“Scared of Murals”
The exhibition “Scared of Murals” focuses on a specific aspect of cultural production that antedates September 12, 1980. The exhibition opens with the 1976 Antalya International Film and Arts Festival, for which a group of artists were invited by the local municipality to make murals and public sculptures, and the debacles that ensued. The end note of the exhibition is a group photograph that captured professionals from the worlds of literature, theater, film and criticism among other fields, taken at the open-air cinema on September 11, 1980, during the Kuşadası Culture and Arts Festival. Artists’ rights; the relationship between art and society as well as economy, labor and politics; debates on censorship and the cultural policies of the state are issues that are investigated in the exhibition.
Posters of the Leftist Movement
Artist, graphic designer and researcher Yılmaz Aysan’s exhibition, Posters of the Leftist Movement, which opened on February 8 at Tütün Deposu, shows the political world of the '70s, and the struggle of the younger generation of the time to engage with and respond to the events that took place around them. The exhibition includes leftist posters, flyers, magazines, books, newspapers and record covers from the '60s to '80s, which have been produced and used to stimulate action, strengthen opinion and alter social conscience. Archival materials in the exhibition were not selected based on the content, but rather on the principles of graphic design. The exhibition Posters of the Leftist Movement seeks to reconsider a suppressed visual story of a particular time and place.