Three additional Turkish traditions, including the centuries-old sport of oil wrestling, were added Tuesday to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage.
The “Kırkpınar oil-wrestling festival,” the “semah, Alevi-Bektaşi ritual” and “traditional sohbet meetings,” all from Turkey, were among the 46 new elements inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The Kırkpınar oil-wrestling festival takes place in the northwestern province of Edirne, where thousands of people from different age groups, cultures and regions travel every year to see wrestlers (pehlivan) fight for the Kırkpınar Golden Belt and the title of Chief Pehlivan.
“Semah” can be described as a set of mystical and aesthetic body movements in rhythmic harmony and constitutes one of the 12 main parts of cem rituals, religious practices performed by adherents of Alevi-Bektasi, a belief system based on admiration for Ali, the fourth caliph after the prophet Mohammed. Semah is performed by semah dancers, accompanied by devout musicians playing the saz, a long-necked lute.
Traditional “sohbet” (conversation) meetings play a crucial role in transmitting Turkish folk literature, folk dances and music, village plays and societal values. Turkish men meet regularly indoors, especially in winter, to discuss local social and cultural issues, safeguard traditions, and encourage solidarity, mutual respect and a sense of community.
In recent years, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, responding to proposals by the Turkish Ministry of Culture, has inscribed Karagöz (a traditional shadow play), the Mevlevi semah ritual (the performance of whirling dervishes), the “aşıklık” (minstrelsy) tradition and the art of “meddah” (public storytellers) on its Intangible Heritage List, which aims to safeguard traditions from around the world.
With more women making movies in Turkey, they’re ruffling feathers – by breaking taboos and broaching tough social issues such as incest and family responsibility.
Turkey's women directors are broaching uncomfortable topics
The Turkish film industry has enjoyed a renaissance over the past decade. Once at a point of virtual extinction, it’s now gaining on France in terms of the number of films currently being produced. And at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival in February, the Golden Bear went to Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu for his film “Honey.”
Within this revival of Turkish film, there is now a growing number of women directors – and it’s not only their gender that is making them stand out in the industry. It’s also the fearlessness of the subjects they are taking on in their films.
Kaplanoglu’s win in Berlin thrust the Turkish film industry into the limelight
Questioning family ties
Stunningly shot in the foreboding mountains of Turkey’s Black Sea, “Zephyr” tells the story of a single mother who leaves her young daughter with the girl’s grandparents in order to pursue a career overseas. It deals with dark, often unspoken issues like abandonment and mortality within the family, as well as questions surrounding love and motherhood.
“Zephyr” is the first feature film of director Belma Bas, who says that taboos are a burden to men and women alike.
“We really have to break those taboos, to take a step forward to solve really primal problems, which are at the core of very disturbing issues of this country,” Bas told Deutsche Welle. “We have to start from somewhere. Those mother-child and parent-child relationships are at the core of these things.
The film director added that she’s not satisfied with getting a “macro-vision of society,” but that the only way to solve problems is to go deeper and take a closer look.
Criticism from women
The lead female character in “Zephyr” is often portrayed in a less-than-positive light, which Bas says allowed her to avoid a feminist discourse. The grandmother character is a voice of conservatism condemning her daughter, who in turn is defended by her father. It is the nuanced nature of the film that has proved controversial
Bas wants her audience to rethink family relationships
At last month’s film festival in Antalya, the country’s most prestigious film event, “Zephyr” drew condemnation from some female critics for its unsympathetic portrayal of lead female characters.
“Zephyr” was one of two films by women directors to compete in the main competition, a first for the festival and an indication of the growing number of female directors in Turkish film.
Revitalizing a tradition
According to film and media professor Tul Akbal Sualp, women filmmakers are both following a long tradition in Turkish culture, and bringing a new cutting edge to Turkish cinema.
“It is a conservative society, but starting from the late 19th century, if you look at the literature and especially the poetry, we have women characters – strong characters – as often as male ones,” said Sualp.
These 19th-century works were far more political than those of current generation, Sualp said, adding that only recently have the female newcomers to the film scene started approaching social and political problems more so than their predecessors.
Winning acceptance
“Merry-go-around,” the second film by director Ilksen Basarir, deals with a dark taboo: incest. A first for Turkey, the film also participated recently in the Antalya film festival.
