Cansu Çakar’s “Kiracı” (Tenant) at .artSümer, Istanbul: Miniature Painting and the Politics of Rent

When Cansu Çakar left her first studio — a tiny former tea house inside an old han in İzmir — she owed the landlord several months’ rent. She paid it the only way she could: with a print of one of her paintings. That small transaction between an artist and a property owner is the seed of Cansu Çakar’s “Kiracı” (Tenant) at .artSümer, Istanbul, on view until 12 December 2026. It is a show about the places we occupy without owning them — studios, homes, cities, histories — painted in a language borrowed from centuries-old manuscripts.

Who is Cansu Çakar?

Çakar was born in Istanbul in 1988 and lives and works in İzmir. She studied Traditional Turkish Arts at Dokuz Eylül University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, where she learned the disciplines of illumination (tezhip) and miniature painting. Rather than practising them as heritage crafts, she has turned them into tools of contemporary critique. Her exhibition record is unusually international for an artist of her generation: the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), “Replica of the Origin” at SALT Beyoğlu and a presentation at Axel Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp (both 2019), “Miniature 2.0” at the Pera Museum and the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), the Ural Industrial Biennial (2021), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022), “Translating Worlds” at Depo (2023) and “New Rarities” at Tate St Ives (2024). She is represented by .artSümer, where “Kiracı” is her second solo show after “Hat ve Hata” in 2023.

Rewriting the miniature from within

The Ottoman and Persian miniature was a court art: made largely by men, for men, celebrating sultans, battles and conquests. Çakar keeps its flattened space, its jewelled detail and its love of pattern, but changes who and what is pictured. Her drawings, paintings and collective workshops have repeatedly examined the position of women within oppressive social structures and the social, historical and architectural memory of Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures. At the Berlin Biennale she enlarged a sun motif from her miniatures into a wall painting, extending her 2020 series Labyrinth to Kybele, which set stories from the Turkish press against the Anatolian mother goddess to think about unlearning inherited power.

What “Kiracı” shows

The new exhibition consists mainly of watercolours on paper, joined by sculptural and installation elements — press reports describe a green organism wrapping itself around a stone structure. Its subject, according to the exhibition texts, is belonging, ownership and memory, and the spaces people take over for a time in order to live, make work and remember. On the paper, humans, animals, landscape and history are woven together; scenes refer to one another, building a world in which everything seems to exist at once and no single reading settles.

Three works give a sense of the range. The title piece returns to that first studio in İzmir’s Büyük Kardıçalı Han and the print-for-rent bargain — an image of art as currency and of the artist as permanent tenant. 1+1 — a title that echoes the shorthand of Turkish apartment listings for a one-bedroom flat — places a figure holding a box on the shore at Zeugma, the ancient city now submerged beneath the Euphrates: a home that has become literally uninhabitable. Avrat Taşı digs into gendered histories attached to a fifth-century stone in Constantinople and the old Avrat Pazarı (“women’s market”) district, linking the city’s oldest layers to questions of who is allowed to occupy public space.

.artSümer and Istanbul’s gallery map

.artSümer has been a long-standing presence on Istanbul’s contemporary scene and now operates in Beyoğlu’s Piyalepaşa area, part of the shift of galleries towards the Dolapdere–Piyalepaşa axis in recent years. Fittingly for a show about tenancy, the gallery’s own address has changed — older guides still list a Karaköy location — so check before you go. In a city where rents and displacement are daily conversation, “Kiracı” lands with particular force.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, Çakar offers something rare: a contemporary artist with deep traditional training and a biennial and museum track record across Istanbul, Berlin, Russia, Germany and the UK. Works on paper of this precision are also an accessible entry point into a practice already recognised by institutions.

For painters, especially those trained in traditional techniques, she is proof that a historical idiom need not be a cage. Watercolour handled with miniaturist control can carry contemporary politics — housing, gender, memory — without losing its beauty. Her method of letting small scenes cross-reference each other across a sheet is a compositional strategy worth studying.

Visiting information

.artSümer, İstiklal Mah., Piyalepaşa Bulvarı, Baruthane Deresi Sk. No:32/A, Beyoğlu, Istanbul (address per current listings — confirm with the gallery). 7 November – 12 December 2026. Listed hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11:00–18:30, closed Sunday and Monday. Contact: [email protected], +90 212 249 10 35 (from earlier listings). See the .artSümer website, our Cansu Çakar Istanbul listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.