The 2010s may be remembered because the period of protest, with the Occupy Wall Road demonstrations towards financial inequality and company greed in New York Metropolis and the pro-democracy Umbrella Motion in Hong Kong being two prime examples. When the Gezi Park protests over city growth, authoritarianism, and police violence erupted in her residence metropolis of Istanbul in the summertime of 2013, Turkish artist and tutorial Işıl Eğrikavuk was struck by how a lot the demonstrators’ spontaneous acts of collaborative creativity resembled the neighborhood artwork practices she had studied in artwork college. As these protests fizzled out or have been purposefully squashed, she questioned if artwork may assist preserve their spirit alive.
Eğrikavuk’s ensuing e book, World Protests By means of Artwork: collaboration, co-creation, interconnectedness (Books Individuals Locations, 2024), examines how participatory artwork practices can be utilized to construct connections and foster social dialogue in restrictive political climates. She joined me over Zoom to debate the e book in mild of renewed unrest in each Turkey and america. This interview has been edited for size and readability.
Individuals collect and spray-paint slogans through the Gezi Park protests in 2013. “Gazyip Biebiber,” written within the foreground, combines the phrase “gaz,” which means “pepper spray,” with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan’s title. (photograph by and courtesy Isil Egrikavuk)
Hyperallergic: What position did you see artwork and artists taking part in in Turkey’s Gezi protests a decade in the past, and the way has this impacted you and your subsequent work?
Işıl Eğrikavuk: World protests usually are not nearly chanting slogans and marching anymore. What was actually eye-opening at Gezi was seeing all these totally different teams coming collectively organically and utilizing very inventive languages and instruments, like singing, dancing, physique motion, and graffiti, in addition to taking frequent on a regular basis acts like cooking or doing yoga and bringing them into public area. After Gezi ended, I needed to take a look at how artists can use dialogue-based practices to achieve totally different communities and if it will be doable to maintain the collaborative spirit of the protests via artwork.
H: Why do you suppose the artwork world tends to dismiss the position of artists in protest actions?
IE: There are a whole lot of artists, artwork collectives, and even larger exhibitions and biennials which have embraced these practices that may be known as artwork or may be known as protest. However on the subject of establishments, we principally don’t see the identical image due to the cash and hierarchies concerned.
H: Once you started trying extra carefully at modern protest actions world wide in your e book, what connections did you discover between artwork apply and political motion, and the way do you differentiate the 2?
IE: What I noticed at Gezi and the opposite protests was particularly attention-grabbing for me as a result of my focus in my research was how artwork can attain non-artist communities and contain them in producing — what we name “co-creation” as we speak. These sorts of efforts search for ways in which artwork will be practiced not simply by the artist because the authority, because the “genius,” however in a manner that creates a multiplication of voices, so everybody can set free their inventive potential.
The inventive actions throughout Gezi have sturdy resemblances to artwork, however the distinction is the context. Take the guerrilla gardening tasks that I write about in my e book: Relying on the context, you possibly can name this gardening, or an artwork motion, or a protest.
Nonetheless of interview between Işıl Eğrikavuk and members of the collective HAH
H: How do you suppose that artwork may also help maintain the collaborative spirit of mass political motion in additional repressive occasions?
IE: My fundamental query was: How can we take these collaborative, spontaneous, collective, nameless, witty, performative qualities expressed organically through the protests and apply them in a creative setting to assist re-create this interconnectedness amid a closely censored surroundings? I spent a 12 months collaborating with six totally different inventive and ecology-oriented collectives in Turkey, and what I discovered was that working collectively was primarily about assembly emotional wants fairly than having a shared inventive understanding. It created an emotional security community that would assist rework concern and nervousness into motion. As soon as artists have this sense of security themselves, they’ll invite others to be a part of it as nicely.
H: How has the legacy of the Gezi-era protests influenced the latest protests in Turkey following the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a number one opposition determine?
IE: The calls for and demographics of the protesters have modified, however we nonetheless see this humorous, inventive language — each textual and visible — of political expression. What’s been very seen within the media have been these fast performative acts, just like the appropriation of the Pikachu cartoon character right into a protest image or issues like dancing, marriage proposals, collective readings, game-playing, or performing the namaz [ritual prayers] in entrance of the police. Incorporating these sorts of on a regular basis acts into protest actions will be traced to Gezi.
H: What classes will be discovered from protest actions you’ve studied which might be relevant to this present international interval of rising authoritarian and antidemocratic backsliding?
IE: My analysis began on the level when the Gezi protests have been violently stopped, and I observed an actual drawing inwards amongst artists in Istanbul. There was a whole lot of concern round talking out and likewise a whole lot of censorship, not simply of artists but additionally of teachers and another form of protests. Now we see censorship closely within the US as nicely, towards academia, towards the humanities, slicing off main funds and alternate applications, slicing off totally different voices.
It’s arduous to lift your voice once we are a lot underneath risk. However beginning one thing collectively is the most important step. I’m not calling for a giant motion, I’m simply saying, attain out to your fellow artists, begin by working with what you might have. The facility of on a regular basis motion, of coming collectively, just isn’t one thing to be underestimated.
