Arts

In Turkey, the Arts Flourish, but Warily

By RACHEL DONADIONOV. 18, 2014

The scene at Contemporary Istanbul, an annual event in a country that is staking a claim to being a world cultural center. Credit Contemporary Istanbul

ISTANBUL — At a glittering dinner on an island in the Bosporus here last week, Ali Gureli, the chairman of Contemporary Istanbul, the city’s annual art fair, told hundreds of international collectors, gallery owners and artists that Istanbul had secured its place as a global art capital.

This metropolis, pulsing with energy, money and self-confidence, seems to prove him right. Galleries abound. The Istanbul Design Biennial is in full swing. Three new private art museums are in the works, including one designed by the London-based star architect Zaha Hadid. The rock and jazz scenes are thriving. A Turkish film, “Winter Sleep,” took the top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival this year.

But beneath the surface, a different picture emerges. Artists say they are increasingly subject to state pressure or intervention, or withdrawal of funding by the government, which is led by the party founded by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose no-holds-barred capitalism has helped fuel the creative boom but whose conservative Muslim sensibility has shifted the national tone after decades in which a secular elite ran the country.

Censorship is nothing new in Turkey, where past governments jailed critics, pulped books and suppressed the cultures of ethnic minorities, including Kurds. But today — after the June 2013 protests in Gezi Park revealed the depth of public anger at the government’s increasingly top-down exercise of power — cultural figures describe a climate of anxiety and self-censorship because the government’s standards for what it considers offensive keep shifting.

“There are these invisible boundaries,” said the artist Iz Oztat, 33, who was asked to remove a mention of the Armenian genocide of 1915 in a booklet she wrote for an exhibition in Madrid last year that received Turkish government funding. “You don’t know they’re there until you cross them.” She added: “That’s what’s so oppressive. There are no rules.”

For his part, Omer Celik, the minister of culture and tourism and a close confidant of Mr. Erdogan’s, has downplayed concerns. “On the contrary, there is censorship within the established circles of culture and arts,” he told a Turkish newspaper this month, referring to the secular elites who dominated state-run cultural institutions in the past. “They socially oppress those who are not from a certain ideology.” (Mr. Celik did not reply to requests for comment for this article.)

Today, as part of the government’s family values push, officials at state theaters say that they must now send plot synopses for government approval, and that gay characters rarely appear onstage anymore. Hemlines have been lowered on ballet costumes. The Presidential Symphony Orchestra of Turkey last month dropped compositions by the classical pianist Fazil Say, who had been charged with insulting religion after he reposted on Twitter a message that mocked an imam. A cartoonist who made fun of Mr. Erdogan in a cartoon was tried on defamation and other charges but later acquitted in a case that resonated as a warning to would-be critics.

Last month, several jurors of the Antalya international film festival, which received private and public funding, quit in protest after festival officials canceled a film about the Gezi Park uprising. (They later reinstated it.) CNN Turk, a private broadcaster, recently pixilated the private parts in Rubens’s 17th-century painting “The Three Graces” in a program about conventions of beauty, to avoid the risk of fines for indecency. Public-school teachers have been investigated for teaching books by John Steinbeck and Amin Maalouf after parents complained that they were inappropriate.

“The governing party has introduced a climate in Turkey in which the pious person is a more acceptable citizen,” said Baris Uluocak, the director of an Istanbul branch of a teachers’ union, some of whose members have been punished for criticizing the government on social media.

The novelist Elif Shafak was tried in 2006 and later acquitted of criminal charges of “insulting Turkishness” for a novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul,” that explored the killings of Ottoman Armenians by Turks in 1915, which Turkey does not recognize as genocide. “Every writer, journalist or poet in Turkey knows deep within that words can get you in trouble,” Ms. Shafak said. The Turkish Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk has also been tried and acquitted on the same charges.

“This was always the case in Turkey but it has become worse,” Ms. Shafak added. “Critical thought is clearly unwelcome. Media diversity and media freedom have visibly shrunk. As a result, there is a lot of self-censorship.”

Last year, the government proposed a new law that would create an 11-person council appointed directly by the cabinet to fund the arts, project by project. Now, the government allocates money to cultural institutions that are free to use it as they wish. Although the law is still in draft form, cultural figures are concerned that the new council would be driven more by politics than by art.

After the Turkish republic was established in 1923, its founder and first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, looked to the West for cultural references, and age-old Turkish traditions were repressed. In 1999, Mr. Erdogan was jailed for reciting a poem with the line “our minarets are our bayonets” during the time when he was mayor of Istanbul. Since coming to national power in 2002, Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party has cast itself as the defender of observant Muslims and Turkey’s rural heartland and has recently been depicting state-sponsored theater, ballet and opera as vestiges of the secular past. After consolidating power in consecutive elections, Mr. Erdogan has begun transforming state institutions. In a speech in 2012, he criticized the secular elites for their previous hold on culture.

“Is theater in this country your monopoly?” he said. “Are you the only people allowed to speak about arts in this country? Those days are over.”

He also said: “With privatization, go ahead and stage your theater as you desire. If funding is needed, we, as the government, will sponsor and support the plays we want.”

But government influence could be felt even earlier. Lemi Bilgin, 58, who was ousted as director of state theaters in 2013 after he openly criticized the government’s plans to change how arts funding is allocated, said the pressure has grown since 2002.

“First, they started asking which plays we planned to include in our repertoire,” he said. “Then they began suggesting plays by conservative playwrights,” including Necip Fazil Kisakurek, a 20th-century writer who was sympathetic to the anti-Semitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and whose work Mr. Erdogan often quotes in speeches.

Last year, the government sold two leading theaters in Ankara, which together drew audiences of more than half a million people a year, to a private business group. The fate of these sites remains unclear. “In theater, you can always be subject to pressure and censorship, but you find a way to get around it,” Mr. Bilgin said. “But if you rip apart the institutions and take away the venues for the artist to perform, it leaves you no room to struggle, and that is the most dangerous form of oppression.”

Many in the Turkish film world say festivals have begun avoiding potentially risky movies for fear of losing government money. There is also widespread concern after the Culture Ministry last year changed the ground rules to require filmmakers to give back state financing if the ministry ended up giving the film in question an 18-and-over rating.

The landscape is complex. There has never been a strong tradition of free speech in Turkey, in the modern sense. Beyond direct crackdowns on artists, cultural figures say that Mr. Erdogan has set a tone in which his conservative constituents feel emboldened to defend their values and suppress others.

The creative class is anxious about where the government’s culture policy is headed. “We haven’t seen this play out yet,” said Banu Karaca, a founder of Siyah Bant, an organization that monitors arts censorship in Turkey.

Yet civil society has evolved. The Gezi Park demonstrations emboldened young people whose parents lived through military dictatorships and tended to avoid protest. Under Mr. Erdogan, ethnic minorities have been acknowledged, if not entirely empowered. In 2008, the Turkish state broadcaster added a Kurdish TV channel and Kurdish radio station, as well as those for Arabic and other regional languages.

“It’s easier to talk about the past now,” said the novelist Kaya Genc, “but it’s still problematic to talk about the present.”