ISTANBUL — When curator Alper Turan and his collaborators from queer and feminist groups across Turkey discuss plans for their upcoming exhibition in Istanbul, they must consider more than which artists to include and how to hang the works.
“Honestly, half of our energy goes into how we can create a safe space – not only for the organizations involved, the artists and ourselves, but also for the audience,” Turan said. Hyperallergic. ‘We talk about the neighborhood where they can go safely. That is new to me.”
Since the Turkish government cracked During the once-vibrant Pride March in Istanbul a decade ago, the country’s LGBTQ+ community has become increasingly conflicted. Homophobic rhetoric has been a mainstay of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan re-election campaign last year. Last month, police robbed a private party and arrested attendees at an LGBTQ+ bar. The streaming site Mubi recently cancelled its annual film festival in Istanbul after government officials banned a planned screening of the new film Foreignstarring Daniel Craig as a gay expat in Mexico.
“Hearing these constant threats, this constant news about the government talking about what evil creatures we are, really affects our mental state,” Berlin and Istanbul-based curator Melih Aydemir told me. Hyperallergic. Until recently, however, the art world felt relatively insulated from risks.
But a government ban on a exhibition on trans rights at Depo in Beyoğlu this summer, in the wake of anti-LGBTQ+ protests at a separate art exhibition last year, has roiled artists and cultural workers in Turkey, forcing them to walk an increasingly thin line between creative resistance and self-censorship.
“On the one hand, queer artists in Turkey are experiencing a period of prosperity,” says the Istanbul-based artist Şafak Şule Kemanciwhose vibrant 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 been difficult lately to find queer artists who aren’t already working with galleries, which is amazing,” Kemancı shared. Hyperallergic. However, they added that the political situation makes it risky to directly associate art events with Pride Month or with openly LGBTQ+ language.
Exhibiting queer artists in galleries while removing the work from a political context risks becoming a form of pinkwashing or exoticization, said Ozan Ünlükoç, another member of the Sınır/Sız team and administrative and visual coordinator at the online publication for contemporary art. Argonotlar. Ünlükoç is curating an exhibition opening in early 2025 that focuses on self-censorship in the artistic process.
“Self-censorship can also be a way to create a sense of security in a very unsafe environment,” Ünlükoç told us. Hyperallergic. “This oppressive regime even affects the inner world of artists, so I think we have to ask ourselves what we are not saying and why.”
One of the artists who will be featured in Ünlükoç’s upcoming exhibition is Furkan Oztekinwho often uses collage and abstraction in his works on paper to explore themes of belonging and loss. For an exhibition curated by Sınır/Sız last year, titled Revival in fragmentsÖztekin 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 push us to find alternative forms of resistance,” Öztekin said Hyperallergic. “If colors are prohibited, we propose black and white exhibitions; when shapes are limited, we create shows with amorphous shapes.”
After an earlier wave of political attacks aimed at the rainbow flag, Turan curated an exhibition, A finger around an eye at the Poşe Artist Run Space, where he similarly invited artists to create works without colors or human shapes. “I invited them to use some abstraction so that there wouldn’t be a detectable, purposeful 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 the question: do they really work, do they really create a safe environment?”
While the gallery still feels like a relatively safe space in Istanbul, it is also often a closed space. “I often ask myself, ‘Are we doing these shows for the same 100 people who go to all the exhibitions?’” Aydemir said. Hyperallergic. An exhibition that he curated this year in the Sanatorium gallery, A crack through which we germinategrapples with how queer identities intersect with the diasporic experience, how symbols like the rainbow flag have been politically co-opted, and which groups are and are not included in LGBTQ+ solidarity. The exhibition’s public programming included a poetry performance by a queer Palestinian writer and a DJ workshop for queer youth.
Queer artists are also disproportionately affected by the growing unemployment, poverty and insecurity experienced across Turkey, said 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.
“Cultural and art events are always the first things to be canceled because they are seen as ‘luxury’,” Demir said. Hyperallergic. “But who can afford not to work in this country? There are not many LGBTI+ artists who do not receive support from their family.”
Independent initiatives like Sınır/Sız and the Ankara Queer Art Program, which offer two-month residencies, aim to give artists the space to create more freely, but they face some of the same challenges themselves. “Due to Turkey’s extreme economic collapse and rising rents in Istanbul, we could not continue to maintain our physical gallery,” says photographer Elçin Acun, co-founder of the feminist and queer project KOLİ Art Space. “We aim to continue our existence without permanent space.”
Online platforms are also becoming increasingly important venues for artist conversations, panels and even exhibitions due to restrictions on LGBTQ+-themed physical gatherings and the reluctance of many art world institutions – even supposedly progressive ones – to show work that could be seen as too political. Meanwhile, economic struggle and political repression have led many artists and cultural workers to seek opportunities elsewhere. Like Aydemir, Turan currently lives abroad as a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, although both expressed that they felt a responsibility to continue organizing exhibitions in Turkey.
“I don’t see the point in self-pity. This is how things are right now, not only in Turkey but all over the world, and we will continue to fight,” Kemancı said. “It’s like an old saying in Turkish that I like very much: no matter how many tricks the hunter knows, the bear knows just as many ways to get away.”
