Pera Museum

Pera Museum, private museum founded by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation. It aims to offer a diverse range of exceptional culture and arts services and has become one of Turkey’s leading art institutions since it opened to the public on June 8, 2005.

Situated in Istanbul's Tepebaşı neighborhood, the Pera Museum is housed in the renovated former Bristol Hotel, designed by the Greek architect, Achilleas Manussos in 1893, and also includes an adjacent five-story building. The museum displays a selection of works from the Orientalist Paintings, Anatolian Weights and Measures, and Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics collections belonging to the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation. The Orientalist Paintings Collection, which is one of Turkey's richest collections in its field, consists of works created in the between seventeenth and twentieth centuries by European and Ottoman artists. Some of the most interesting items in the collection are those of Osman Hamdi Bey’s, including his famous Tortoise Trainer painting. With almost 10,000 artifacts, the Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection is of global significance, mainly consisting of weights and measures instruments used in Anatolia from 2000 BCE to the present. The Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics Collection contains around 1,000 pieces reflecting a variety of periods and styles, which allow a detailed observation of the art form’s development from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

The museum has organized collaborative arts projects with leading museums, collections and foundations, including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the St. Petersburg State Russian Museum, the JP Morgan Chase Collection, the New York School of Visual Arts, and The Maeght Foundation. In addition to the long-term thematic exhibitions at the Sevgi and Erdoğan Gönül Gallery, the museum has also introduced art lovers to the works of master artists like Jean Dubuffet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rembrandt, Niko Pirosmani, Josef Koudelka, Joan Miró, Akira Kurosawa, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Goya, Alberto Giacometti, Grayson Perry, Cecil Beaton, and Giorgio de Chirico.

Pera Education is an informative program that introduces children, young people and adults to art. It also aims to increase overall awareness of museums by making art more accessible, enabling visitors to communicate with works on display and encouraging creativity. Pera Film has a wide-ranging program, run in parallel to the exhibitions, which gives museum visitors and cinema-fans a different experience through various activities, including screenings of classic and independent movies, animations, documentaries and shorts.
In 2009, Suna Kıraç and İnan Kıraç received the Istanbul Tourism Honorary Award for their contribution to the cultural fabric of Istanbul by opening the Pera Museum and the Istanbul Research Institute. In the same year they also received the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Special Academy Award for founding the Pera Musuem. This was followed in 2011, by the TÜYAP Art-Friendly Instititution Award in recognition for their work at the Pera Museum and later in 2014 by Turkey's Superbrands Award.