“Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink;
it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location,
but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes,
but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.”
Gertrude Stein
Pera Film’s first program for the New Year is brewing with a selection of cinematic tales of coffee and the enigmatic culture surrounding it. As Gertrude Stein eloquently puts it, coffee is “a lot more than just a drink.” The film program Coffee’s Just an Excuse, Cinema’s the Muse, presented in the context of the Museum’s collection exhibition Coffee Break: The Adventure of Coffee in Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics, explores coffee and its culture in cinema through narrative fiction and documentaries. Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia; this “magic fruit” reached the land of the Ottomans through Yemen in the 15th century. Coffee soon assumed its place as a prestigious beverage in the palace and wealthy households. Over time, it not only generated its own rituals and ceremonies, but also played an instrumental role in the development of social life. The selected films for this coffee program travel into different aspects of the social life. Jim Jarmusch’s cult film Coffee and Cigarettes conjures up a nostalgic time when people actually took the time to converse with one another, a time when coffee and cigarettes were the props over which we shared our worries rather than the causes of them. Wayne Wang’s wanderings around Brooklyn with writer Paul Auster, which came to life as the film Smoke is about a tobacconist on an intersection in Brooklyn, providing a haven from the hustle and flow for his peculiar customers. Blue in the Face presents a series of improvisational situations strung together forming a collage of unusual characters; Straight to Hell a film about a gang of bank robbers finding their way to a surreal town full of cowboys who drink an awful lot of coffee. Inside Llewyn Davis tells the story of a struggling folk singer in 1960s New York City, Greenwich Village performing at a coffeehouse, the Gaslight Café, a countercultural institution showcasing poets and folk music. Coffee: Between Reality and Imagination is a cinematic collaboration between young Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, who together created a series of short films, all dealing with - coffee. The satirical documentary Coffee Futures weaves individual fortunes with the story of Turkey's decades-long attempts to become a member of the European Union whereas Hot Coffee investigates what lies behind America's obsession with “the civil wrong” through the McDonald's coffee case. The program’s final selection is a documentary A Film About Coffee, a love letter to, and meditation on, specialty coffee. A short animation film on coffee accompanies the program.
January 14
07:00 A Film About Coffee
January 16
07:00 A Film About Coffee
08:30 Smoke
January 17
02:00 Hot Coffee
06:00 Coffee and Cigarettes
January 18
14:00 Smoke
16:00 Blue in the Face
18:00 Straight to Hell
January 28
07:00 Blue in the Face
January 29
19:00 Hot Coffee
January 30
06:00 Coffee Futures
06:00 A Cup of Turkish Coffee
09:00 Inside Llewyn Davis
January 31
13:00 Coffee Futures
13:00 A Cup of Turkish Coffee
16:00 Coffee: Between Reality and Imagination
19:00 Straight to Hell
January 14
19:00 A Film About Coffee
January 16
19:00 A Film About Coffee
20:30 Smoke
January 17
14:00 Hot Coffee
18:00 Coffee and Cigarettes
January 18
14:00 Smoke
16:00 Blue in the Face
18:00 Straight to Hell
January 28
19:00 Blue in the Face
January 29
19:00 Hot Coffee
January 30
18:00 Coffee Futures
18:00 A Cup of Turkish Coffee
21:00 Inside Llewyn Davis
January 31
13:00 Coffee Futures
13:00 A Cup of Turkish Coffee
16:00 Coffee: Between Reality and Imagination
19:00 Straight to Hell
February 1
13:00 Coffee: Between Reality and Imagination
15:00 Inside Llewyn Davis
17:00 Coffee and Cigarettes
Istanbul Research Institute and Pera Museum organize Istanbul Unbound: Environmental Approaches to the City, an international, virtual conference that seeks to offer new insights on the complex layers of Istanbul’s urban landscape, to be held on April 8–11, 2021.
Pera Museum presents virtual event series “Stage of Plastic Dreams” in collaboration with HYPERCORTEX and with the support of the British Council. Organized in parallel to the A Question of Taste exhibition, the “Stage of Plastic Dreams” event series brings musicians and visual artists together in a virtual event space open to participants.
