大象传媒

Join art critic Alastair Sooke on a journey of discovery to the world's most inspiring museums. In this episode, he visits Turkey's biggest city, Istanbul, as he explores the Pera Museum's collection of Orientalist paintings and discovers what the people of Turkey today feel about it. The Pera Museum has a unique collection that charts the relationship between East and West, and in particular how Western painters in the 19th Century appropriated the culture of the Near East for their own ends - an art movement today known as Orientalism. Alastair hears how Osman Hamdi, known as Turkey's only Orientalist, used the form to reclaim his own culture. He also meets Istanbul artist Ardan 脰zmeno臒lu, who tells Alastair how the Orientalist artists depicted women of the Ottoman era and takes him on a tour of the authentic Islamic works that inspire her at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art. During a studio visit with Ardan, Alastair discovers how she is reappropriating the imagery of the Orientalists on her own terms and in her own spectacularly colourful way.