Pera Museum in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district has opened two exhibitions that approach memory from different perspectives, bringing together one of the U.K.’s most influential abstract painters and a rarely seen archive of early Republican-era Istanbul.

The new season pairs "Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction," curated by Alistair Hicks, with "Behind the Camera of the Republic," organized by the Istanbul Research Institute (IAE) to mark its 20th anniversary.

While one exhibition follows six decades of artistic experimentation, the other turns to thousands of press photographs that capture everyday life beyond official historical narratives.

Frank Bowling's 1st exhibition in Türkiye

The Bowling exhibition marks the first time the 92-year-old artist's work has been shown in Türkiye.

The exhibition places his paintings alongside works by Francis Bacon and Victor Willing, creating a dialogue between three artists whose approaches to painting developed in different directions while grappling with similar questions about form, emotion and transformation.

Bowling's work traces themes of migration, memory and place through more than 60 years of painting. His celebrated "Map Paintings" blur geography with personal history, reflecting a life shaped by Guyana, the U.K. and the United States.

As his practice evolved, he expanded his canvases with acrylic gels, polyurethane foam, collage and found objects, turning the painted surface itself into part of the artwork.

Curator Alistair Hicks said the exhibition is built around the idea that creation and destruction exist together in the act of painting.

"All three artists make us more aware of the fine line between order and chaos," Hicks said during the opening.

Rather than presenting Bowling through a conventional retrospective, Hicks said Bacon and Willing act as "interventions" that help visitors navigate Bowling's artistic journey from new angles.

The exhibition also brings four Francis Bacon paintings to Istanbul on loan from the "Sainsbury Centre," including "Study for Nude" (1952-1953) and "Portrait of Lisa" (1956), works that are rarely seen outside major European museums.

Looking behind the headlines

If Bowling's exhibition looks at memory through paint, "The Republic Behind the Scenes" does so through photography.

Curated by Idil Çetin and Ahmet Ersoy, the exhibition draws from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation's Press Photographs Archive, a collection of more than 90,000 negatives spanning roughly from the 1910s to the 1970s.

The archive, preserved and expanded over decades by photographer Selahattin Giz alongside work by Namık Görgüç, Cemal Göral and Faik Şenol, underwent a two-year restoration and digitization process before becoming accessible in 2013.

Instead of focusing only on iconic published images, the exhibition highlights contact sheets, cropped negatives and photographs that never reached newspaper pages.

One of the exhibition's strongest ideas is that photographs do not have to be technically perfect to hold historical value. Blurred frames, damaged negatives and cropped images become part of the story, revealing how photographs were edited, selected and sometimes rejected before reaching newspaper pages.

Visitors encounter scenes often left out of familiar images of the Republican era: children filling neighborhood streets, workers going about their day, crowds gathering after accidents, people waiting in courthouse corridors, as well as scenes of fires, demonstrations and elections. Together, these images build a more layered portrait of Istanbul and its everyday life.

"The archive's value lies precisely in the photographs that might once have been considered disposable," the curators said.

By preserving what they describe as the "raw texture" of everyday life, the exhibition offers a broader view of early Republican Istanbul and gives space to people and moments rarely centered in historical memory.

2 different paths to memory

Although the exhibitions differ in medium, both challenge familiar ways of looking at the past.

One asks how painting can be rebuilt through constant experimentation, while the other shows how forgotten photographs can reshape collective memory decades later.

"Sometimes you cannot build something new without first breaking it apart," Pera Museum Temporary Exhibitions Manager Begüm Akkoyunlu Ersöz said during the opening, describing the shared spirit behind the museum's new season.

"Frank Bowling: Creation and Destruction" runs until Jan. 31, 2027, while "The Republic Behind the Scenes" remains on view until March 28, 2027, at Pera Museum in Istanbul.