Aziz Basan ART BLOG

"I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became the voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising."                                                                                                                   - Miriam Makeba Ali Atmaca, one of the most sought after contemporary Turkish artists whose work is represented in the museum in Nice, once told me that when he was living in Paris a collector who'd come to his studio had walked out on discovering he was Turkish, saying "your history is building mosques, not painting." Not everybody reacts that badly to Turkish painters. Yavuz Tanyeli,  anothe...

I painted this f our years after   the violent suppression of peaceful protests at Gezi Park in Istanbul, which had started on May 23, 2013, and spread to other cities. Those arrested, especially the women,  were humiliated whilst in jail and continued to be   persecuted in the courts on charges of sedition, etc. Others, mainly  outspoken   journalists and intellectuals, had since joined them, and continued to do so on the slightest of legal pretexts . Even those who 'liked' the wrong thing on FB, let alone dared to comment, now found themselves in court on charges of insulting the President or members of his family, if not sedition.   What was different was that in the past those who'd objected to the existing regimes had been killed, or incarcerated and tortured by the military coups that seemed to take place every decade - 1960, 1970, 1980... This time the crack down was being carried out by a civilian government who'd done nothing but complain about the...

There seem to be two dominant strands of protest in contemporary Western art. In  Ways of Seeing (1972),   John Berger concludes ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’. The Tate article Feminist Art concludes, "Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society."  John Berger had a lot more to say than that though, taking the subject all the way back to the Bible. Since the 70s  women have been taking issue with the roles men expect them to fulfill, spare rib or not. Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger immediately spring to mind.  Later artists, more specifically Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker lead well into the what I think is the second dominant strand of protest in Western art, namely the colour of your skin. I love Jacob Lawrence's work because I retain a weakness for that no-no, narrative art, which he did so outstandingly well. Of course , reference to past events is not limited to African-American...