ISTANBUL — A restored fez factory in Istanbul that reopened to great fanfare last week as a massive new arts and culture venue was briefly forced to close after its inaugural exhibition came under conservative attack.
Decrying artwork containing nudity, “LGBT propaganda” and images seen as critical of the state, dozens of protesters gathered outside the Artİstanbul Feshane place in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 27, requiring the end of the show. The venue was temporarily closed to visitors due to the protest, but reopened in the evening after the group dispersed.
Organized by 19 different curators under the auspices of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, the exhibition Starting from the middle features works by some 300 contemporary artists from Turkey spread across 86,000 square feet of exhibition space. The 19th-century factory was restored by the opposition-run Istanbul Municipality as part of its wider initiative to transform the city’s historic buildings into cultural centers.
Pro-government newspapers and online accounts, including some owned by members of the country’s ruling party, began attacking the show after a writer from one such outlet posted a video tour of his visit to what she called a “kinky exhibit.” Works singled out for criticism included “Ingres“(2015), a gendered portrait inspired by a famous neoclassical painting, and an accompanying text to the installation by Ekin Keser”Every touch tears me apart now(2023) which describes the difficulties faced by the artist as an LGBTQ+ person in Turkey.
In the installation, a photo of a hand hangs crookedly above a damaged wall and a pile of rubble, referencing both the poor living conditions of marginalized people and family members. that the artist lost in Hatay in February. devastating earthquakes. “I am a struggling queer trying to breathe in social life. This situation can lead to homelessness and unemployment in Turkey. In short, I am dispossessed,” writes Keser in the text.
Harsh anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric featured prominently in the country’s recent national elections, which saw President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his proxies repeatedly accuse the opposition to be “LGBT sympathizers” and “terrorists”. But works of art with other themes have also drawn opprobrium from conservative opponents of the exhibition.
Among these were photographs from 2013 Gezi protests which they said “contained hostility towards the police”, and a video work by Kurdish artist Mehmet Ali Boran, “The quests of a worried Anatolian leopard(2021). Featuring a leopard-shaped kite floating above the rugged landscape of southeast Turkey, the video uses the endangered animal’s story as a lens through which to examine a long history of violence and ecological and cultural displacement, including a reference to a 1937–38 massacre of Alevi Kurds carried out in the town of Dersim (today called Tunceli) by the Turkish army.
“That part of the video, and the language of the video being Kurdish, was what was targeted,” Boran said. Hyperallergic.
Ferhat Özgür’s photograph “Felt like a Prophet Today” (2007), which shows a man obscuring his face with the orb-shaped light of a desk lamp, has also been criticized as “insulting to Islamic values”.
The work “is based on the prohibition of imagery in Islamic belief and depictions of Christian apostles with halos in traditional Western painting,” Özgür said. Hyperallergic. “So it could be interpreted as a surreal juxtaposition of Islamic and Christian belief, but it has nothing to do with defaming Islamic values.”
The protest in Feshane is not the first such incident in Istanbul. A sculpture of the face of an Ottoman sultan on a woman’s bathing suit was pulled, then reinstated, then removed by the artist in 2016 Contemporary Istanbul art fair after an angry mob called for it to be removed. A small group of Islamists also attempted to attack an artwork they objected to at a 2017 exhibition from the private collection of businessman Ömer Koç.
“This [Koç] the exhibition became a hot topic and reached a record number of spectators”, artist historian Osman Erden noted on Twitter yesterday, ironically suggesting that “Istanbul Municipality and the artistic community should thank” the Feshane protesters.