Pera Museum presents virtual event series “Stage of Plastic Dreams” in collaboration with HYPERCORTEX and with the support of the British Council. Organized in parallel to the A Question of Taste exhibition, the “Stage of Plastic Dreams” event series brings musicians and visual artists together in a virtual event space open to participants.
Focusing on contemporary approaches to miniature painting, the exhibition Miniature 2.0: Miniature in Contemporary Art brings together the works of 14 artists from different countries such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. The artists do not treat miniature solely as a historical object, they emphasize its theoretical potential as a contemporary art form.
Focusing on contemporary approaches to miniature painting, the exhibition Miniature 2.0: Miniature in Contemporary Art brings together the works of 14 artists from different countries such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan. The artists do not treat miniature solely as a historical object, they emphasize its theoretical potential as a contemporary art form.
The talk will focus on how the relationship between miniature painting and contemporary art in Turkey developed with particular emphasis on CANAN’s works in the exhibition and on the current forms into which miniature painting has evolved with an interdisciplinary approach that transcends periods.
The photographs exclusively produced for A Road Story exhibition by Laleper Aytek in Syros Island, Yusuf Sevinçli in Larnaca and Rhodes and Alp Sime in Çanakkale and Istanbul will be compared and contrasted in terms of their style, content and technique.
At the 180th anniversary of the invention of photography and the first photography trip that took place in 1839, A Road Story: 180 Years of Photography exhibition brings together interpretations and perspectives of photographers who explore the same route with today’s techniques. The talk featuring Coşkun Aral and Yekta Kopan, which will be organized as part of the exhibition, focuses on Aral's exhibited photographs of Mount Sinai, Gaza, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nablus, Sidon, Deir el-Qamar, Damascus and Tripoli as well as his experiences in those places.
In this talk within the scope of the exhibition, Murat Germen and Evrim Altuğ will be touching upon different themes such as the exploitation instruments and methods employed by the system dominating the world, and how local culture can be preserved under the overwhelming pressure of globalization, on the basis of the photographic works produced by Germen in various parts of Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor and Suez for the exhibition A Road Story.
At the 180th anniversary of invention of photography and the first photography trip that took place in 1839, A Road Story: 180 Years of Photography exhibition brings together interpretations and perspectives of photographers who explore the same route with today’s techniques. As part of exhibition, an exhibition tour with the curator Engin Özendes will be organized on January 19, at 19.00.
At the 180th anniversary of invention of photography and the first photography trip that took place in 1839, A Road Story: 180 Years of Photography exhibition brings together interpretations and perspectives of photographers who explore the same route with today’s techniques. As part of exhibition, an exhibition tour with the curator Engin Özendes will be organized on January 19, at 19.00.
Pera Film presents a retrospective selection of the films of Tomer Heymann, a documentary producer and director whose films focus exclusively on the human in their search for truth. The program Chosen Families: Tomer Heymann focuses on the director’s six documentary films that explore with an honest and sensitive perspective the concept of family, the ones we are born in and the ones we choose, and the feelings that arise from being together.
Pera Museum presents a talk on the video installation For All the Time, for All the Sad Stones, inspired by the Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection. According to the philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, the metric system which was presented in 1799 in France, was “for all people for all time”. The metric unit for mass, the kilogram was modeled based on a platinium-iridium object in 1889. However, the weight of this object changed 50 micrograms in the past 129 years. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures organized a summit to discuss the future of the metric system In November 2018. Kilogram is now standardized according to the Planck constant.
As part of “New Sounds”, a musical project inspired by Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation collections, the composition titled Rudan’s Coffee Break invites the audience to explore the main character Rudan’s mind, with the inspiration it takes from coffee’s adventure, from the bean to the cup.
In a talk as part of The Time Needs Changing exhibition, artist and academic Şeref Erol will explore the idea of “time as the enabler of our facilities, or in other words, our creations or conceptualizations” through correlations drawn with formal sciences (logic, mathematics) and philosophy.
