Life Seeping Through Concrete: Su Yücel and ‘The Pupils of the City’ at Galeri Diani
Turning off from Beyoğlu’s masonry facades onto Bostanbaşı Street, the city’s relentless drone steadily yields to the neighborhood’s distinct interior cadence. Stepping across the threshold of Galeri Diani, the asphalt grey dissolves entirely, surrendered to the hues of soil, wind, and ancient flora breathing obstinately beneath the shadow of a sprawling metropolis. In inaugurating the season with Şehrin Gözbebekleri (The Pupils of the City), seasoned artist Su Yücel does far more than exhibit pictures mounted on a wall; she lays bare the city’s overlooked, trodden-upon, yet stubbornly vital capillaries.
On view through 1 November 2026, the exhibition is worlds away from conventional landscape painting or an embalmed pastoral ode. On Yücel’s canvases, nature is never an inert backdrop to be admired from a distance, but a visceral presence that breaches the frame through sound, scent, granular texture, and grit. The artist casts species woven deep into Istanbul’s collective memory—the Bosphorus flax, the arrestingly delicate Istanbul sweet pea, Riva mullein, and crocuses nudging through pavement cracks—as treasured focal points, the figurative “pupils” of the city. Beneath dense, layered pigments hums the quiet skirmish between the surrounding urban sprawl and wild hackberry, incandescent broom, and crimson firethorn.
What lends the show its particular charge is Yücel’s formal and material generosity. Moving beyond two-dimensional wall works, the installation features freestanding triptychs clad in bookbinding cloth, holding their own weight like classical illuminated manuscripts. Parting laterally like leaves in a codex, these surfaces blur the boundary between painting and sculptural object. Most compelling are the compositions executed across reclaimed olive oil tins, which drop the viewer squarely into the vernacular memory of Anatolia and the Aegean. Applied over oxidized metal, cold tin, and the faint patina of cured oil, her kinetic brushwork radiates an intimate warmth tied directly to the soil, manual labor, and the domestic hearth.
This polyphonic vocabulary is hardly accidental. Having designed a postage stamp as a child prodigy, studied under Sarkis Zabunyan at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, and developed a multifaceted visual practice spanning scenography and cinema, Yücel has spent decades attuned to the field through documentary filmmaking and grassroots women’s workshops stretching from Tarlabaşı to Diyarbakır, Karaburun to Lesvos. Şehrin Gözbebekleri is consequently no detached studio concept, but the distilled essence of hands plunged into soil, communal memory, and documentary witness.
Moving through the galleries, one is met neither with nostalgic eulogy nor grim despondency. In chronicling endangered species, Yücel refuses to take refuge in melancholia; rather, she marshals an unvarnished, audacious hope. The project’s concurrent workshops further dismantle passive spectatorship, inviting the public to collectively observe these urban nuclei and engage in a communal creative process.
For those looking to step away from the urban fray and observe firsthand the quiet resilience taking root beside us, Galeri Diani stands as one of the season’s most tactile, heartfelt destinations. A visit to Beyoğlu before 1 November is essential: this exhibition whispers of how life surges forth with fierce defiance, tucked inside the very details we so routinely overlook.
