ISTANBUL — When curator Alper Turan and his collaborators from queer and feminist teams round Turkey focus on plans for his or her upcoming Istanbul exhibition, they’ve extra to think about than which artists to incorporate and learn how 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 informed 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 Delight March a decade in the past, the nation’s LGBTQ+ group has grow to be more and more embattled. Homophobic rhetoric was a mainstay of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s re-election marketing campaign final yr. Final month, police raided a non-public celebration and arrested individuals at an LGBTQ+ bar. The streaming website Mubi lately canceled its annual Istanbul movie pageant 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 themes pictured)
However a authorities ban on a trans rights exhibition at Depo in Beyoğlu this summer season, coming within the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ protests at a separate artwork present final yr, has rattled artists and cultural employees in Turkey, leaving them attempting to stroll an more and more skinny line between inventive resistance and self-censorship.
“On the one hand, queer artists in Turkey are having a period of blossoming,” stated Istanbul-based artist Şafak Şule Kemancı, whose effervescent work usually 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 informed Hyperallergic. They added, nevertheless, that the political state of affairs makes it dangerous to affiliate artwork occasions straight with Delight 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 response to Ozan Ünlükoç, one other member of the Sınır/Sız workforce who can also 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 inventive course of.
“Self-censorship can also be a way to create a feeling of safety in a very insecure environment,” Ünlükoç informed 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 will likely be featured in Ünlükoç’s upcoming exhibition is Furkan Öztekin, who usually employs collage and abstraction in his works on paper to discover themes like belonging and loss. For a Sınır/Sız-curated exhibition final yr, 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 replicate the general public suppression of symbols related to LGBTQ+ protests.
“These political threats and restrictions drive us to find alternative forms of resistance,” Öztekin informed 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, wherein he equally invited artists to create works with out colours or human types. “I was inviting them to use some abstraction so that there would be no detectable, targetable queer body in this space,” he stated. “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 way 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 secure house in Istanbul, it’s also usually 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 informed Hyperallergic. An exhibition he curated at Sanatorium gallery this yr, A Crack We Sprout By way 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 response to Aylime Aslı Demir, director of the Ankara Queer Artwork Program and coordinator of educational and cultural applications 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 informed 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 affords two-month residencies, purpose 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,” stated photographer Elçin Acun, who co-founded the feminist and queer challenge 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 point out work that may 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 residing 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,” stated 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.”
