The Story Unfolds in Istanbul and other publications

Contribution to a new art book, upcoming events in the US and more

Dear readers,

Firstly, I wish all of you patience and perseverance in these difficult times for our world. It’s depressing to watch Elon Musk & Bros dismantle and destroy what is left of US institutions — their acts are closely watched, with admiration, I must say, by Turkey’s right-wing politicians and our own Turkish “Bros” who have long complained about losing their “masculine energy,” and feel that our society, too, “has become very, like, neutered, or emasculated.”

I was lucky enough to spend the past months away from the algorithms & frustrations of Silicon Valley Bros and delved into various book projects.

In the past I have worked on art books as a translator for multiple Istanbul-based galleries and museums.

Since 2018, I’ve been writing essays for art books. Fatma Bucak was the first artist to invite me to write for her book.

Last year, I contributed to an art book published by Arter and wrote an essay about Yasemin Özcan’s practice.

I was pleased to see that Argonotlar, an independent & polyphonic contemporary art publication from Turkey, had picked Wet Floor as one of the best art books of 2024.

In writing for art books my challenge is to find a voice that best fits the show’s texture.

My latest contribution to an art book was published last week. And it didn’t concern a living artist.

When Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı, curators of Istanbul’s Meşher gallery, invited me to contribute to their future show, sometime in early 2024, I had little idea about the extent of the collection they were preparing to exhibit.

The Story Unfolds in Istanbul features 300 books from the Ömer Koç Collection, and showcases “autograph manuscripts, first editions, and volumes signed and inscribed by their authors, accompanied by various artifacts, including engravings, paintings, film clips, posters from a range of sources, published Turkish translations and newspaper cuttings.” It’s a well-researched, fun show. If you happen to visit İstiklal Street, you should pay a visit.

The scope of this show, which contains various representations of Istanbul produced over various periods and literary genres from the 16th century to the present day, allowed me to write a long essay about the shapeshifting city where I’ve lived for the past 44 years. Among the books on exhibit are works of Western literature, from fantastical stories to graphic novels, and from science fiction to spy thrillers.

Here is the opening paragraph of my essay, “Framing Istanbul: Depictions of a Fluid City in Western Literature”:

Even the name is liquid, protean and shapeshifting. Lygos. Byzantium. Augusta Antonina. New Rome. Constantinople. Konstantiniyye. Dersaadet. Islambol. Stamboul. Istanbul. How you defined this city has long defined who you were. A rich legacy of political and cultural categories devised by Orientalist writers and visitors has resulted in various definitions, even when they have been shown to be based on inaccurate distinctions. Paradoxically, this inaccuracy of the Orientalist categorisation and classification of Istanbul, its neighbourhoods, peoples, animals and histories has led to ideological certainty in the city’s representations. During the centuries-long reign of Orientalism in the arts and sciences, Istanbul took the form of a dangerous but exciting, chaotic but vibrant, unforgiving but soulful, mysterious but well-traversed city.

As Edward Said noted in Orientalism, “the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western” when you attempt to understand, classify and categorise your source of oriental fascination, in this case, Istanbul. As the Western gaze domesticated the exotic through classification and categorisation, a “limited vocabulary and imagery” imposed themselves.

Istanbul’s framings by European and Anglophone travellers in their novels, stories, poems, travelogues, diaries, plays, cartoons, pamphlets, tracts, biographies and other textual productions, have shown a preference for categorisation and order over social texture and irregular detail. The more rational the observer, the more ambitious the stereotyping of their representations. The more well read and well bred the chronicler of Istanbul, the more fantastical their passages and descriptions.

The Story Unfolds in Istanbul is a Borgesian attempt to convey a cornucopia of such writings and observations. The exhibition offers a Library of Babel for Istanbul’s representations: five centuries of looking at Istanbul has produced many thousands of texts and images of this city, which makes such a library, at first glance, impossible to establish. The narrator of the Argentine author’s short story tells readers of a universe comprising countless adjacent hexagonal rooms, each of which features four walls of bookshelves (and some basic necessities) for the reader. Borges’s library contains all the possible 410-page books ever written — or that might one day be written. The Story Unfolds in Istanbul reveals that a similar effort to compile a Library of Babel for Istanbul has been in the making for some time.

If you want to read more, you can browse and buy the catalogue here.

I’m preparing to fly to SFO this week, then make my way to Los Angeles and again fly to Chicago for two upcoming events. The first one is at University of California Irvine on February 8.

I’ll be joining Jeffrey Ngo and Jeffrey Wasserstrom for this event which will be live-streamed.

On February 12, I’ll be talking about The Lion and the Nightingale at Northwestern University. I’ll deliver my talk, “The Lion and the Nightingale: The Turkish Government Against Turkey’s Artistic Communities”, from 12:30PM-2:00PM at Harris Hall, Room 108. Lunch will be served! To register for the lecture, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-lion-and-the-nightingale-tickets-1110663156399?aff=oddtdtcreator

The lecture will be followed by a reception from 4:30PM-6:30PM at the Buffett Institute Reading Room. To register for the reception, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-lion-and-the-nightingale-reception-with-kaya-genc-tickets-1152617553129?aff=oddtdtcreator

I hope to run into you in one of these events and chat about books, Istanbul, the folly of “Bros”, etc.

Until next time,

—Kaya