It was the sensitive subject matter, not her gender, that made it difficult to get financing, said Basarir, although it has not always been like that.
“In Turkey in the last five years, the women directors have become stronger,” she said. “We want to tell our stories to the people and maybe they will start to accept us in this film industry.”
Early on, she wanted to become a camera assistant, but was told that was out of the question because she would have to carry heavy objects. “But now things are changing: There are [female] lighting assistants, camera assistants, directors – so it’s changed,” said Basarir.
Currently, more than 100 films are in production in Turkey. While the majority of mainstream film directors are still men – as in the rest of the world – that may soon change as well, says Bas.
“Recently, there is no majority of males anymore in documentary- and short-filmmaking in Turkey,” she said. “[Women] are coming forward to make feature length films as well. I just long for the day when there will be no naming of female or male filmmakers.”
Three more Turkish traditions were added to UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage.
“Kirkpinar oil wrestling festival”, “Semah, Alevi-Bektasi ritual” and “traditional sohbet meetings” are among the 46 elements inscribed Tuesday on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The Kirkpinar oil wrestling festival takes place in Edirne, Turkey where thousands of people from different age groups, cultures and regions travel every year to see wrestlers (pehlivan) fight for the Kirkpinar Golden Belt and the title of Chief Pehlivan.
Semah can be described as a set of mystical and aesthetic body movements in rhythmic harmony. Semah constitutes one of the twelve main services found in Cem rituals, religious practices performed by adherents of Alevi-Bektasi, a belief system based on admiration for Ali, the fourth caliph after the prophet Muhammed. Semah is performed by semah dancers, accompanied by devout musicians playing the saz long-necked lute.
Traditional Sohbet Meetings play a crucial role in transmitting Turkish folk literature, folk dances and music, village plays as well as societal values. Turkish men meet regularly indoors, especially in winter, to discuss local social and cultural issues, safeguard traditions, and encourage solidarity, mutual respect and a sense of community.
In recent years, the UNESCO, upon the proposal by Turkish Ministry of Culture, inscribed Karagoz (shadow play), Mevlevi Sema ritual (performance of whirling dervishes), asiklik (minstrelsy) tradition, and the art of meddah (public storytellers) on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage List which aims to safeguard traditions from around the world.
Fresh from a world tour spanning from Istanbul to New York, Portico Quartet will be returning home next month to play at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 3-4 December.
In a tour that has seen the band build on much critical acclaim, Portico Quartet continue their growth solidifying their strong reputation within the world of jazz and beyond. Since forming five years ago, the band has released a pair of albums that document a unique evolution of style, emanating from an amalgamation of the diverse tastes of each player. The jazz quartet’s traditional make-up of drums, bass and horns is given a distinctive twist by Portico with the addition of electronics and a hang, a melodic percussive instrument played with the fingers, or in the case of Portico Quartet, with mallets. These unique sounds took shape initially with Portico’s first full-length release Knee-Deep In The North Sea, an album that arrived to much critical acclaim, and which went on to get nominated for a Mercury two years ago, alongside the likes of Radiohead and Elbow.
As the gig will be at the tail end of an extensive tour which has showcased their second album release Isla, an album recorded by Stone Roses producer John Leckie at Abbey Road studio 2, the Quartet are excited to be playing back in London and say they are “especially looking forward to our two shows at the ICA in December.” During the two-night stint there will be guest appearances by electronica artist Leafcutter John of Polar Bear renown on the first night and France-based Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf the following night.
– Colm Doyle
via Jazz breaking news: Portico Quartet Return To London With A Vengeance For ICA Dates.
Left: Artists Julie Ault and Mario Rizzi. Right: BAK artistic director Maria Hlavajova with BAK curator Cosmin Costinas. (All photos: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie)
WITH SO MUCH HAPPENING elsewhere in Istanbul—an opening at Rampa for the painter Ahmet Oran, a very VIP preview of Kutlug Ataman’s retrospective at Istanbul Modern, a new project by the critical darlings xurban_collective at Sanat Limani, Banu Cennetoglu’s first solo show at Rodeo, and a timely debate at Depo on the often violent relationship between art and gentrification—it was slightly frustrating to spend three full days stuck inside the Istanbul Technical University’s Architecture Faculty for a “research congress” organized two weeks ago by Former West. I’m sure there were worse places to be. Built as a medical school and military barracks for the Ottoman Army, the campus is a neoclassical jewel, with four pink façades lining a leafy courtyard with a reflecting pool and a lion fountain in the middle. But still.
