Forgotten Lands, Cities, and Homes: Negotiating Locality and Globalism in Turkey

Matt Hanson reviews how, during the summer of 2024, a trio of contemporary art programs in Turkey evoked the passion of historical dispossession, as it has claimed lands, cities, and homes from the Anatolian heartland to the Mesopotamian plain. The critic follows a tension between global art-world tourism that forgets localities and a reclaiming of the right and the freedom to forget by retaining the sovereignty of remembrance to preserve the root of histories and identities.

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6th Mardin Biennial, Further Away, curated by Ali Akay, photo by author.png

6th Mardin Biennial, Further Away, curated by Ali Akay, 2024, photo by author
6th Mardin Biennial, Further Away, curated by Ali Akay, 2024
Photo by author
 


Intro

The presumption that humanity must be connected everywhere — along approved channels — is late-imperialist propaganda. Most of today’s global populations are descendants of subjects long forced to obey rulers professing divinely ordained birthright supremacy. The majority of people forgot, over the course of generations, that their socioeconomic and cultural heritages are the result of coercive assimilations and that their ancestors were mandated, under pain of death, to inherit imposed histories, languages, cultures, and geographies. They forgot that they forgot who or even where they were. They passed down aphorisms of self-forgetting to survive under the pretenses of institutionalized identities and redrawn maps.

Domination by way of capitalist consumerism has led industrial and technological societies to subdue others with gaining voracity. Outside threats to the self and opposition to officialized identification are demonized as violence. Localities under the globalized order conform to the cultural hegemony, absorbed by a singular, monolithic source of political power.

Against these trends, eccentrics convey the catharses of non-utilitarian, creative worldviews. They are the artists, poets, philosophers, critics, those content to wander, experiment, and dream in the face of authoritarian coercions to produce and reproduce. Liberated, they reclaim the right and the freedom to forget, by the same coin retaining the sovereignty of remembrance to preserve the root of their histories and identities.

Nonconformists and visionaries are privy to the detritus of civilization, gleaning from the ruins of material progress relics of lives lived, cities built, and lands fertilized by the Earth’s autonomous, anarchic autopoieses. In the summer of 2024, as Turkey’s art world reeled from the postponement of its flagship affair, the Istanbul Biennial, wrangling over the Armenian Genocide and Eurocentric patronage, a trio of contemporary art programs evoked the passion of historical dispossession as it has claimed lands, cities, and homes from the Anatolian heartland to the Mesopotamian plain.

 

 

Nermin Er, Listen Series (2017), Cappadox, photo by author.png

Nermin Er, Listen Series (2017), Cappadox, 2024, photo by author
Nermin Er, Listen Series (2017), Cappadox, 2024
Photo by author

 

Forgetting Land while “Changing Skies” in Cappadox Festival

In the central Anatolian region of Cappadocia, geological monuments and neolithic caves inspire the festival Cappadox, which, in its fifth year, relayed the curation of its contemporary art component from Fülya Erdemci after her passing in 2022, to Kevser Güler, known for designing critical and original exhibitions in Istanbul’s premier cultural institutions.

Under the theme, “Changing Skies,” Cappadox returned in 2024, in memory of Erdemci and, with a retrospective glance, opened an archival space in a historic stone building in the town of Uçhisar. A wall of photographs detailing past installations was echoed by new exhibitions in nearby Pigeon Valley, where ear-trumpet sculptures from Nermin Er’s “Listen Series” (2017) vibrated with the song of local endangered birds from the speakers of Call (2024) by Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt.

For their shot at a redeeming aesthetic, political or ecological commentary on Cappadocia — an apt point of concern seeing as how the province’s extractive hollowing-out in the name of exotic vacationing has rendered its fragile ecosystems bare of agriculture — Cappadox filled the landscape with Hale Tenger’s voice installation Life, Death, Love and Justice (2018), whispering questions of existentialism, “Can you be without doing?” she asks, not far from Yaşam Şaşmazer, Seeds I-VII (2024), oversized kernels implanted in the crevasses of stone, placed in the quiet, leafy basin of Pigeon Valley where stone age inscriptions decorate entries into towering, subterranean passageways.

