{"id":26873,"date":"2023-06-19T08:56:25","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T06:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=26873"},"modified":"2023-06-19T09:53:14","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T07:53:14","slug":"the-ghost-of-gezi-park-turkey-10-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/the-ghost-of-gezi-park-turkey-10-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost of Gezi Park\u2014Turkey 10 Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"
Gezi Park has become a ghost. But a ghost, by its very nature, being neither alive nor dead, cannot easily disappear. The memory of modern Turkey is not only a memory of violence, but also a memory of protests across generations.<\/h5>\n

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Arie Amaya-Akkermans<\/h4>\n

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The Gezi Park protests began in Istanbul in June 2013 and over a period of three months, spread throughout the country like wildfire. What began as a demonstration for environmental justice quickly morphed into a nation-wide uprising against authoritarian rule. A decade later, this moment seems buried in the deep past, but for those who lived through it, the Gezi Park protests practically transformed life in Turkey forever. The aftermath of the events is so confusing that we can no longer simply look at chronology to understand the genesis here, yet a decade of contemporary art in Turkey since then either advanced the events, attempted to process them or articulated the reality that they created. This story of art is perhaps not reliable as historiography, but it can give some insights about a moment in time that defines where we are today.<\/p>\n

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Hale Tenger, “I Know People Like This III,” 2013 (photo Murat Germen for ARTER).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

January\u2013May 2013: Remembering the Past<\/h4>\n

It was a time of true effervescence for Istanbul, when it felt dynamic and energetic, although still somewhat unfree, and pressure was growing. As someone who had been in the country for only a few months, it was hard for me to explain where the asphyxiation came from. At the opening of Envy, Enmity, Embarrassment<\/em> at the old ARTER<\/a> (since relocated to a white cube museum) on the pedestrian Istiklal Street, the crowds were huge, and the moment was both tense and exciting. Hale Tenger\u2019s installation \u201cI Know People Like This III,\u201d (2013) formed a narrow walk-through labyrinth at the entrance, and the assembled lightboxes serving as walls displayed a terrifying but discreetly sanitized journey though scenarios of violence in the public space in Turkey, from the Istanbul pogroms against minorities in 1955 to the military coup in 1980, and the protests in Diyarbak\u0131r that took place shortly before the installation was completed.<\/p>\n

Photographs were sourced from archives, newspapers, and journalists, and printed on see-through clinical X-ray films, giving them a halo of strangeness and distance. But the images were not distant at all. These monumental juxtapositions of political violence, present in everyday images, felt retrospectively as if they exposed a fragment of the archive of cruelty that would soon be unleashed. While the situation was still apparently normal in Istanbul, the Kurdish-dominated east of the country was restive, as always, and the hand of oppression was never absent. One night, a number of pedestrians congregated around a street musician in front of the window of the installation, listening to a song I can\u2019t remember now, not paying much attention to the lightboxes glowing in the dark with the translucent images. But it was perhaps the images that were staring at them, in a latent stage, about to reawaken in the following months. By the time the events of Gezi Park took place, a few months later, the lightboxes were already gone, but the images of violence in the public space in Turkey have never ceased accumulating.<\/p>\n

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Gregory Buchakjian, “Ghost City,” 2013 (courtesy of the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Lebanese artist and historian Gregory Buchakjian visited Istanbul later in the spring, we met with Hale Tenger at a restaurant in Karak\u00f6y. He was familiar with Tenger\u2019s videowork \u201cBeirut\u201d<\/a> (2005-2007), which shows the windows of the St. Georges Hotel, in front of which Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a bomb in 2005. Harmoniously fluttering white curtains are contrasted with the haunting sounds of war, pointing us at a dramatic interruption. The conversation centered on the shared fates of both countries, between political assassinations, protests, and unsolved crimes. Buchakjian showed us his work-in-progress, a long series of photographs documenting the architectural heritage of Beirut, destroyed by reconstructions, demolition, and amnesia. At the time, he was expectedly mesmerized by the abandoned and dilapidated houses on Tarlaba\u0219\u0131 Boulevard in Istanbul, once upon a time occupied by Christians and Jews.<\/p>\n

Buchakjian\u2019s instinct was to immediately photograph their fading presence, and their status as a ghost, while wondering who their inhabitants might have been. He photographed the buildings for the unpublished series Ghost City<\/a><\/em> (2013) at the last minute before their demolition. In the aftermath of Gezi Park, which started as a protest about public space, the built environment and dispossession, entire rows of these houses were demolished to make space for a failed real estate project that still stands there empty. This process resembled the reconstruction of downtown Beirut in the postwar era and that Buchakjian had documented in his work.<\/p>\n