Like a discursive sequel to Manifesta, Former West is a peripatetic platform investigating various histories of the post-1989 period. At the heart of the project, initiated by the BAK center for contemporary art in Utrecht, is the proposition, or maybe the hope, that the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t necessarily signal the end of communism but rather the beginning of the end of capitalism, and with it, the hegemony of the West. Through seminars and symposia, Former West is trying to nudge that process along, or in congress-speak, to produce the West as former, and to posit that as a horizon for our time. The gist of the Istanbul gathering, titled “On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination,” was to say that the collapse of the Cold War system didn’t make utopian projects bunk; they just needed to be rebranded as horizons for anyone to take them seriously again.
In her opening remarks, BAK’s artistic director Maria Hlavajova purred a warm welcome to the digital masses following the live stream online. But for all the delirious talk of social media, by the time the congress ended, only one question had been posted on Facebook, followed by a note from the organizers saying, in effect, sorry we missed this, but someone will get back to you soon.
Hlavajova also struck a strange note when she quoted a headline from The Economist—“Turkey, turning its back on the West?”—and then said, “Calm down, the answer from the editors is no.” Was anyone in the audience really unhinged by the prospect? At this point, an artist I know was so turned off by the organizers’ tone that he got up, walked out, and never came back. The next defection came when a curator opened his freebie bag and found a box of Dutch sweets. “Even the fucking cookies are imported,” he said, and likewise went on with his life.
To be fair, Former West set itself a difficult task with the research congress—a preposterously pretentious name for a gathering of academics, a few curators, and the odd artist reading prepared papers. Most of the talks were devoted to splitting semantic hairs and theorizing concepts of horizon, horizonal, and horizontality into being. The different approaches of philosophers (Peter Osborne, Gerald Raunig), sociologists (Caglar Keyder), political theorists (Ernesto Laclau, Jodi Dean), and architectural historians (Beatriz Colomina, Wouter Vanstiphout) were completely irreconcilable. Eventually, even Simon Sheikh, a Former West researcher who had organized the congress, said the various discourses were “totally incoherent” together.
That’s not to say there weren’t moments of drama and debate, as when Dean gave a Sarah Palin–style stump speech, albeit from the far left rather than the far right. Vanstiphout called her mocking and sneering. “I’m glad you were uncomfortable,” she said. “I’m not going to apologize.”
What was missing from all of this was any grounding in artistic practice. The anticipation for Laclau’s lecture was nearly messianic. But after giving a dense interpretation of the horizon, he shot down the idea of addressing contemporary art. “I can’t,” he said. “It’s not my thing.” Julie Ault, Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the Raqs Media Collective, Robert Sember of Ultra-red, and Dmitry Vilensky of Chto Delat? tried to redress the balance by speaking vividly of their work (as did Colomina). But the longer the congress went on, the more it seemed to fold in on itself.
“I’m a little confused,” said Ault on day one. “Why is art so central to this event? How are you connecting it to the larger political stage?” To which Osborne replied: “Art is the institutionally funded space for the displacement of political discourse.” That may be so, but it fails to recognize how or why contemporary art made that space to begin with, which is also like interrupting an ongoing conversation by giving a speech.
By then, some spiky rebellion had entered the room. On day two, Sengupta questioned the post-1989 fetish. On day three, Sember urged the organizers to reconsider the configuration of the event, arguing there were better ways of being in the same space together to work and think. “To be able to get to know one another would have nice,” he said. Maybe next time?
PanARMENIAN.Net – Armenia will have a separate pavilion at Modern Istanbul art fair due November 25-28.
Modern Istanbul art fair is the largest, but relatively new phenomenon in Turkey’s modern art. It provides painters, art critics and directors of art galleries from various countries with the opportunity to meet, communicate, exhibit their works and establish useful contacts during four days.
This year the fair will bring together 420 art workers from 14 countries, representatives of 80 galleries. 2,000 works will be featured.
Painters Tigran Kirakosyan, Felix Ghazaryan, Armen Gevorgyan and Chairman of the Painters’ Union of Armenia Karen Agamyan are invited to participate in the event, RFE/RL reported.
PARIS – Anatolia News Agency
