Inside IST. Festival’s 15th Anniversary Arts and Culture Bash in Istanbul

When Demet Müftüoğlu Eşeli and Alphan Eşeli, the founders of the Istanbul-based global cultural platform ISTANBUL’74, dreamed up the first IST.FESTIVAL fifteen years ago, the world was a different place—more stable, more hopeful. Influencers didn’t exist, Instagram wasn’t a thing, and social media was still in its awkward tween years. The festival—a weekend of symposia, art exhibitions, intimate dinners, a glamorous gala, and late-night after-parties where dancing was non-negotiable—felt like a revelation. Several figures from the inaugural edition, then known as Istancool, such as Zaha Hadid, Gore Vidal, Sir V.S. Naipaul, and Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani, have since passed away. Others, like Gareth Pugh and then–Dunhill creative director Kim Jones, were at the start of their careers.

Demet and Alphan invited some of the world’s most creative minds across fashion, literature, music, art, film, design, and architecture—fashion designer Haider Ackermann, Ryan McGinley, Silvia Venturini Fendi, Tilda Swinton, Michèle Lamy, and Liya Kebede, among roughly 150 past speakers—to engage with their city, while welcoming Istanbul residents to learn from them. “We started to try to make sense of the world through art, music, and conversation,” Alphan told the audience at the new Renzo Piano–designed home of Istanbul Modern, the city’s contemporary art museum.

Now, the world feels very different. Markets are unstable, authoritarianism is rising, sociopolitical conflict is pervasive, and AI is transforming how we work and create. For this year’s IST.FESTIVAL 15, which took place from October 10 to 12, Demet and Alphan—along with Nazy Nazhand, the festival’s arts and culture director—chose a theme that captures the uncertainty of our time: What Is Really Real?

“You live in an age where everything looks like something, but nothing quite feels like anything. We scroll, we perform, we create, we edit our own realities,” Alphan said in his opening remarks. “And art, maybe more than ever, becomes the one place where something still hits you in the gut.”

IST.FESTIVAL 15 opened with Nearness, a neighborhood-wide exhibition centered on ISTANBUL’74 Arnavutköy, the platform’s Bosphorus-side gallery space. Sheree Hovsepian, the New York–based artist, projected her 2018 work The Difference Between Signals—a video of two hands—onto the orange roll-down metal grate of a storefront across the street. A few doors away, a tapestry by Turkish artist Nancy Atakan hung in front of a butcher shop. Inside ISTANBUL’74 Arnavutköy, highlights included a new painting and amphora installation by José Parlá inspired by Arabic calligraphy and regional ceramics; a sound installation by Ben Frost; and a Reading Room & Listening Room by Freeman & Lowe, Johan Kugelberg, and Alphan Eşeli, featuring books like Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village 1978–1983 and Dash Snow: Selected Works 2001–2008, alongside soundtracks from Pulp Fiction to Grease. Upstairs, Turkish artist Lal Batman showed a magnificent five-panel altar—a kaleidoscope of myth and fantasy adorned with gazing faces, jewels, flora, and fauna.

“AI doesn’t yet have the ability to fear death or to experience joy,” Jeff Koons told Timothée Verrecchia in the weekend’s first talk. “I hope we can learn to experience our senses on a higher level—and feel challenged by this technology to define what this biological experience really is.”

“I saw some work made with AI that I thought was good,” said Stefan Sagmeister, the graphic designer behind album covers for Jay-Z, Talking Heads, and The Rolling Stones, in conversation with Julia Halperin. “When I looked into it, I found those people did good work before AI—and the people who made terrible stuff before are still making terrible stuff.”

At Feriye the next day, Inez van Lamsweerde, half of the photography duo Inez & Vinoodh, declared, “I love AI,” before urging the audience to upload photos of their dogs into ChatGPT and ask it to turn them into humans. “I guarantee it’s the best thing—my favorite thing—and I’m recommending it to everybody.”

Other panelists were less familiar. “I thought ChatGPT was an automobile game,” confessed Lou Doillon, the artist, musician, and designer. “Obviously it’s not—but where I’m lucky is that I don’t like technology very much.”

Polish pianist Marcin Masecki, who appeared on a panel with his collaborator, the model, actress, and filmmaker Małgosia Bela, echoed Doillon’s sentiment: “I guess I’m old-fashioned. It hasn’t reached me yet,” he said, before admitting that his 13-year-old daughter had used ChatGPT for a pep talk before getting her ears pierced.

The crowd favorite for being really real was Kid Cudi—musician, actor, and artist Scott Mescudi—who will open an exhibition in Paris on January 30. “In my darkest times, you were the moon,” one fan told him after his talk with Alphan. “Your light guided me. You saved my life.”

On Saturday night, guests gathered for a gala dinner at The Marmara Esma Sultan, a former 19th-century Ottoman palace overlooking the Bosphorus strait. The evening captured what Demet and Alphan have cultivated over the past 15 years—a rare blend of glamour and intimacy, where artists, thinkers, and locals meet as equals.