Turkey’s longtime leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan easily won a runoff election on Sunday to extend his rule into a third decade after a divisive campaign electrified his conservative base but antagonized his critics, who include many artists in the country.
Most voters ignored warnings from his opponent Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu that the election was a last chance to “shut the gates of hell” to Erdoğan’s authoritarian style of rule that undermined democratic standards. Provisional results from Sunday’s poll show the incumbent winning 52% of the vote against 48% for Kılıçdaroğlu.
Turkey’s creative community fears that Erdoğan is now stepping up a long-running crackdown that has intimidated artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural activists. Kurdish, female and gay artists feel particularly vulnerable after Erdoğan exploited social fissures to galvanize religious and nationalist voters, declaring opposition parties ‘LGBT’ and labeling the country’s main Kurdish bloc, with 5 million voters, “terrorists”.
“I’m anxious about the environment for making art. I’m not about to apply self-censorship…but I worry about the community because I see people turning inward,” says Fatoş İrwen, whose charged sculptures incorporate organic matter , including her own hair, to challenge the power of the state. İrwen, who is Kurdish, served a three-year prison sentence for participating in a political protest before being released in 2020.
Osman Kavala, a philanthropist who supported marginalized artists in Turkey, and filmmaker Ciğdem Mater, remain behind bars for participating in mass anti-government protests a decade ago.
“Many artists feel alienated in a society that would re-elect Erdoğan despite these limits on freedom of expression. They are demoralized and think, “If this is what the country wants, what should I do? says Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, art critic and founding editor of the Argonotlar website.
Erdoğan has long lamented the power of art to inspire political action and vowed to raise a new generation to wrest cultural influence from his opponents. In the past year alone, the government has canceled more than a dozen music festivals and withdrawn public funding from projects that stray from the official narrative, including burning dayswhich debuted at the Cannes Film Festival but was forced to return Culture Ministry funds after government-affiliated media branded the film gay propaganda.
Turkey’s culture wars erupted again the day before the election when Merve Dizdar became the first Turkish woman to win the Best Actress award at Cannes for her role in About Dry Grasses directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Dizdar dedicated his prize “to the souls who strive for the better days that Turkey deserves”.
In response, Turkey’s Deputy Culture Minister Serdar Çam compared it to anti-Turkey “lobbies” in the West. “Slices of this pie that you don’t deserve will be gradually distributed to new executives who are currently in training,” he said in a tweet, referring to the financial support.
Private companies have stepped in to fund the country’s biggest cultural institutions and events. But their reliance on friendly relations with the government to conduct business in the for-profit realm may encourage silence on state interventions in culture, including Kavala’s imprisonment.
“Kavala stays in prison because he is a symbol, a message to those who have capital that if they get involved, open up an art space, try to strengthen civil society, that’s what will happen” , said Akbulut.
The Istanbul Museum of Modern Art invited Erdoğan to speak this month after its reopening in a building designed by Renzo Piano in a cruise port and shopping complex on the Bopshorus Strait. In what sounded like a stump speech, Erdoğan railed against the disregard given to traditional Ottoman culture and said that criticism of its cultural heritage, particularly a 1,000-room presidential palace he has built on former forest land in the capital Ankara, were “lies and slander”. Propaganda.”
Yet the opening of Istanbul Modern, whose mission is to make contemporary art accessible to all segments of society, in the current climate shows how vital art remains, says Kerimcan Güleryüz, an independent curator who directs the Empire Project gallery.
“The pressure cooker that Turkish artists are in creates better art. Turkish art is political precisely because it can be considered a thought crime,” says Güleryüz. “The community has understood what democracy is for and that they have to fight for it.”
Working as a Kurdish artist in Turkey can make İrwen “feel like couch grass. This is the tenacity we need now,” she says. “What gives me hope is that this election becomes a motivation for artists. For that to happen, it is vital that institutions do not abandon artists now, both morally and materially.
