Semiha Berksoy: The Memory of a Voice
On “Aria of All Colors” at Istanbul Modern.
A figure who turned life itself into a creative space. What defines Semiha Berksoy is not the work she made, but the way she could bring these different fields together within a single existence. In her, stage, painting, word and body cannot be separated; they stand side by side like different faces of the same inner need. This is why Berksoy is not only an artist but a model of how art and life can be woven into each other — a reminder that it is possible to create, to live and to remain true to oneself.
Walking through “Aria of All Colors” at Istanbul Modern, I thought about how tangible this feeling becomes. Some artists are remembered not for their works but for the world they built. Encountering Berksoy’s paintings felt less like following an artistic practice than bearing witness to an inner world still unfolding. The paintings were not trying to tell something; they carried the trace of a feeling already lived. In that moment, I felt again that art is sometimes not something to be explained, but a state in which one remains.
I remembered the choral sounds I heard at the weekend rehearsals of the TRT Istanbul Radio youth choir in Harbiye, which I joined in my youth. The great volume created by voices rising together opened a space where you could hear your own voice only within the voices of others. My bond with the stage began there; a bond less about being seen than about feeling. Looking at Berksoy’s paintings, I recognised the same feeling again. It was as if the voice were continuing, this time within the colours. The stage light had not gone out; it had only changed form. Colour had taken the place of voice, the gaze the place of movement, but what one felt was the same: art not as an expression, but as a state of being.
What moved me most in Berksoy’s paintings was that nothing seemed finished. The figures did not seem frozen in a moment; they were still transforming. The expressions on the faces were shifting rather than fixed; beauty and unease stood side by side on the same surface. So, looking at the paintings, what emerged was a sense not of an outcome but of a process. A space opened that recalled how art is less a search for flawless form than an honest relationship with one’s inner world.
As I moved through the exhibition, the paintings stopped hanging on a wall and began to hang in the space itself. The weight of the fabric, the urgency of the line, the unfinished state of the figures… All of it carried a transience that belongs to the stage. As if these images had been made not to be fixed, but to appear for a moment and vanish again. On the large surfaces, the figures hovered between costume and body, and the painting became less a portrait than a state. In that moment I understood that in Berksoy’s world, a painting is not something you look at; it is a stage you enter.
At some point I realised I was not standing in front of the paintings but walking inside the stage they had built. The figures on the large fabric surfaces stood less like paintings than like presences, as if the stage light were about to change and they would begin to move. As the scale grew, distance disappeared, and no boundary remained between viewer and image. In Berksoy’s world, the figure was not only a represented body, but something like a state that was still speaking. In that moment, the exhibition stopped being a place to look at and became a time to be inside.
Moving through the exhibition, Semiha Berksoy’s voice was not only something heard; it was like a tension circulating through the space. The voice rising from the videos was not trying to be flawless; on the contrary, it carried within it the possibility of breaking. Opera here was less about grandeur than about openness — about a voice emerging unhidden, unguarded. The more I looked at the paintings, the more clearly I felt it. The harshness of the brushstrokes, the directness of the faces, the colours that at times overflowed… All carried the same sense of risk. As if the voice lived on inside the canvas, and the paintings spoke where that voice fell silent. Opera had withdrawn from the stage, yet it had not lost its presence; it had only changed form. In that moment, the exhibition became less an experience of viewing than a space where the voice leaves the body and turns into image.
A voice sometimes withdraws from the stage, sometimes stays on the canvas, and sometimes settles into the memory of whoever is listening. Perhaps that is why encountering her feels less like seeing an artist than like remembering a voice. And some voices go on being heard long after they have fallen silent.