Semiha Berksoy: Aria of All Colors

Semiha Berksoy: Aria of All Colors is a solo exhibition at Istanbul Modern given over to Semiha Berksoy (1910 to 2004), the Turkish opera singer and painter. It runs at the museum in Istanbul from 22 January to 22 November 2026. More than 200 works are on view: drawings, paintings and large "sheet paintings" made on everyday fabrics, joined by sound recordings, moving images, photographs and archival material.

The selection ranges across early drawings, the opera paintings that grew out of her stage roles, portraits, self-portraits and works about her mother, the painter Fatma Saime Hanım. Her daughter, the theatre and film artist Zeliha Berksoy, recalls her working on canvas, sheets, cardboard and even a refrigerator door. Among the works she singles out is "Woman Trapped in a Mangle". The exhibition image is a detail of Hapishanede Ziyafet (Feast at the Prison), 1999, from the Dr. Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı Foundation Collection.

Rather than following a timeline, the rooms are grouped by theme, with a "Red Room" at the centre designed to feel like a stage. A separate section draws on "Letter from the Grave", a short story Berksoy wrote in 1935. Two films in which she appeared are screened: İstanbul Sokaklarında (1931), billed by the museum as the first sound film made in Türkiye, and Söz Bir Allah Bir (1933). In the museum's words, the show sets out her "personal mythology" and her tie to performance.

The curators are Öykü Özsoy Sağnak, Chief Curator of Istanbul Modern, with the curator Deniz Pehlivaner and the assistant curator Yazın Öztürk. The project began as a retrospective curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, from 6 December 2024 to 11 May 2025. For Istanbul it was enlarged, with a new title, framework, design and choice of works. The museum calls it the most comprehensive exhibition on Berksoy ever presented in Türkiye. Flormar sponsors the exhibition. The catalogue gathers texts by Dikmen Gürün, Ayşe Güngör, Sam Bardaouil, Elif Uras, Deniz Pehlivaner and Öykü Özsoy Sağnak, with a conversation between Zeliha Berksoy and Yazın Öztürk.