Prof. Dr. Kaan H. Ökten, lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, Mimar Sinan Fine Art University will take an “inside look” at the existential perspectives of time and explore the domains and possibilities of being in his talk as part of The Time Needs Changing exhibition.
Geographer and film critic Jean Radvanyi is giving a talk as part of “Parajanov with Sarkis” exhibition, exploring Parajanov’s cinema in the Soviet context. Sergey Parajanov was born in 1924, in a family of Armenian merchants in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
Pera Museum, invites you to see The Time Needs Changing, an exhibition questioning our geo-politically controlled notions of time, with its curator Alistair Hicks and artist Nilbar Güreş!
The Time Needs Changing presents a thought-scape that draws from three different parts of the world; China, Turkey and India. The artists explore time through drawing, video, photography, installation and new media.
Raqs Media Collective, whose works Escapement (2009), Re-run (2013), Emperor’s Old Clothes Maquette (2016) and Hollowgram (2017) are shown as part of “The Time Needs Changing” exhibition at Pera Museum, will be talking about concepts they’ve been working on recently as well as their recent projects. The exhibition’s curator Alistair Hicks will be in conversation with Raqs following the talk.
Pera Film presents a selection of films to pay homage to Ronit Elkabetz who brought to life memorable female characters struggling for their liberty against the boundaries imposed by society. The Beyond Boundaries program presents nine films by Elkabetz which she directed or starred in. Ronit Elkabetz wrote and portrayed the role of Viviane Amsalem in the trailblazing and award-studded cinematic trilogy she created together with her brother, Shlomi Elkabetz, in 2004-2014. Shlomi Elkabetz will be in conversation following the screening of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem at 17:00.
As part of “New Sounds”, a musical project inspired by Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation collections, the composition “Measures” by Şirin Pancaroğlu and Bora Uymaz presents instrumental music inspired by the names of weight and length measures, as well as improvised performances accompanying poetry composed by divan and folk poets on the subject.
Pera Film proudly presents a selection of Bosnian director Danis Tanović’s films as part of Bosnia Sancak Culture Days. Presented as part of the program Legacy of the Memory director Tanović will be in conversation following the screening of No Man’s Land at 19:00.
Philosopher Ayşe Uslu opens a discussion on the portrait as a form of representation and its relationship with emotion and affect in art works as a part of the exhibition Look At Me! Portraits and Other Fictions from the “la Caixa” Contemporary Art.
Pera Museum presents a lecture and film event as part of the exhibition Re/Framing Louis Kahn: Photographs by Cemal Emden – Drawings and Paintings. Following the screening of the 1972 documentary Louis Kahn, Architect, Assoc. Prof. Funda Uz ve Prof. Dr. Neslihan Dostoğlu will analyze and talk about Louis Khan’s architecture, and set on a quest to discover what can be learned from him today.
Places are heterogeneous: A multiplicity of beings co-habit the place: humans, dogs, trees, worms, mushrooms... We are thrown-together and we will be, at different times and speeds, again dispersed. Our social setting is a bubble that draws together forms of life and materials, yet destined to burst out as we move on.
Gülşen and I met randomly at a film screening in Berlin in 2012. The coffee we drank in the foyer marked the beginning of a friendship and life-long collaboration between a gay cis-man of White Turk identity born in the West of Turkey, and a Kurdish cis-woman born in Dersim, who dedicated her life to activism and women’s work in Germany.
Chosen Families symposium, sets out from the question of ‘What happens when home ceases to be welcoming, when we leave home either voluntarily or involuntarily?’ and trails the quest for different kinds of belongings beyond family as an institution, the impact of experiences of conflict and resolution that emanates from such quests on the levels of society and sociability, as well as the role of affect in political activism.
Wilson’s installation, for the Istanbul Biennial, entitled Afro Kismet, includes a number of handcrafted items related to Ottoman culture and the roles of black people within it. Please join us in this conversation with the artist about the long history of black people in the region – many, if not most, with origins in the Ottoman slave trade – and today refer to themselves as Afro-Turks or Afro-Anatolians.
