A small peaceful protest to prevent the central Istanbul Gezi Park in Taksim Square from being turned into a shopping mall turned into a countrywide unrest because of the police intervention on the protesters on 31 May 2013. The reaction from the public has further turned into huge protests all over Turkey against their government’s attitude and wrong policies within the last few years. The reasons for the protests are many; the authoritarian outlook of the government, PM’s handling of the country’s problems including these protests, the new social and educational reforms that side with moderate Islamism, international politics that threaten peace, police violence, capitalist enterprises and construction plans that destroy nature, media censorship, the pressurized environment for artists, journalists and intellectuals, losing democratic platforms that allow freedom of speech and the right to protest, and many more.

‘Resistance’, as Turks call it, still continues. It continues regardless of the violent police intervention with the heavy usage of pepper and tear gas bombs, water cannons and plastic bullets that have killed 7 people and injured thousands. Millions of people are either on the streets or communicating on online and social media criticizing the corruption of their government and are demanding true democracy and human rights.

The whole country is united with the strong belief and hope for a bright future. However, well-grounded resolutions are still to be found and negotiated.


 Far away from state, close to the clouds    ''Devletten uzak bulutlara yakin''

 ISTANBUL reloaded
Baysal’s photographs may have been tagged as “urban transformation” or “gentrification,” but to me they are images of environmental violence more than anything else. This is violence against the built as well as the natural environment—vernacular buildings as well as rivers and meadows, and ultimately the earth itself. This, moreover, is violence not just against but also through architecture. It supplants buildings of a more humane-scale—buildings whose builders and inhabitants are one and the same—by an architecture of pomp, power, authority, and gigantism. As a result, Baysal complicates the various binary oppositions that underpin the ways in which this state-endorsed enterprise is often presented to us. Politicians and policy makers have been telling us that this is an initiative of “urban renewal,” but what we now see is ruination. The entire enterprise is predicated on a recently issued “Law on Disaster Prevention,” but it has wrought such havoc as to mimic disaster itself. We constantly hear of Turkey’s “construction boom,” but these images portray profound destruction. The violence Baysal has captured therefore blurs the often taken-for-granted boundaries between renewal and ruination, construction and destruction, and disaster and its prevention.

Eray Çaylı



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