Yet, public knowledge of Cappadocia’s ochre cave paintings and atrophied irrigation systems is obscured in contrast with the imports of Western cultural globalization, which, exemplified by Cappadox, merely aggravates the increasingly forgotten richness of the immediate landscape as tourist artists and their urban impressions remain entrenched in the solipsistic individualism of anthropocentric approaches to artistic creativity vis-à-vis the contemporary modernism.

 

 

Cappadox, Changing Skies, Halil Altındere, 22 (2016) and Ayşe Erkmen 22 (2024), photo by author.png

Cappadox, Changing Skies, Halil Altındere, "Space Refugee" (2016), Ayşe Erkmen "Three Eyes" (2024), 2024
Cappadox, Changing Skies, Halil Altındere, "Space Refugee" (2016), Ayşe Erkmen "Three Eyes" (2024), 2024
Photo by author

 

Screened inside the grandest of rock towers, Halil Altindere’s Star Wars; Cappadocia (2024) leans in to ridicule Turkey’s global appeal as part of the self-exploiting vicious circles of capitalist commodification in which copies of copies amply satisfy the forgettable and instantaneous absurdities of snapshot sightseeing. The video shows armed stormtroopers and the science fiction world of George Lucas touching down on Cappadocia’s otherworldly terrain. The art-world joke reeks of cynicism, jaded and cruel as the insensitivity of the whole ordeal of the Istanbul-based art world’s cultural complicity in Turkey’s extractive, runaway tourism sector.

 

“Further Away” from Locality in Mardin Biennial

Altindere continued his Skywalker series in his hometown with Star Wars: Mardin (2024), exhibited at the local Sakip Sabanci Museum in Turkey’s southeast, where another contemporary art program is in its single digits. The 6th Mardin Biennial opened with artist punk band Guguou in the Ottoman-era German Headquarters, one of eight venues along the main drag of 1st Street in the hilltop town built in the 12th century by Artuqid Turks. Led by co-founders Güneş Terkol on vocals and keyboards and Güçlü Öztekin on bass and voice, both exhibited artwork at Mardin’s International Design Foundation Art Gallery for the Biennial. Terkol’s sewing on fabric and Öztekin’s acrylic paintings on craft paper harmonized with the dissonant arrhythmic frequencies of their music, jarring the historic town on a hill, looking out toward Syria, with the Istanbul-based wavelengths of slacker-generation pop culture resistance.

 

Aslı Çavuşoğlu, 22 (2024), Mardin Biennial, photo by author.png

Aslı Çavuşoğlu, "Buried Intentionally" (2024), Mardin Biennial, 2024, photo by author
Aslı Çavuşoğlu, "Buried Intentionally" (2024), Mardin Biennial, 2024
photo by author
 

 

Mardin is a pearl in the crown of modern Turkey’s territorial hold on the Kurds, Assyrians and Arabs who remain among the earliest cultural communities still inhabiting its steep, winding stone-wrought steps that overlook the Mesopotamian basin from wind-whipped facades and balconies of churches and mosques, wineries and coffeehouses.

Since it began in 2010, the Mardin Biennial has exemplified the complicated and counterintuitive relationship that contemporary art programming has to historical heritage beyond the Eurocentric pale. Mardin is an enigma of cultural preservation, integrated with local urban life, remote from global centers of society and authority. Despite the lure of its austere limestone architecture, engraved with immemorial wisdom, the international artists of the 6th Mardin Biennial, titled “Further Away,” cast long shadows over the petrified, blood-tinted streets carrying aromas of soap and spices, bearing the enigma of their distance, as many, unlike Altindere, hailed from continents afar.

The prolific curation of Turkish philosopher Ali Akay, while insightful in a self-referential sense and having a well-balanced artist list, only poured salt over the wounds of Mardin’s geographical and sociocultural disenfranchisements. Widely furnished with feature-length video installations exploring complex political and conceptual themes, the transporting effect of the cavernous, lightless space in which a projection fills the void of a black box room in the interest of an intellectual or entertaining diversion appeared more as abstract exercises in negative capability than site-specific complements to Mardin’s innate and interconnected wonders.

