Watch Professor Judith Butler’s lecture, “Freedom of Assembly, or ‘Who are the People?’” held on September 15, 2013 in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. Judith Butler’s lecture was a collaboration of Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, the 13th Istanbul Biennial and Boğaziçi University. About the Talk The freedom of assembly is a basic right, but how is it to be understood? [...] → Read the full article…
A crackdown on anti-government protests forced the art show to abandon its more edgy ideas. But the spirit of Taksim Square is not entirely absent For the time being, the days of “art for art’s sake” are over in Turkey. A police crackdown on a fresh protest in Taksim Square threatened to overshadow the opening of the Istanbul Biennial, the country’s most important [...] → Read the full article…
Now in its 13th edition, this year’s Istanbul Biennial, which runs through Oct. 20, is called “Mom, Am I a Barbarian?” taking its title from a book by the Turkish poet Lale Muldur. It fills five venues in Istanbul’s bustling downtown, bringing together 88 artists from around the world: 15 of them are Turkish, others are from Latin America, the [...] → Read the full article…
The demonstrations that broke out across Turkey earlier this year after the police clampdown on an environmentalist protest at Istanbul’s Gezi Park came as a major sociopolitical quake for the country. The first tsunami after the big tremor is beginning to rise as street clashes spread again across Turkey over the Sept. 10 death of a 22-year-old protester in Hatay province. A [...] → Read the full article…
The promotional video the Turkish government showed the I.O.C. for Istanbul’s Olympic bid depicted cappuccino-drinking young executives, out jogging, flirting and having fun – exactly those Turks who had rallied to save Gezi Park and were pleased to see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Olympics pitch turned down. The government seems unable to deal with dissent from this freer-thinking urban professional class other [...] → Read the full article…
The response of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to this summer’s protest movement in Turkey made clear his worsening authoritarianism. Yet his AKP party was founded on inclusivity and pragmatic compromise. As Turks struggled to grasp the impact of this summer’s protests in Istanbul and other cities across the country, Yeşim Arat, professor of political science at Bogazici University, pointed [...] → Read the full article…
Police detained 6 individuals at the entry of Izmir International Fair on the possibility that they could “launch a Gezi Resistance protest”. Released after the ceremony, detainees have filed complaints on policemen for “arbitrary detention and ill-treatment”. Police detained 6 individuals at the entry of Izmir International Fair on the possibility that they could “launch a Gezi Resistance protest”. Released [...] → Read the full article…
One of the greatest accomplishments of the protests, for these three individuals, was the chance to meet and experience unity with people from different religions, classes and ethnicities. Although the Gezi protests may have faded a little over the past six weeks, they haven’t for protesters. No youngster in Turkey has ever seen such massive state violence in action before. Before [...] → Read the full article…
On an early morning in October 2011, I received a text from a columnist of a Turkish daily telling me to not give up. I was traveling in Amsterdam, still jet-lagged from the day before, and I didn’t know what he meant. Then I noticed my Twitter feed was overflowing with similar messages. It was my seventh year as a columnist [...] → Read the full article…
Technically a chemical weapon, tear gas is seeing heavy use in Turkish protests. On Wednesday, hundreds of Turkish riot police forced thousands of protestors out of Taksim Square in Istanbul, by showering them with tear gas and blasting them with water cannons. The square has been ground zero for protests that started on May 31 with the goal to stop [...] → Read the full article…