Director:  Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, Lea Massari
Italy, 143', 1960, black & white
Italian with Turkish subtitles

The first of Antonioni’s breakthrough film trilogy, L’avventura proved an “adventure” from its rough, perilous production to its troubled release, including charges of obscenity and immorality. Using a widescreen canvas for the first time, Antonioni’s signature experimental narrative style blossoms fully and radically around absence, initially in the form of a woman’s mysterious disappearance during a trip to an island. The ensuing search is composed of behaviors not fully comprehensible, desires abandoned and central plot points forgotten. Upon this dizzying post-war terrain, truth, love and happiness are unequally exchanged for money, sex and status, and all characters suffer from an emotional seasickness. Antonioni describes with stunning precision his indistinct, inarticulate explorers apprehensively treading toward, in his words, “the moral unknown.”

Story of a Love Affair

Story of a Love Affair

Red Desert

Red Desert

Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point

Identification of a Woman

Identification of a Woman

L’Avventura

L’Avventura

Blow-Up

Blow-Up

The Mystery of Oberwald

The Mystery of Oberwald

Shorts

Shorts

From two portraits of children…

From two portraits of children…

The Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation’s Orientalist Painting Collection includes two children’s portraits that are often featured in exhibitions on the second floor of the Pera Museum. These portraits both date back to the early 20th century, and were made four years apart. One depicts Prince Abdürrahim Efendi, son of Sultan Abdulhamid II, while the figure portrayed on the other is Nazlı, the daughter of Osman Hamdi Bey.

The Success of an Artist

The Success of an Artist

Pera Museum presents an exhibition of French artist Félix Ziem, one of the most original landscape painters of the 19th century. The exhibition Wanderer on the Sea of Light presents Ziem as an artist who left his mark on 19th century painting and who is mostly known for his paintings of Istanbul and Venice, where the city and the sea are intertwined.

Reminiscences of Motifs

Reminiscences of Motifs

As artisanship became a part of artistic practices with the blurring of art and craft, the use of traditional motifs has also flourished. In this context, how are these motifs currently structured or designed beyond their traditional connotations?