ISTANBUL — When curator Alper Turan and his collaborators from queer and feminist groups around Turkey discuss plans for their upcoming Istanbul exhibition, they have more to consider than which artists to include and how to hang 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 told Hyperallergic. “We’re talking about which neighborhood will be safe for them to come to. That is new for me.”
Since Turkey’s government cracked down on Istanbul’s once-vibrant Pride March a decade ago, the country’s LGBTQ+ community has become increasingly embattled. Homophobic rhetoric was a mainstay of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s re-election campaign last year. Last month, police raided a private party and arrested participants at an LGBTQ+ bar. The streaming site Mubi recently canceled its annual Istanbul film festival after government officials banned a planned screening of the new movie Queer, starring Daniel Craig as a gay expat in Mexico.
“Hearing these constant threats, this constant news about the government talking about what evil beings we are, really affects our mental state,” Berlin- and Istanbul-based curator Melih Aydemir told Hyperallergic. Until recently, though, the art world had felt relatively insulated from risk.
But a government ban on a trans rights exhibition at Depo in Beyoğlu this summer, coming in the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ protests at a separate art show last year, has rattled artists and cultural workers in Turkey, leaving them trying to walk an increasingly thin line between creative resistance and self-censorship.
“On the one hand, queer artists in Turkey are having a period of blossoming,” said Istanbul-based artist Şafak Şule Kemancı, whose effervescent work often combines lush floral motifs with erotic scenes. As a member of the Sınır/Sız (Border/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 told Hyperallergic. They added, however, that the political situation makes it risky to associate art events directly with Pride Month or with overtly LGBTQ+ language.
Exhibiting queer artists in galleries while detaching the work from a political context risks becoming a form of pinkwashing or exoticization, according to Ozan Ünlükoç, another member of the Sınır/Sız team who is also the administrative and visual coordinator at the online contemporary art publication Argonotlar. Ünlükoç is curating an exhibition set to open in early 2025 that focuses on self-censorship in the artistic process.
“Self-censorship can also be a way to create a feeling of safety in a very insecure environment,” Ünlükoç told 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.”
One of the artists who will be featured in Ünlükoç’s upcoming exhibition is Furkan Öztekin, who often employs collage and abstraction in his works on paper to explore themes like belonging and loss. For a Sınır/Sız-curated exhibition last year, titled Resurgence in Fragments, Öztekin exhibited ink-on-paper drawings of everyday objects including a fan, a whistle, an umbrella, and a megaphone, all rendered in black and white to reflect the public suppression of symbols associated with LGBTQ+ protests.
“These political threats and restrictions drive us to find alternative forms of resistance,” Öztekin told 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 attacks directed at the rainbow flag, Turan curated an exhibition, A Finger for An Eye at the Poşe Artist Run Space, in which he similarly invited artists to create works without colors or human forms. “I was inviting them to use some abstraction so that there would be no detectable, targetable queer body in this space,” he said. “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?”
While the gallery still feels like a relatively safe space in Istanbul, it is also often 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 told Hyperallergic. An exhibition he curated at Sanatorium gallery this year, A Crack We Sprout Through, grappled with how queer identities intersect with the diasporic experience, how symbols such as the rainbow flag have been politically co-opted, and which groups are included – and not included – within LGBTQ+ solidarity. The public programming for the exhibition included a poetry performance by a queer Palestinian writer and a DJing workshop for queer youth.
Queer artists are also disproportionately affected by the growing unemployment, poverty, and precarity that is being experienced throughout Turkey, according to Aylime Aslı Demir, director of the Ankara Queer Art Program and coordinator of academic and cultural programs at Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest LGBTQ+ association.
“Events in the field of culture and arts are always the first things to be canceled because they are seen as ‘luxuries,’” Demir told Hyperallergic. “But who can afford not to work in this country? Not many LGBTI+ artists, who do not have support from their families.”
Independent initiatives like Sınır/Sız and the Ankara Queer Art Program, which offers two-month residencies, aim to give artists space to create more freely but face some of the same challenges themselves. “Due to Turkey’s extreme economic collapse and the soaring rents in Istanbul, we couldn’t continue maintaining our physical gallery,” said photographer Elçin Acun, who co-founded the feminist and queer project KOLİ Art Space. “We aim to sustain our existence without a fixed space.”
Online platforms are also increasingly important venues for artist talks, panels, and even exhibitions due to restrictions on LGBTQ+ themed physical gatherings and a reluctance by many art-world institutions – even purportedly progressive ones – to show work that might be seen as too political. Meanwhile the economic struggles and political repression have led many artists and cultural workers to seek opportunities elsewhere. Like Aydemir, Turan is currently living abroad, as a PhD student at the University of Toronto, though both expressed feeling a responsibility to keep 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,” said 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.”
