When visitors arrived at the artist Halil Altındere’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul in 2008, they found the gallery space closed and its windows covered with newspaper. The single work of art he had created was instead on display in a vitrine on the bustling pedestrian street outside: a life-size, hyperrealistic wax figure of an eccentrically dressed homeless man well-known in the neighborhood.

Pala the Bard (2008) contained elements that continue to define Altındere’s multidisciplinary practice nearly two decades later: a puckish, pop-culture-saturated take on current events and the art industry, a challenging of power relations and representation, and an eye toward broad audiences.

‘I didn’t want to create works that only the art world would understand,’ says Altındere, who will be participating in Art Basel Qatar in February 2026 with Pilot Galeri, the only gallery from Turkey to present at the fair. ‘[My work] is not just for the 300 art experts who have done their homework, it’s for the people walking down the street, transporting the artwork, cleaning the exhibition space.’

Born in 1971 to a Kurdish family in Mardin, a city in the southeast of Turkey, Altındere studied painting at university and moved to Istanbul in the mid-1990s to pursue the subject at postgraduate level. There, he fell in love with Pop Art, conceptual art, and the Fluxus movement.

‘I didn’t actually paint at all,’ he says with a laugh.

One early work, Welcome to the Land of the Lost (1998), which put the faces of people who ‘disappeared’ while in police custody in Turkey during the troubled 1980s and 1990s on postage stamps, is among those that built his reputation as a politically engaged artist. In other photographic and video pieces from the era, Altındere grappled wryly with issues of identity, as a citizen of Turkey and as an artist, such as with My Mother Likes Pop Art Because Pop Art is Colorful and My Mother Likes Fluxus Because Fluxus is Anti-Art, a pair of photographs from 1998 that depict the artist’s mother, dressed in traditional village attire, sitting on colorful floor cushions while reading art magazines.

Altındere was an instrumental figure on the Turkish scene in the 2000s, publishing and editing the first magazine on contemporary art in Turkey, Art-ist, from 1999 to 2007 and curating notable group exhibitions featuring up-and-coming artists. (He says he ‘paused’ his curatorial practice in 2010 because the scene became too commercial.) Altındere has since developed a strong international profile; his works have been exhibited at MAXXI, Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1, and other leading museums and biennials. Today, his practice encompasses a broad range of mediums, from painting, video, and photography to wax and bronze sculptures to Ottoman-style miniatures and robot-woven carpets, often made in collaboration with other artists, artisans, and the subjects of the works themselves.

‘Just because I had formal art education doesn’t mean I wanted to limit myself to that forever. Having an idea is what’s important, and when bringing that idea to life, I use whatever medium and material is most suitable,’ Altındere says over a cup of coffee in his studio – a sparse, almost cave-like chamber inside a 17th-century urban caravanserai near Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, where his neighbors include metalsmiths and textile traders. It is more of a ‘space for thinking’ than a traditional studio, admits the artist.

Lately, Altındere has been thinking a lot about surveillance, militarism, technology, and the display of power. One ongoing series comprises modern takes on traditional miniatures, created in collaboration with trained miniature artists and mashing up scenes of ceremonial Ottoman court processions with Teslas, Segways, and Star Wars characters. Another is a set of textile works that reference the Afghan ‘war rugs’ that emerged in the 1980s, but with images of Turkey’s much-exported (and lauded) Bayraktar-brand drones taking the place of Soviet and US fighter jets. Works from both series will be shown in Qatar along with Mobese (2011), a gold-plated sculpture of a pole fitted with surveillance cameras.

Since being invited to Manifesta in 2002 and Documenta in 2007, Altındere has found a global audience through the local specificity of works like Wonderland (2013), a video collaboration with the young rappers of Tahribad-ı İsyan. While rooted in the destruction of an ancient Romani neighborhood in Istanbul, it spoke to the broader threat that gentrification and commodification pose to cities and communities around the world.

At the 2019 Venice Biennale, Altındere presented Space Refugee (2016–2019), a multimedia project centered around the real-life story of Muhammed Faris, a Syrian cosmonaut who traveled to the Mir space station in 1987 but fled to Turkey as a refugee in 2012 after war broke out in Syria. The project also included detailed proposals for establishing a refugee community on Mars based on consultations with scientists from Nasa, human-rights lawyers, and architects.

The often thin line between reality and fiction is another theme running through the work of Altındere, who has staged a fake bank robbery on a busy Istanbul street (Miss Turkey, 2005); displayed a flipped-over police car in front of an exhibition venue in Berlin (The Monument of Direct Democracy, 2009); filled a gallery with wax figures of everyday people, including a street seller of counterfeit designer handbags (The Monument of an Illegal Street Vendor, 2012); and commissioned other artists to photograph and paint his own self-portrait (Self-portrait, 2023).

Altındere’s photograph Köfte Airlines (2016), created after Turkey made a EUR 6 billion deal with the EU to keep refugees from crossing into Europe, depicts around three dozen refugees perched on the fuselage and wings of a passenger airplane branded after a Turkish meatball. (There was actually a decommissioned plane in Tekirdağ, Turkey, bearing this name; it served as a restaurant and roadside attraction.) Five years later, when photographs of people in Afghanistan desperately, and fatally, clinging to airplanes to try and escape the fall of Kabul to the Taliban made the news, a Turkish paper ran the two images side by side, writing that ‘a work of art in 2016 became real in 2021.’

Altındere does not find this resonance so surprising. ‘I’m not locked in a studio painting, I’m doing work related to the period and the geography I’m living in, and sometimes artists can predict things before they happen,’ he says. ‘My work may seem very absurd to people, but it’s the reality I see.’