ISTANBUL — When curator Alper Turan and his collaborators from queer and feminist teams round Turkey talk about plans for his or her upcoming Istanbul exhibition, they’ve extra to contemplate than which artists to incorporate and the way to grasp the works.
“To be honest, half of our energy is going towards how we can create some safe space — not just for the organizations involved, the artists, and ourselves, but also for the audience,” Turan instructed Hyperallergic. “We’re talking about which neighborhood will be safe for them to come to. That is new for me.”
Since Turkey’s authorities cracked down on Istanbul’s once-vibrant Satisfaction March a decade in the past, the nation’s LGBTQ+ neighborhood has change into more and more embattled. Homophobic rhetoric was a mainstay of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s re-election marketing campaign final 12 months. Final month, police raided a personal get together and arrested members at an LGBTQ+ bar. The streaming web site Mubi just lately canceled its annual Istanbul movie competition after authorities officers banned a deliberate screening of the brand new film Queer, starring Daniel Craig as a homosexual expat in Mexico.
Left to proper: Furkan Öztekin (picture by Emirhan Tuğrul), Şafak Şule Kemancı, Alper Turan, and Ozan Ünlükoç portrait (all courtesy the topics pictured)
However a authorities ban on a trans rights exhibition at Depo in Beyoğlu this summer time, coming within the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ protests at a separate artwork present final 12 months, has rattled artists and cultural employees in Turkey, leaving them making an attempt to stroll an more and more skinny line between artistic resistance and self-censorship.
“On the one hand, queer artists in Turkey are having a period of blossoming,” mentioned Istanbul-based artist Şafak Şule Kemancı, whose effervescent work typically combines lush floral motifs with erotic scenes. As a member of the Sınır/Sız (Border/Much less) collective, which organizes exhibitions of underrepresented LGBTQ+ artists, “it’s actually been hard lately to find queer artists who aren’t already working with galleries, which is amazing,” Kemancı instructed Hyperallergic. They added, nevertheless, that the political state of affairs makes it dangerous to affiliate artwork occasions straight with Satisfaction Month or with overtly LGBTQ+ language.
Exhibiting queer artists in galleries whereas detaching the work from a political context dangers changing into a type of pinkwashing or exoticization, in keeping with Ozan Ünlükoç, one other member of the Sınır/Sız crew who can be the executive and visible coordinator on the on-line up to date artwork publication Argonotlar. Ünlükoç is curating an exhibition set to open in early 2025 that focuses on self-censorship within the creative course of.
“Self-censorship can also be a way to create a feeling of safety in a very insecure environment,” Ünlükoç instructed Hyperallergic. “This oppressive regime even affects the inner world of artists, so I think we need to question what we don’t say and why.”
Şafak Şule Kemancı, “Untitled” (2020), polymer clay, 7 9/10 x 5 9/10 inches (20 x 15 cm) (picture courtesy the artist and Depo)
One of many artists who might be featured in Ünlükoç’s upcoming exhibition is Furkan Öztekin, who typically employs collage and abstraction in his works on paper to discover themes like belonging and loss. For a Sınır/Sız-curated exhibition final 12 months, titled Resurgence in Fragments, Öztekin exhibited ink-on-paper drawings of on a regular basis objects together with a fan, a whistle, an umbrella, and a megaphone, all rendered in black and white to mirror the general public suppression of symbols related to LGBTQ+ protests.
“These political threats and restrictions drive us to find alternative forms of resistance,” Öztekin instructed Hyperallergic. “If colors are banned, we propose black-and-white exhibitions; if forms are restricted, we create shows with amorphous shapes.”
After an earlier wave of political assaults directed on the rainbow flag, Turan curated an exhibition, A Finger for An Eye on the Poşe Artist Run Area, by which he equally invited artists to create works with out colours or human varieties. “I was inviting them to use some abstraction so that there would be no detectable, targetable queer body in this space,” he mentioned. “My idea was also to find an alternative to the visibility politics adopted from the West and ask, are they really working, are they really creating safe environments?”
Set up view of A Crack We Spout By means of with work by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Ndayé Kouagou, and Elif Saydam, curated by Melih Aydemir (picture by Zeynep Fırat, courtesy the artists and Sanatorium)
Whereas the gallery nonetheless seems like a comparatively protected house in Istanbul, additionally it is typically a cloistered one. “I ask myself a lot, ‘Are we doing these shows for these same 100 people that go to all the exhibitions?’” Aydemir instructed Hyperallergic. An exhibition he curated at Sanatorium gallery this 12 months, A Crack We Sprout By means of, grappled with how queer identities intersect with the diasporic expertise, how symbols such because the rainbow flag have been politically co-opted, and which teams are included – and never included – inside LGBTQ+ solidarity. The general public programming for the exhibition included a poetry efficiency by a queer Palestinian author and a DJing workshop for queer youth.
Queer artists are additionally disproportionately affected by the rising unemployment, poverty, and precarity that’s being skilled all through Turkey, in keeping with Aylime Aslı Demir, director of the Ankara Queer Artwork Program and coordinator of educational and cultural packages at Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest LGBTQ+ affiliation.
“Events in the field of culture and arts are always the first things to be canceled because they are seen as ‘luxuries,’” Demir instructed Hyperallergic. “But who can afford not to work in this country? Not many LGBTI+ artists, who do not have support from their families.”
Set up view of A Finger for an Eye at Protocinema at Poşe, Istanbul in 2021, with works by Baha Görkem Yalım, Cansu Yıldıran, Dorian Sarı, and Istanbul Queer Artwork Collective (picture courtesy Zeynep Fırat)
Impartial initiatives like Sınır/Sız and the Ankara Queer Artwork Program, which presents two-month residencies, goal to offer artists house to create extra freely however face among the identical challenges themselves. “Due to Turkey’s extreme economic collapse and the soaring rents in Istanbul, we couldn’t continue maintaining our physical gallery,” mentioned photographer Elçin Acun, who co-founded the feminist and queer undertaking KOLİ Artwork Area. “We aim to sustain our existence without a fixed space.”
On-line platforms are additionally more and more essential venues for artist talks, panels, and even exhibitions resulting from restrictions on LGBTQ+ themed bodily gatherings and a reluctance by many art-world establishments – even purportedly progressive ones – to indicate work that could be seen as too political. In the meantime the financial struggles and political repression have led many artists and cultural employees to hunt alternatives elsewhere. Like Aydemir, Turan is at present dwelling overseas, as a PhD scholar on the College of Toronto, although each expressed feeling a accountability to maintain organizing exhibitions in Turkey.
“I don’t see any point in self-pity. This is how things are at the moment, not just in Turkey but around the world, and we will keep fighting,” mentioned Kemancı. “It’s like an old saying in Turkish that I love a lot: No matter how many tricks the hunter knows, the bear knows just as many ways to get away.”
