The Victoria and Albert Museum opened Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires on November 7, 2026, and the exhibition, which runs until May 9, 2027, has become an unexpected focal point for a conversation about where Turkish art now lives. The show looks back across centuries of the city's history, but the artists and curators talking about it are increasingly working from outside Turkey altogether.

The shift follows a wave of emigration that began after 2016, when political pressure and a deteriorating economy pushed many artists, curators and writers to leave. Inflation, which peaked at 85.5 percent in October 2022, made sustaining a practice at home still harder, and the result has been a scene that now operates across borders, with Istanbul and London as its two main poles.

The human cost of that displacement is visible in individual stories. Artist Cansu Yildiran was detained after photographing Istanbul Pride in June 2025 and remains subject to a travel ban, and is now based in Basel. Meanwhile Istanbul Modern's director Celenk Bafra has kept the museum's programme running at home, and the gallery Dirimart opened a London space in 2025, giving Turkish artists a foothold in the British capital. The artist Elif Uras, whose work draws on the traditions of Iznik ceramics, is among those whose practice bridges the two cities.

The institutional calendar reflects the same split attention. Istanbul Modern is showing Beneath the Same Blue, a survey that runs from September 8, 2026 to December 31, 2027, while the London project space Flatmates 37 presents SOFT SERVE, a show of work by Turkish artists that runs until November 14. Together they describe a scene that has not so much left Turkey as learned to live in two places at once.