 

Sarkis, _5 Gold-drawn stained glass series_ (2021), Mardin Biennial, photo by author.png

Sarkis, "5 Gold-drawn stained glass series" (2021), Mardin Biennial, 2024, photo by author
Sarkis, "5 Gold-drawn stained glass series" (2021), Mardin Biennial, 2024
Photo by author
 

 

 

Erik Bullot’s 55-minute Language of the birds (2021), screened in the German Headquarters, evoked an absorbing analogy of ecological extinction, traces of survival and warning signs that, parallel to the endangered multiculturalism of Mardin, provoked a keen poignancy. Together with Ali Kazma’s “Printing Studio” (2012) in the same 19th-century building where German allies of the Ottoman Empire were based in 1917, the rigor of observation that these videos detail prompts critical awareness of Western perspectives as utterly removed from local surroundings, remote as a fine artist in their city studio preparing to exhibit work in a white cube, disembodied as a symbol beside its representation in nature.

With the acerbic wit of a local Kurd, an enfant terrible of the Turkish art scene in the 1990s, Altindere’s “Star Wars” in Cappadocia and Mardin convey the unwitting potential of postmodern Westernization and its appropriation of contemporary art to distract itself and forget alternative, independent perspectives on world history, replacing indigenous culture and its appreciation with such modernist radiations of universal ubiquity as the shadow of video art.

 

Finding Lost Domesticity in Eldem Art Space

From the metropolitan extractivism of the Mardin Biennial and the eroded geographies of Cappadocia, Turkey’s art world imposes a loud, bold footprint outside of the globalized nexus of Istanbul, where the national centralization of socioeconomic infrastructure softens the focus of cultural work beyond the largest Turkish cosmopolis, relegating the periphery to memory and its tendency to fade, distant.

 

 

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LABOR OF HER HANDS, LIGHT OF HER EYES, Eldem Art Space, 2024, photo by Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan
LABOR OF HER HANDS, LIGHT OF HER EYES, Eldem Art Space, 2024
Photo by Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan
 

 

Married artist duo Melike and Maury Vaughan walk in the pastoral hills near their home in Eskişehir, a university town on Turkey’s national railway between Istanbul and Ankara known for its student population, Ottoman homes, and picturesque canals. Espying a trash heap at the edge of a private property, their curiosity got the best of them. They bent down to sift through the cracked concrete and bottles adrift like tumbleweed.

A trove of textiles, letters, and family memorabilia revealed itself in their able, searching hands as Maury, a sculptor, and Melike, a book designer, gleaned the found objects that comprised Labor of Her Hands, Light of Her Eyes, an exhibition at Eskişehir’s Eldem Art Space, housed in the primary hall of the modest cultural center in a historical mansion called the Dalyancı Estate, repurposed for contemporary art shows.

The site-specificity of Labor of Her Hands, Light of Her Eyes is pertinent, as the Vaughans returned the effects of the lost family property to the residential quarters that appear similar to the genesis of their provenance. It began with a recreation of the waste pile, ostensibly trash, secret gold to the venturous postmodernists. Maury drew from his sculptural arts training at Virginia Commonwealth University, adding spatiality to Melike’s initial response to their finding, namely to craft an artist book.

 

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LABOR OF HER HANDS, LIGHT OF HER EYES, Eldem Art Space, 2024, photo by Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan
LABOR OF HER HANDS, LIGHT OF HER EYES, Eldem Art Space, 2024
Photo by Melike Taşcıoğlu Vaughan
 

 

Her publication accompanies the recovered objects, along with a video retracing their steps, the rolling, high plains of central Anatolia fanning out with defunct Armenian vineyards and politicized construction sites, a testament to the current overhaul of late development anxiety in the wake of Turkey’s prevailing, populist macroeconomics, erasing and forgetting abandoned properties reduced to rubbish, its personal histories profaned into mere capital.

Labor of Her Hands, Light of Her Eyes fought back against the mainstream, amnesia-oriented, capitalist industrialization of residential property in Turkey. The exhibition carefully paired the interior architectural and painterly motifs of the walls and structure of the Dalyancı Estate with the delicate, intricately crafted textiles that bore stripes of local cultural knowledge and letters written in Ottoman script, dated as late as the 1940s and translated into modern Turkish.

While blocking out the faces of the actual family to conceal their identities, using AI to redraft their appearances, the show exposed a yawning gap of silence, an emotional chasm that, instead of burying folklore under the obscurations of contemporary life and its art, they have steadily resurrected its ghostly afterlife, chillingly human in its creative vision of that which is too often forgotten, enacting a reconciliation of private history in the present Turkish context, transcending the localism of one particular family and their lost, intergenerational memories.