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Hera Bu\u0308yu\u0308ktas\u0326c\u0327\u0131yan, “In Situ,” 2013 (photo Arie Amaya-Akkermans).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The dispossession in fact happened and has been happening continuously. A 15-minute walk from Tarlaba\u0219\u0131, in the neighborhood of Pangalt\u0131, a historical hammam of the same name was demolished in 1995 with the promise that it would be rebuilt, but a hotel rose in its stead. During that same spring, Greek-Armenian artist Hera B\u00fcy\u00fckta\u0219\u00e7\u0131yan, was concluding an investigation into the traces of the site, in the absence of any documents other than a tiny white and black photograph from the 1970s, as a part of a residency at PiST, a local art space that closed its doors in 2013.<\/p>\n

B\u00fcy\u00fckta\u0219\u00e7\u0131yan, who was born in the neighborhood, home to the remnants of the Greek and Armenian communities, sought out a site-specific placement that would be both mental and physical: She reconstructed the imagined interior of the hammam entirely on bars of Turkish bath soap, with their characteristic citrus fragrance. This reconstruction, titled In Situ<\/em><\/a> (2013), making reference to an archaeological artifact that has not been moved from its original place of deposition, was a psychogeography of a place that had become invisible, but that could still be conjured up through the imagination. On the opening night, I visited the exhibition alongside Hale Tenger and other members of the arts community. Little did B\u00fcy\u00fckta\u0219\u00e7\u0131yan imagine at the time that protests would engulf the city a week later. She recalled years afterward that a gesture of transformation of urban material into active memory, similar to In Situ<\/em>, took place during the protests: local residents erected makeshift barricades around Gezi against police repression, using materials from the urban fabric itself, changing the meaning of spatial memory in the process.<\/p>\n

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Deniz Goran’s New Novel Contrasts Art and the Gezi Park Protests<\/a><\/h4>\n
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\nJune\u2013September 2013: Gezi Park and the 13th Istanbul Biennial<\/h4>\n
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Protester in Istiklal Street (photo Arie Amaya-Akkermans).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We didn\u2019t experience the beginning of the Gezi Park protests as anything like the news coverage imagined it. On the 28th of May, some 50 environmentalists gathered around the park to prevent its demolition and the construction of a planned shopping mall. The next day, a conference on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze took place at Akbank Sanat, followed by a dinner on Kartal St., which was then a meeting point for the arts community, and a visit to the park with artists Seza Paker, Burak Ar\u0131kan, and art critic Ali Akay, where crowds were beginning to grow. The atmosphere was cheerful and that night ended at the upscale Reina nightclub (it sounds almost like a comedy, told from the perspective of today). By the next morning, the situation had escalated and the country had changed: The protest camp was raided by the authorities on that day, as protests spread like wildfire throughout the country. The following two weeks, the park would be occupied by protesters, until it was cordoned off by police on June 16th, even though protests continued throughout the summer.<\/p>\n

The story is well-known; books have been written about it.<\/p>\n

On May 30th, while escaping from the smoke of teargas raining on Taksim Square, I snapped a picture of a protester holding a banner that read \u201cWhat if they demolish Central Park, Hyde Park, or Tiergarten to build a mall?\u201d Although it might seem naive today, that was in fact the starting point \u2014 opposition to the destruction of public space. Many artists were active in the protests and the spirit of this moment continued to reverberate in Turkish art through the following decade. Soon enough, the themes and icons of Gezi Park (penguins, the woman in red, the protester fighting the police) became a subject for art. Most of these images have been forgotten today.<\/p>\n

The 13th Istanbul Biennial, Mom, Am I Barbarian?<\/em><\/a> \u2014 the title was borrowed from Turkish poet Lale M\u00fcld\u00fcr \u2014 took place that year, curated by the late Fulya Erdemci. It was planned long before the events of Gezi Park and centered on notions such as a democratic public space and living together, and the idea of an agonistic public space borrowed from philosophers Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe: the acceptance of permanent conflict and ongoing renegotiation as a potentially positive aspect of modern politics.<\/p>\n

But as disturbances unfolded in the city, the biennial withdrew from public space and distributed its exhibits throughout art institutions in the city center. Erdemci\u2019s reasoning was that it was problematic to stage a biennial in public while people were still fighting for their right to those very spaces. The controversy over the relationship of the biennial to Gezi obscured most of its content, despite the fact that it included works by major figures such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Hito Steyerl, and Thomas Hirschhorn.<\/p>\n