Sheikh-Zade is a Crimean Tatar painter with the additional title of “monumentalist”. At the last Bosphorus Forum, he lowered a poster of Michelangelo from the Kerch Fortress and staged a performance around the presentation of this artwork. Sheikh-Zade sees hidden body parts in the Sistine Chapel drawn on this oversized poster: Genitals and cerebral convolutions. His great-grandfather was a sheikh in the Crimean Khanate. Ismet was born in Uzbekistan, attended school in Leningrad and Moscow, and trained as a young painter with prominent artists in Moscow in the 1990s until his parents moved to Crimea.
Ismet centers his work and thought on the interconnectedness of crimean tatar and eurasian color schemes, which can be found in the European Renaissance. After 2014, Ismet and his colleagues from the Art History Institute of Simferopol University travel more than ever before. He himself has finally found a job there, as an architecture lecturer. The university now receives a larger budget than in Ukrainian times. He has presented his papers on the influence of Renaissance art on the art of the Crimean Khanate at several conferences, because his additional passport opens additional doors for him: with his Russian passport he flies to Moscow and to Kazakhstan, with his Ukrainian passport to Berlin, Istanbul and Melbourne.
