Thursday, June 27, 2013
2.04 (Binnengasthuis)
Throughout the EU accession negotiations of the past decade the governing Justice and Development Party repeatedly emphasized that the Copenhagen criteria are not to be seen as goals imposed from outside, but rather that they are, in fact, ‘Ankara’s very own criteria’ regardless of the outcome of the negotiations. The legal reforms that have been enacted from 2004 onwards are often cited to evidence this stance, and yet the number of political prisoners in Turkey has recently reached new heights. The current onslaught on the freedom of expression has also expressed itself in the field of culture and the arts. However, in contrast to the complete bans that marked the 1980 coup d’état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage the circulation of artworks that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state. Discussing selected examples of censorship in the contemporary arts in Turkey this paper identifies current modes of silencing and draws attention to how the tensions between legal reforms, current applications of these laws and political discourses impact artistic expression. I argue that censorship efforts gain their effectiveness through the highly arbitrary manner in which they are enacted. This is especially true for artists who are organizationally affiliated with the Kurdish rights struggle. In their case all artistic production is being equated with illegal political action by the Turkish state and subjected to a particular regime of surveillance and legal prosecution.
