Alper Turan: Proud and Sad
Queer Visibility and the Geopolitics of Rights in Turkey
Free without registration
What does a proud gay man on the streets of Brussels owe to a queer person in Istanbul? How does his pride depend on the other appearing as oppressed?
- As part of
- Brussels Ass Book Fair
- Date
- 14:30 — 15:30
- Location
-
Box 2
Visibility has long been treated as the natural language of queer emancipation: to come out, to be seen, to be recognised. Yet visibility is a trap and one that travels unevenly. Across Europe, queer rights have been mobilised as markers of liberal and civilisational superiority, distinguishing a supposedly tolerant West from its Muslim, migrant and non-Western others. Pride became a credential, proof of which side of history you were on.
Türkiye fucked that logic, multiple times.
During the EU accession years of the 2000s, queer life became increasingly public, tolerated and at times instrumentalised as evidence of a modern, democratic and "European" society. Istanbul Pride grew into the region's largest public display of queer existence. But that same visibility was later recoded: following the ban on Istanbul Pride in 2015, and with anti-LGBTQIA+ politics intensifying since 2020, queer existence has increasingly been framed as a Western import threatening the family, the nation and public morality. Queer politics had been made to serve opposite projects; first as evidence that Türkiye was becoming European, then as evidence that Europe was corrupting Türkiye.
Taking Banu Cennetoğlu's right? as a point of departure, curator and writer Alper Turan traces that transformation through queer politics, contemporary art and image-making in Türkiye. Drawing on queer and postcolonial critiques of rights and visibility, the talk asks what queer images in Türkiye today can and cannot afford to show.
Alper Turan is a curator, writer and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Toronto.