A Finger for an Eye
February 25–March 26, 2021
A Finger for an Eye, by Alper Turan, ProtoZine Full Text
Baha Görkem Yalım, Cansu Yıldıran, Dorian Sarı, Istanbul Queer Art Collective
Curated by: Alper Turan
Within Protocinema Emerging Curator Series
Commissioned and presented by Protocinema
In collaboration with poşe Artist Run Space
Protocinema, in partnership with Poşe Artist Run Space, presents A Finger for an Eye, a group exhibition with Baha Görkem Yalım, Cansu Yıldıran, Dorian Sarı, and Istanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergul), curated by Alper Turan within our Emerging Curator Series 2021. ProtoZine takes many forms and is distributed on multiple platforms, digital & print, of commissioned texts accompanying our exhibitions. A Finger for an Eye responds to the ongoing violence materialized in the realm of the visual codes, symbols, and representations of queer existences in Turkey. Here Turan expands on each artists’ work as well as his concerns and proposals.
Download a printable and viewing version
"Repression is a cat without a smile in the heterosexual streets, and a smile without a cat in homosexual minds."
Guy Hocquenghem, from Screwball Asses, 1973
When it is grey, between light and a water drop
While the hate speech, targeting, public repression, and everyday violence against the queer existence in Turkey are not new, it is crystal clear that, since the beginning of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the LGBTI+ movement and its public visibility are increasingly coming into the government’s crosshairs. In the last year, LGBTI+ people have been publicly dubbed by high officials and opinionators as great haram subjects, partners of Western plots, poisoners of young minds, perpetrators of generational disaster, pedophiles, people with low morals, and people against nature. Correlatively, there is an ongoing systematic LGBTI+ hunting that has been operating mainly in the visual regime and through the optical detection of now-publicly-known, adopted symbols of visibility. The state’s logic sees any kind of queer representation in public as a threat to the heteropatriarchy and family morals due to their contagious dispositions. It is working to erase them from the surface to sanitize the public.
An artwork featuring rainbow flags submitted anonymously via an open call by a student collective, which incorporated an artivist exhibition on campus related to ongoing demonstrations at Boğaziçi University, outraged the public sensibility. This anonymous poster with rainbow flags at the four corners depicted a mythical half-woman, half-snake creature (known as Shahmaran) on top of Islam’s holiest site in Mecca, the Kaaba. Allegedly “insulting the public values,” the artwork, targeted as an “ugly attack,” made it legitimate for the authorities to use disproportionate force on protesting students. Rainbow flags were seized during a police search of students’ rooms, and students who organized the exhibitions were arrested. Catalyzing massive, angry protests inside and outside the campus, university resistance became a nationwide protest. While the protests are still going on around the country, each day, phobic public statements are being made by high officials: “LGBT perverts,” “terrorists,” “vandals,” “LGBT? There’s no such thing as LGBT+ people,” “Let’s not worry about what lesbians and mesbians say,” and “This LGBT thing is something that doesn’t suit our values, and that was introduced by the West. Do we have such things as LGBT in our past?” While I am writing this text in February 2021, “LGBTI” has become a hot topic, perhaps maybe, for the first time ever, for such a large public. Perhaps now, for the first time ever, the LGBTI community in Turkey is targeted as a criminal organization, a terrorist group, and the rainbow flag has become evidence of a crime—a symbol reduced to a volatile culture war marker now criminalized as an insulting image.
Dirty Figures and Muddy Colors
The exhibition, A Finger for an Eye, is born out of an urge to generate aesthetic reactions to the state’s ongoing repression politics against Turkey’s queer existences through the visual realm. It is as suffocating as it is intriguing to witness how the state power’s paranoid acts of aggression are more and more directed on the queer through its visual, representative, and symbolic forms; and how the state mechanisms ambitiously work in an iconoclastic fashion against the images of the queer. As the most salient abstracted icon of politicized queers for Turkey’s new authorities, the rainbow colors have been the most targetable. It is more visible and identifiable now for a broad section of the public. Not only a flag with seven colors, but a pink flamingo also became a censored image, a unicorn is a gay propaganda.
Acknowledging that these attacks of the state are tangible, beyond aesthetics, felt on our flesh, body, soul, and psyches, the exhibition of which, as a format is inherently linked to the questions of visibilities, is initially an invitation to subvert the attacks on the visual and an emergency call to feel and investigate the area beyond the visible and before invisible. Following the theoretical path of many, who suggest queer as a site beyond representation and intelligibility, the apprehension of what has not yet been articulated and only visible on the horizon and something which is always in becoming, the exhibition investigates the potential between activism’s intrinsic politics of visibility and art’s ways of hiding. While the schizoid authority is fixated on misinterpreting the symbols, targeting forms, misleading the colors, misidentifying the indexes with the killing motivation of sanitizing the public surface from queer gems, there is a viral queer potential invisible to the eyes. But the rate of contagiousness is threateningly high, so they are right to be scared. A Finger for an Eye is a minuscule exploration of tactically un-indexical queer positions, gestures, forms, and images that cannot be targeted, censored, and visibly deciphered as perverted, illegal, and criminal.
A Finger for an Eye retaliates by not playing the same game, as the power of eyes is already blind, and it proposes a fight with a nonindexical (middle) finger. The title also connotes an expression in the Turkish language, (putting) a finger to a (blind) eye, often used when “criticizing” a work of art that is too direct and obvious, which does not give any room for expansive decoding. When the artwork’s message is also clear, it is a failure. It is putting the elephant in the room on a pedestal; that is how it is redundant. It is funny to hear this expression frequently, which implies Turkey’s consensus that good art is the one that hides perfectly. Put differently—art —one way or another, should involve a degree of abstraction. The more, the better. Does this also come with an unconscious imperative of detaching art (which should be thickly layered and impenetrable, but also very porous for that specific reason) from life (which is direct, bitter, fraught with straight-forwardness and unpleasant realities)? Is it because we put on art, in its abstracted perfection, the responsibility of being a site or evidence of a utopia, where things should not break down to our usual concepts, tools, and views but always offer something untranslatable? Alternatively, did we internalize hiding so much that the art should not be something but a safe space where entry is limited and coded?
This exhibition, while it was still a purely rhetorical question sent to the universes of the invited artists for the first time, had a purpose in itself to radically limit the artists and to give them strict instructions by way of imitating the oppressor, impersonating the censors, and by calling for artists to adopt the strategies of oppression, to appropriate them to create new visual signifiers that move and exist beyond oppression. I mimicked the censor officer’s voice, according to my authoritarian curatorial propositions sent to the artists in the email, in this exhibition:
-There should be no color.
-There should be no figure.
While the government attempts to ban all rainbow images and the alignment of the seven natural colors, my proposition was harsher than this, and what I asked from the artists was to avoid using any color. However, what does that mean? What is no color -black, white, or tones of gray? Or anything except “gay” colors? To not to fall into the trap of the modernist, serious, and racial binary of black and white, by visualizing the greyish muddy colors that emerged after mixing up all the rainbow colors onto one palette, the “no colors” started to translate as “no colors but muddy colors,” or as “no rainbow colors.”
This exhibition was supported by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in Istanbul and Pro Helvetia, The Swiss Arts Council, Switzerland, Charlotte Feng Ford; Suzanne Egeran & works courtesy Empire Project, Istanbul; Öktem Aykut Gallery, Istanbul and Wilde Gallery, Switzerland.
Protocinema is supported by FfAI - The Foundation for Arts Initiatives, The Cowles Charitable Trust, New Jersey, 601Artspace, New York.
