinities between artists of very different generations and backgrounds, including some of the most important names in contemporary art.