Currents at DEPO Istanbul: Tarabya Cultural Academy Turns 15 With a Video Exhibition

A residency is usually measured by what artists take home. Currents at DEPO Istanbul, on view from 5 to 22 November 2026, asks what they leave behind. The exhibition brings together video works by alumni of the Tarabya Cultural Academy — Germany’s artists’ residency on the Bosphorus — to mark fifteen years since the programme opened, and it does so in one of the most fitting rooms in the city: a former tobacco warehouse in Tophane that has become a byword for independent, critical programming.

Currents and the Tarabya Cultural Academy at 15

The Academy opened in October 2011 in the grounds of the German summer embassy in Tarabya, on the European shore of the upper Bosphorus. Since September 2012 it has hosted more than 220 artists working across visual art, literature, music, performance and film. For its anniversary it has built a season under the title Water Finds Its Way (Turkish: Su Akar Yolunu Bulur), running from October to December 2026 and reuniting more than fifteen former fellows with Istanbul partners they worked with during their stays. Currents is the season’s exhibition chapter at DEPO, supported by Stiftung Mercator and the German Consulate General Istanbul.

DEPO describes the selection as video works by alumni of different generations and disciplines, moving from the interior of the body outward into urban and rural space. That arc — body, street, landscape — is a useful way into a show that otherwise resists a single theme.

Who is in the show

The list reads like a cross-section of German and German-based moving-image practice, with strong Turkish and diasporic threads:

• Theo Eshetu (born London, 1958; lives in Berlin) is the senior figure: a pioneer of video installation and experimental film who took part in documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale in 2011, and whose work is in the collection of MoMA. He was a Tarabya resident in 2016, 2017 and 2018.
• Anahita Razmi (born Hamburg, 1981) works across moving image, photography, installation and performance, often re-staging cultural images between Iran and the West. She has shown at the 55th Venice Biennale and Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
• Sven Johne (born Bergen auf Rügen, 1976; based in Berlin) combines photography, film and text in research-led works; he showed at the Berlin Biennale in 2022 and won the Art Prize of the Akademie der Künste in 2016. His residency ran this summer.
• Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, both born in Ankara and based in Frankfurt, studied sculpture at Hacettepe University before the Städelschule; the duo received the ars viva Prize in 2012.
• Sarah Szczesny, based in Cologne and a former master student of Rosemarie Trockel, expands painting through animation and sound. Her work Eye Writing Blue is the exhibition image.
• Isabella Gerstner (born Ellwangen, 1980; based in Berlin) makes objects and site-specific installations; during her Tarabya stays she worked inside an Istanbul abrasives factory.
• Julia von Leliwa (born Hamburg, 1982) comes from fashion and costume design, with past work for Viktor&Rolf, Balenciaga and the theatre director Robert Wilson.
• Jasmin İhraç, a Berlin-based choreographer, dancer and sociologist, opens the evening with a live performance.

Why video, and why now

Choosing video as the common format is a smart curatorial constraint. Residencies are short; painting and sculpture made during a three- or four-month stay often leave with the artist. Video travels, and it carries a place inside it — the light on the water, the sound of a street, a body moving through a workshop. Several of these artists are not primarily filmmakers: Szczesny is a painter, Gerstner a maker of objects, von Leliwa a designer, İhraç a choreographer. Seeing how each of them uses the camera is part of the interest. Expect the moving image here to be treated as a material, not just a recording medium.

Note that DEPO has not published individual work titles beyond Szczesny’s piece, so the precise line-up of films is best discovered on site.

DEPO: a warehouse with a conscience

The venue matters. DEPO occupies a tobacco warehouse in Tophane that stored leaf until the 1950s, was used occasionally for exhibitions from the 9th Istanbul Biennial in 2005, and reopened as a renovated art space in January 2009. Run by Anadolu Kültür, it is explicitly non-commercial and has built its reputation on exhibitions and debates around history, memory and social questions in Turkey and its region; it has also housed the independent station Açık Radyo since 2012. A show about a German–Turkish exchange programme fits naturally into that mission of cross-border dialogue — and admission, as always at DEPO, is free.

Who should go

• Moving-image enthusiasts get a rare chance to see Eshetu, Razmi and Johne side by side in Istanbul.
• Artists considering residencies can see, in concrete form, what a stay on the Bosphorus has produced over fifteen years.
• Collectors and curators following German and Turkish-German practice will find a compact survey of names active between Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne and Istanbul.

Visiting information

DEPO, Hacımimi Mah., Koltukçular Çıkmazı Sok. No:1, Tophane, Beyoğlu, Istanbul. 5–22 November 2026; opening Thursday 5 November at 19:00, with Jasmin İhraç’s performance at 18:30. Open 11:00–19:00, closed Sundays and Mondays; free entry. Phone +90 212 292 39 56. The run is short — under three weeks — so plan ahead. Full details are on our Currents listing and on DEPO’s official exhibition page. For more openings in Istanbul, Ankara and abroad, see Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.