Join artist Nikita Alexeevfor a talk with curator Alistair Hicks, in relation to Pera Museum’s Doublethink: Double Vision exhibition. The talk will focus on Alexeev’s work “Iconostasis Tie”, which he produced specifically for the exhibition, and will also open a platform to discuss Moscow Conceptualism, a term that constitute the backbone of the exhibition.
Join artist Ali Kazma for a talk with curator Alistair Hicks, in relation to Pera Museum’s Doublethink: Double Vision exhibition. The talk will focus on Kazma’s video in the exhibition, “House of Letters” and on the recently published book “A Voyage around Our Minds” written by Hicks and composed around the video work.
As part of the exhibition “Doublethink: Double vision” Pera Museum is presenting a talk on Saturday May 27th at 14:30. Moderated by curator Alistair Hicks, the talk will be accompanied by the artists Waqas Khan, RAQS Media Collective.
As part of Pera Museum’s performance project Look Again, the artist duo AslieMk is presented a performance entitled In Situ, based on the exhibition Coffee Break: The Adventure of Coffee in Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics. The performance aimed to turn the exhibition space into an open and functioning laboratory, taking visitors beyond a one-way visual communication in relation to the works at the museum.
As part of Pera Museum’s performance project Look Again, Ekin Bernay’s performance 9 Stone is a reference to the Anatolian Weights and Measures collection exhibition. Active audience participation was required during this performance where Bernay will focued on questions such as the rediscovery of the relation between body and soul, the freedom of the body, and body weight. Participants hada unique experience during this performance.
Pera Film’s Forms and Politics of Yugoslav Experimental Film program brings together lesser known films made by artists in socialist Yugoslavia between 1963 and 1987. Sezgin Boynik, the curator of this program, will further discuss and contextualize the specific conditions of experimental filmmaking in socialist Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, the historical and social situation in which they were produced.
Pera Film proudly presents a selection of Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić’s films as part of Bosnia Sancak Culture Days.” Presented as part of the program Poetry of Reality Director Žbanić will be in conversation following the screening of Love Island at 14:00.
Presented as part of Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry exhibition, the artist Katherine Behar will give a talk titled “Optimized, not Optimistic”. In this talk, Behar presents her artwork and discusses the often confounding and sometimes rebellious ways that people and technologies manage to coexist in digital labor.
Artist Bahia Shehab will give a talk titled “Excavating the Future.” This event is presented in conjunction to the Jameel Prize 4 exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in partnership with Art Jameel, and in collaboration with the Pera Museum.
Join curators Salma Tuqan and Tim Stanley for a tour of the Jameel Prize 4 exhibition organised by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in partnership with Art Jameel, and in collaboration with the Pera Museum. The tour will offer a unique insight into the works of the exhibition.
Pera Film hosts a series of events in the context of the 35th Istanbul Film Festival, organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV). As part of the event series, Necati Sönmez, Reyan Tuvi, Can Candan come together with moderator Tül Akbal for a panel discussion on Saturday, April 16th at 17:00.
Pera Film hosts a series of events in the context of the 35th Istanbul Film Festival, organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV). As part of Festival Talks, Gianfranco Rosi, Jakob Brossmann and Melis Behlil come together on Sunday, April 10th at 18:00.
Pera Film hosts a series of events in the context of the 35th Istanbul Film Festival, organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV). “Burak Göral’s Guide to Selecting Films for Children” workshop will be held on Saturday, April 9th at 13:00.
As a result of its geographical location, Poland has always been in close contact with Eastern cultures. Coupled with the Orientalist tendencies of the 19th century, this cultural interaction has led to original outcomes in various fields of art and life. The "Orientalism in Polish Art" Symposium aims to examine these outcomes.
Pera Museum, in collaboration with Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), is one of the main venues for this year’s 15th Istanbul Biennial from 16 September to 12 November 2017. Through the biennial, we will be sharing detailed information about the artists and the artworks.
Tuesday - Friday 11.00 - 17.00
The museum is closed on Saturdays,
Sundays and Mondays.
On Wednesdays, the students can
visit the museum free of admission.
Full ticket: 25 TL
Discounted: 10 TL
Groups: 20 TL (10 people or more)