"You Want Kilims, But I Do Films" Art and Culture in Turkey

Much has been publicized about the recent crackdown on freedom of expression in Turkey. What is often overlooked, however, is how censorship works, and how it has been changing. Based on cases studies collected for more than a decade, this presentation will detail the modalities of censorship and the different actors involved in it, outline how freedom of the arts is legally and discursively circumscribed by politics and Turkey’s official memory regime, and examine artistic strategies that push back against censorship.

Banu Karaca is an anthropologist working at the intersection of political anthropology, art and aesthetics, nationalism and cultural policy, museums and commemorative practices. She is currently a Fellow at the Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe Research Program the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her manuscript “Decivilizing Art: Cultural Policy and Nationalism in Turkey and Germany” examines the entrenchment of the art world in state violence. Karaca’s ongoing research centers on the practice of writing art history against the background of the politics of dispossession in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Her recent publications interrogate freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, and visual literacy. She is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey.

Political and social upheavals in Turkey have decisively changed working conditions for artists, scientists and journalists. In the special programme "You Want Kilims, But I Do Films – Art and Culture in Turkey", the Akademie der Künste invites representatives from various cultural sectors to present their practice.

On 4 July, Aslı Özarslan’s documentary Dil Leyla is shown. You can find more information here.

In cooperation with taz.gazete.

With the friendly support of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Akademie der Künste (Society of Friends of the Academy of Arts).