In recent years, the neighborhood known as Akaretler has become downtown Beşiktaş’s answer to gallery havens such as Nişantaşı or Beyoğlu. With branches of already-existing galleries like Galerist and C.A.M, as well as Akaretler-specific galleries like Rampa, Autoban, and Artlimits, Akaretler possesses at least half a dozen (and counting) vibrant new galleries, nearly all of them within shouting distance of each other in the picturesque row houses of Şair Nedim Caddesi.  

One of the more recent additions is art ON, which has been at Number 4 Şair Nedim Caddesi since March 2011. The gallery was originally supposed to be located at Number 10 (on  in Turkish), which is how it acquired its name; by coincidence, O and N are also the first initials of gallery owners Oktay and Nil Duran – and of course spell the English word “on.”

As a gallery, art ON is small (compared, for example, to its neighbor Rampa), consisting of a single floor with four rooms. Of these, one is used as office space (as is the basement floor) and one as a project room, leaving a small front room with a display window, and a larger room behind it, as gallery space. art ON’s small size and intimate atmosphere make it possible to focus carefully on, say, half a dozen works, without feeling impelled to stay in constant motion as one does at museums and large shows. (That’s not to say that art ON can’t host more than one artist at a time: four of the seven shows that have taken place at the gallery since its opening have been group shows). art ON has exhibited artworks in many different media – painting, photography, sculpture, and new media; the gallery’s director, Sinem Yılmaz, particularly aims to showcase the work of early-career artists.

Our visit to the gallery coincided with the current exhibition For a Moment by young artist Sümer Sayın, also one of the participants in the group show CROSSROADS at art ON last year. (Yılmaz prefers to have artists take part in group shows at first, prior to having their own solo shows). The fewer than a dozen pieces in For a Moment  have been well chosen and afford ample material for careful reflection. One section features acrylic on canvas works that play games with geography, such as the ironically-titled “The World is Round,” featuring an incomplete segment of a globe perched cerebellum-like upon a pedestal for our apparent edification, or “The Country of Transition,” in which a long strip of territory shaped like an ECG readout suggests gerrymandering or Bantustan-ing taken to an extreme. The wall drawing “Within the System 2” also brilliantly summons the image of a world map through nothing more than a series of quadrilaterals of varying size, as well as fluid outlines that – on closer inspection – have nothing in common with the actual coastlines of the world’s continents.

There are also a number of other sculptures and prints, plus Sayın’s signature “kinetic installations.” One of these, the cryptically-titled “Yes,” occupies the small display-window room, and consists of what look like the twitching segments of a digital clock. If one waits long enough, however, these segments are transformed into the word YES for a brief moment. This, according to art critic Andreas Schlaegel, is the “moment” referred to by the show’s title: “one surprising and brief moment…when things just click, and everything seems to make sense, the individual elements align and form the ultimate affirmative…it makes you want to wait, like a bride at a wedding, for the magical word to appear.”          

The presence of an artwork in a gallery display window, where it can be viewed just as easily from outside the gallery as inside (or, in some spaces, more easily), raises provocative questions about the role of art in public life. Admission to art ON, as with the vast majority of galleries, is free, thus making this enclosed space – partly visible from the street, yet distinct from it – something not quite private and not quite public. It should be said in this connection that art ON’s staff are extremely welcoming, friendly, and willing to answer questions, and on the evening we visited, the gallery door was literally open to the street, despite the cold. Yılmaz has spoken with praise of the 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency’s Portable Art project, which brought contemporary art to cultural centers in neighborhoods like Ümraniye, Tuzla, Fatih, and Küçükçekmece, districts normally considered beyond the artistic pale.

Thanks to the efforts of galleries like art ON, contemporary art is gaining wider recognition in Turkey – and also becoming a lucrative business. In Yılmaz’s opinion, the most significant event of the past 10 years in the Istanbul art world was the sale of Burhan Doğançay’s Mavi Senfoni (Blue Symphony) for well over a million dollars, reflecting Turkey’s burgeoning national economy, with its collectors who are willing to pay large sums for art. Just ten years ago, says Yılmaz, most Turkish artists needed to have day jobs simply to make ends meet, a fact which was the subject of a 2007 show Art & Money curated by Marcus Graf. Nowadays, producing works of art is a career, not just “a hobby or part time job.”   

art ON, Şair Nedim Caddesi No.4, Akaretler; P: (0212) 259 15 43