Turkey’s emerging artists dwell in dystopia
The Mamut Art Project, an annual platform for young artists, reflects the new generation’s concerns on immigration, gay rights and the destruction of nature in the country.
Severed body parts in fluffy textiles, flashing sentences from a paragraph of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” that explains how you can scare people into submission, and glossy photos of a young man in 3D goggles running along the torrid landscape of a post-apocalyptic world greet the audiences at the maze-like exhibition space in the heart of Istanbul. Clearly, the emerging talents selected in the 2019 edition of the Mamut Art Project are mostly a grim bunch who are inspired by dystopian literature, regional strife and Ahmed Saadawi’s award-winning novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad.”
“Yes, some of the works are pessimistic,” agreed Seren Ojalvo-Oner, director of the Mamut Art Project, as she tours the exhibition with a group of journalists. “But there is also a lot of irony, a lot of experimentation with forms and strong undertexts,” she told Al-Monitor.
Since 2013, the Mamut Art Project has provided a platform for Turkey’s emerging talents such as graffitist Nconen and performance artist Leman Sevda Daricioglu, among many others. While connecting the new generation of artists with galleries, collectors and the public, the five-day exhibition casts light on the inspirations, trends and concerns of Turkey’s troubled young artists who are often squeezed between economic hardship and censorious state.
Unsurprisingly, the works of the 50 artists displayed in the 7th edition mostly reflect the grim agenda of the country: immigration, alienated identity, destruction of the environment, sexual harassment and growing authoritarianism.
