Daring views of secular Turkey

An exhibition of contemporary Turkish art gives a glimpse into the psyche of non-Islamic Turkey, writes Lara Marlowein Istanbul

Turkey is probably the only country in the world where daring works of art are used by the government to counter fears that they are closet Islamic fundamentalists.

Santralistanbul is an exciting new art museum, in an annex to Istanbul's former power plant, on a campus of Bilgi University. The government provided the site, and businessman Oguz Ozerden, the founder of the university and museum, warned prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that some of the artworks might be called obscene.

But Erdogan accepted Ozerden's argument that the ruling Justice and Development Party would strengthen its democratic credentials by supporting the project. Erdogan personally inaugurated the opening exhibition, Modern and Beyond, which continues until February 29th.

The exhibition includes the Turkish artist Sukran Moral's photograph of herself posing Christ-like, with naked breasts and a white loincloth, as if on a cross. Moral married an Italian to obtain residence papers. Then she married another, and another - five in all, including a woman. She turned her wedding photographs into art too, creating multiple scandals in Italy. "Catholicism and marriage are very important there, and she attacks both," says Fulya Erdemci, a curator of the Santralistanbul exhibition.

There hasn't been a hint of protest from Erdogan or his conservative Muslim supporters about Moral's photographs, nor about Kutlug Ataman's Ottoman calligraphy drawings in the shape of male and female genitalia. "Contemporary art is meant to provoke controversy. But so far no one has paid any attention," Erdemci says. "That's good and bad at the same time." Ironically, it was secularists, not Islamists, who protested when Erdemci and her fellow curator, Emre Baykal, organised an open-air pedestrian exhibition in Istanbul two years ago. It included a huge facade decorated with calligraphy. The script - which is not understood by most Turks - said "What a pleasure" and "This too shall pass". But because secularists associate calligraphy with Islam, they believed it was radical Islamist art and had the poster torn down.

Contemporary Turkish artists, writers, film-makers and musicians follow the same trends as artists all over the world. But at the same time, Turks endow each art form with something unique. "Turkey underwent profound westernisation since the foundation of the republic [in 1923] says the philosopher and essayist Ahmet Soysal. "Yet Turkish artists have never been imitators. Each time, they create something of their own inspiration. The West has never recognised this."

Modern Turkish painting and sculpture always integrated Turkish elements. "The artistic ideology of the 1950s could be summed up as 'cubism meets Anatolian motifs'," says Erdemci. While following European fashions, artists incorporated domes and minarets, women with veils, Byzantine-inspired mosaics, the patterns of carpets and hubble-bubble pipes in their creations.

At first glance, you would take Ilhan Koman's wooden sculpture for an abstract form. But the "dervish" ambling around on its rotating base is an obvious, humorous reference to the whirling Sufi mystics who this year celebrate the 800th anniversary of the birth of their founder, Mevlana.

Kemal Önsoy's 15m high Come and Cry from My Eyes evokes a white double helix or spiral staircase. But Önsoy had a dual Turkish inspiration: the death of his brother in the 1999 earthquake for want of a fire escape, and the stairs inside minarets.

Erdag Aksel executed his sculptural installation, in the entrance to Santralistanbul, in bronze. "Bronze is the fine arts material that classical and modern sculptors use, while contemporary sculptors use ready-made, everyday materials," Erdemci says. In Aksel's hybrid work, a crescent from the pinnacle of a minaret sits atop a helicopter propeller. A sword is thrust into an Ottoman cauldron filled with coins, and tubes resembling rockets pierce a bronze trunk turned end-up. "It's about Islam, capitalism, globalisation, ethnic and religious wars . . . It's a very loaded work," Erdemci says. And she also sees the installation, which was completed before 9/11, as a premonition.

Modern and Beyond covers a half-century of Turkish art, from 1950 until 2000. From 1970 until 1990 was the transitional period between modern and contemporary, Erdemci says, the main difference being that contemporary artists build on earlier minimalism and abstraction and endow it with a narrative.

IN THE MODERN period, when art was still under the sway of Turkey's fine arts academy, most of the artists were men. Today the majority are women, mainly because art is no longer considered a money-making profession. The gender reversal is a consequence of Turkey's transition from a statist, centrally planned, almost Soviet-like economy to a free market system.

