A government crackdown on Turkey’s opposition has ensnared members of the culture community, including the detention of prominent figures, amid mass protests over the shock arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, a chief rival of long-time leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
İmamoğlu’s detention on 19 March on corruption and terrorism charges, which he denies, sparked the largest protests in more than a decade in Turkey, bringing hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to march against what they see as the country’s descent into authoritarianism under Erdoğan.
Artists in Turkey have long lived in the shadow of censorship and sometimes prosecution for expressing their political views. But a broad clampdown on dissent has gathered force since last year, when the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered its worst-ever electoral setback in nationwide municipal polls. İmamoğlu won re-election by a margin of more than 11 percentage points.
“The AKP government has been trying for years to establish its own cultural hegemony,” says Fırat Yusuf Yılmaz, an independent curator and art writer. “They fear symbols that are freely produced, because they cannot establish permanent authority over them. Creative protests are their Achilles heel.”
Among the nearly 50 people who were incarcerated with İmamoğlu was Mahir Polat, who has run the municipality’s cultural heritage department since 2019. Polat has overseen the restoration of more than a dozen historical landmarks, several of which have been transformed into public art institutions.
Polat, 48, was moved from a high-security prison to house arrest on 9 April after he was hospitalised twice with high blood pressure, a life-threatening condition due to his history of heart disease, his lawyer Erkam Erdem says.
Polat still faces terrorism charges stemming from his party’s outreach to Kurdish voters during the 2024 election, when he was narrowly defeated in his bid to become mayor of Istanbul’s conservative Fatih district, home to a population of nearly half a million people and much of the city’s Unesco World Heritage List-inscribed monuments.
Erdem says prosecutors failed to provide evidence for the charges against Polat and linked his arrest to his “strong political profile” and the popularity of his conservation work.
“Mahir’s prominence stems from his work on cultural heritage,” Erdem says. “When he nearly won [the vote for Fatih mayor], his ability to appeal to conservative voters who traditionally support the AKP apparently caused concern.”
At least seven photographers were among the thousands of people arrested during the street protests. Yılmaz notes that university and high school students were also singled out, many of whom created colourful protest banners and “changed the way we are accustomed to making and seeing art. There were people who were detained because they had stickers in their bags.”
Murat Germen, an architect, archivist and photographer whose work is held in the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art’s collection, was briefly detained on suspicion he had incited “hatred and hostility”. The charge arose from a social media post expressing support for a one-day “no shopping” action to protest the crackdown. Germen declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing judicial process.
Art institutions have faced online criticism for failing to speak out about the pressure on artists, and Yılmaz blamed the silence on their patrons’ commercial interests. “Small-scale and independent institutions have had to take on all of the risk and the critical discourse,” he says.
A group of artists, filmmakers and musicians recently gathered in a small city park to discuss ways to resist the clampdown. Among them was the visual artist Ali İbrahim Öcal, who says the protests are already inspiring new concepts for production. “Artists are now obliged to follow this process and help design the response to it. It is our duty to use our art as a form of criticism,” Öcal says.
