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Orwell casts his shadow on Istanbul’s culture scene

Orwell’s legacy is reinterpreted in Istanbul’s Pera Museum’s exhibition “Doublethink: Double vision.”
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Six neon figures that light up a single wall at Istanbul’s Pera Museum make no sense until you read the title, “A Few Hours After the Revolution.” Then you realize that the neon letters duplicate the Turkish word DEVRIM (Revolution) in capital letters after the letters have been altered by anti-revolutionaries or police. In Turkey, leftists often write "devrim" on walls only to have the graffiti quickly made incomprehensible by others.

For someone who has lived in Turkey during the left-right clashes on the streets before the 1980 military coup and, to a lesser degree, during the 2013 Gezi Park revolt in Istanbul, this distorted version of “devrim” is almost as familiar as its correct writing.

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