In the 1950s, Turkey's finest artists went to Paris to learn abstract art. In the 1960s and 1970s they again went to Paris, but as exiles from military coups. Altan Gürman created what Erdemci calls Turkey's first contemporary work of art, showing barbed wire in front of a hill that has become a military zone, in 1967.

In 1974, a Turkish woman named Nil Yalter created Turkey's first video installation, which was also one of the first video artworks in Paris. In Headless Woman, Yalter juxtaposed male orientalist fantasies of women with demands for women's rights, writing the words of a feminist manifesto with a marker around her navel, while belly-dancing.

In Hale Tenger's Decent Death Watch installation (1993), newspaper clippings recounting the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims are clinically stored in glass jars, laboratory-like, on metal shelves. Bosnia was for centuries part of the Ottoman empire, and Turks were outraged at the world's indifference to the genocide there.

To question the nationalism that is still drummed into Turkish schoolchildren, Esra Ersen dressed German schoolgirls in the grey uniforms that Turkish girls wear and videotaped them repeating "I am Turkish, I am honest, I work hard . . . Oh great Ataturk . . . ", the litany that Turkish children recite daily. She then wrote the German children's reactions on the front of the uniforms.

The Kurdish-Turkish artist Halil Altindere has made postage stamps of the faces of men and women who died or disappeared in police custody. A series of photographs mocks the police habit of writing words with the bullets they capture from PKK separatists. With two Turkish flags as a backdrop, Altindere stands before a table where he has written "I love you" in bullets.

Bulent Sangar is Erdemci's favourite artist, for his acerbic photographic essays on contemporary issues. A facade of windows, which Sanger enters and exits, suitcase in hand, becomes a commentary on globalisation and mobility. His documentary-like photographs of Turks slaughtering sheep beside the motorway show the ill effects of urbanisation. In another, the artist has multiplied images of himself, in jeans and khaki shirt, so that he plays both police or imperialist tormentors and their cringing, kneeling victim.

CONTEMPORARY TURKISH ART is often funny. Erkan Özgen's How can we reach Tate Modern? shows two Kurdish men on donkeys, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in the wilderness of southeast Turkey. "You know what? It was shown at the Tate Modern!" Erdemci laughs.

Virtually all of Turkey's modern and contemporary art is created by secular artists. There are Islamic artists, says Lora Sariaslan, curator at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, "but they're not adding anything new into the mix. They're refreshing the past. It has a purpose as well; they're not letting that tradition die. But it's not contemporary art as we or westerners think of it."

Fulya Erdemci believes practising Muslims are inadvertently introducing a new aesthetic to Turkey, exemplified by president Abdullah Gül's daughter wearing a headscarf under a US-style mortarboard at her university graduation. "This is the new culture," Erdemci says, "a fusion of America and Islam." Many of the artists on exhibit at Santralistanbul can also be seen in the permanent collection across town at Istanbul Modern. This splendid museum, in a former warehouse on the Bosphorus, was opened three years ago by Oya Eczacibasi, the wife of a pharmaceutical millionaire. There is virtually no state subsidisation of the arts in today's Turkey.

Current exhibitions include the portfolios of six photographers, commissioned by Oya Eczacibasi to create works on the theme of the Galata Bridge, which links old and new quarters of Istanbul, across the Golden Horn. The show continues until January 6th and includes Cemal Emden's superb, hyer-real photograph of the bridge at dawn.

Two paintings in Istanbul Modern's permanent collection left the deepest impression on me. Burhan Uygur, who died in 1992, spent two years painting The Door as his last will and testament. He included everything that had entered his life, and the enchanting effect is somewhere between Marc Chagall and the doors of the Florence Cathedral.

The other is a self-portrait by Abdülmecid Efendi, the last caliph of the Ottoman empire, who was expelled to France in 1924. Though in exile, Abdülmecid still wears his royal sash and medal. The mixture of eastern and western accoutrements is striking: the dinner suit with white waistcoat and bow tie are European, the red fez and worry beads oriental. Even Abdülmecid's face belongs to both civilisations: blue, blue eyes above a white moustache and beard.

By way of explanation, Lora Sariaslan points out the window of the Istanbul Modern, to the sight of two continents facing each other across the Bosphorus: "There is Asia, and there is Europe."

www.santralistabul.com

www.istanbulmodern.org