ISTANBUL — In the summer of 2013, composer and sound artist Erdem Helvacıoğlu spent weeks making audio recordings of anti-government protests and then sweeping his home country of Turkey. Edited into an hour-long play that plays in a darkened room, the sound builds cinematically from hushed conversations to the roar of a singing crowd. When the police intervened to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, Helvacıoğlu’s irregular breathing and violent coughing clearly indicated the turn of events.
“It is a very intimate but also monumental work,” Helvacıoğlu said. Hyperallergic. His installation “The Sounds of Resistance” is included in a biennial program this month that attempts to address the legacy of the protests. It is held at the Maxim Gorky Theater in Berlin, a city where many Turkish artists have since settled. “There has never been another event that inspired me to be in the middle of things for so long and create such a long sound piece,” Helvacıoğlu said.
A decade since Gezi protests, which began as an attempt to protect a park in central Istanbul and quickly spread across Turkey, the protests remain an emotional touchstone for their participants – and a useful political bogeyman for the leader that they challenged the recently re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Eight activists, artists and members of civil society currently serve long prison sentences for their alleged roles in protests after what were widely seen as politically motivated trials.
Gezi – 10 years later, curated by Shermin Langhoff with co-curator Erden Kosova and assistant curator Nele Lindemann, is part of the 6th Berliner Herbstsalon (Berlin Autumn Salon), running until June 25. The works presented cover both the manifestations and their consequences. Helvacıoğlu’s sound piece has a visual counterpart in It’s just the beginning (2013), an archive of images taken during the protests by the NarPhotos collective and photographer Ulaş Yunus Tosun. Painter Timur Çelik’s mural installation “Painting the Decade” (2011-2023) depicts scenes of struggle and oppression in Turkey over the past ten years. And an exhibition of cartoons highlights one feature of the Gezi protests: humordemonstrated in graffiti, signs, political cartoons and memes.
“I was 41 when the protests broke out and I was used to this kind of very sober, angry and manly radical politics in Turkey,” Kosova said. Hyperallergic. “The politicization of the new generation [at Gezi] was much more playful, nourished by humour, by social networks, by the aesthetics and language of queer and feminist movements.
As the To occupy movement that began in the United States and the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong, Gezi is an example of how “political performativity has changed”, according to Işıl Eğrıkavuk, a Berlin-based Turkish artist and scholar whose research focuses on dialogue-based community art practices.
“In Gezi, people were distributing food, cooking together, painting together, singing together, reading together – all these types of collaborative acts that I had studied,” Eğrıkavuk said. But just as important as Gezi’s creative potential was its abrupt end: harsh police repression and the subsequent silencing of opposition voices across society.
“Post-Gezi was a very isolating time. It was difficult to speak publicly, even in the digital public space,” Eğrıkavuk said. Hyperallergic. His recent research examines how artists in Turkey responded to this in part by forming collectives – “not because they had similar artistic interests, but as a way of supporting each other emotionally”.
Other artists have left Turkey altogether, as well as scholars, journalists and activists who have been targeted or marginalized in the post-Gezi era. Many have settled in Berlin, including journalist Can Dündar, who was sentenced in absentia to more than 27 years in prison. For Gezi – 10 years laterDündar curated an installation that includes sketches of the courtroom from the post-Gezi trials, a virtual reality experience of a prison cell, and the “Museum of Little Things”, an exhibition of 12 everyday objects – like a candle, a safety razor, and a paper airplane – coupled with videos probing the meaning political prisoners have found in those rare personal effects given to them behind bars.
“It is important to note that we are watching Gezi from Berlin; we can’t do this stuff in Turkey now,” Kosova said. After Gezi, he says Istanbul’s art institutions were hesitant to collaborate with him because of his outspoken political views; the lack of work opportunities eventually led him to emigrate to Germany.
Although Berlin has offered Turkish artists more creative freedoms, the state of life in exile creates its own ‘invisible barbed wire’, Kurdish artist and journalist Zehra Dogan noted. Previously imprisoned on the basis of one of her paintings, she organizes a Radio Resistance series of programs as part of Gezi – 10 years laterwhich also includes panels, workshops, theatrical performances, concerts and film screenings.
“It’s hard for a refugee artist in Europe to be recognized, and not exoticized, in such a white art environment,” said Doğan, who now splits her time between Europe and Iraqi Kurdistan. “If I could live in my own country, I could work on the subjects that correspond to my curiosity – women’s issues, body issues, ecological issues – rather than having my artistic expression defined by what is arrived.”
Organizers of Gezi – 10 years later try to build bridges with other diaspora communities in order to learn from each other on how to most effectively engage with issues in their home countries, according to scholar Şirin Fulya Erensoy, who co-organized the program of documentaries on political demonstrations around the globe.
“It’s not just nostalgia, but also a way of remembering the importance of collective action, of the struggles that took place before Gezi and continue today, such as the LGBTQI+ movement and the Kurdish movement,” Erensoy said. Hyperallergic. “Gezi was a magical moment of togetherness, and after the last 10 years of so much polarization, coming back to that moment when we were all together is very powerful.”
