C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 775 [775–802] 31 Kurdish Art and Cultural Production Rhetoric of the New Kurdish Subject engin sustam Introduction This chapter analyses Kurdish cultural and artistic work. In the past three decades, significant artistic activities took place and cultural works have been produced in cities such as Diyarbakir, Mardin, Istanbul, Duhok, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Qamislo, Kermanshah, Mahabad, Tehran, as well as in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. For much of the twentieth century, Kurdish cultural and artistic productions were repressed by the assimilationist policies the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria adopted with respect of their Kurdish population. In Iran, Kurdish people suffered various forms of political oppression during the rule of the shah of Iran and these policies continued after the revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Although the Iranian state recognizes the language and culture of the Kurds, this recognition does not extend to autonomy and self-government and the provision of public education in the Kurdish language is prohibited. In Turkey, from 1991 onwards, the situation began to change as a result of the easing of restriction on Kurdish language and culture initiated by the reforms of the government of Turgut Özal. During the 2000s, more restrictions on Kurdish culture and art were removed and means to disseminate it, such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, were established. Cultural festivals organized by the municipal councils in the Kurdish regions of Turkey became commonplace in this period. However, in recent years and as a result of the acceleration of Turkey’s authoritarian turn, many of the institutions that played a leading role in the production and dissemination of Kurdish culture in Turkey have been closed down by the state. In Iraq, Kurds have been enjoying extensive autonomy since 1991 and cultural production has flourished since then. A de facto Kurdish autonomous entity has also emerged in Syria in July 2012 onwards, and all of the restrictions 775 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 776 [775–802] engin sustam imposed on Kurdish culture and identity by the Ba’athists have now been removed. This chapter postulates that the cultural endeavours in these regions and the artistic work produced there has an overtly anti-colonial character, adapting an oppositional political stance to war, oppression and mechanisms of political repression that the Kurds have been subjected to, as well as addressing their multifarious social consequences. Cultural and artistic production in the Kurdish space in Turkey during the 1990s is especially marked by an acute political awareness, going hand in hand with the rise of an artistic dynamic leaning on a destructive and ironic language. In that respect, it can aptly be stated that all artistic and cultural works of art that fall within the Kurdish space are political due to the clear stance they take. One of the most intriguing contributions of this chapter is its emphasis on artistic and cultural production within the actual political arena, interrogating how it contributes to the transformation of the new Kurdish subjectivity that situates itself across borders. Artistic production for Kurds signifies the memory of a stateless people trying to survive amidst the hegemony of the dominant national cultures and the traumas of the repression of Kurdish culture. Hence, analysing the participation of contemporary artists and producers in the Kurdish artistic and cultural space in the midst of conflict and violence enables us to highlight the emancipatory capacity of their work (see the analysis of the work of Cengiz Tekin in Sustam, 2015). Territorialization, Reterritorialization and Deterritorialization: Understanding Kurdish Cultural Space The analysis presented in this chapter draws from the theoretical discussion advanced in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and in particular the concepts of ‘territorialization, reterritorialization and deterritorialization’. Before I proceed to the discussion, these concepts need to be briefly outlined and their value as a method of analysis highlighted. This research investigates how, through literary and artistic efforts, a cognitive territory of an oppressed people is created or rather recreated. The concepts of ‘territorialization’, ‘reterritorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ traverse the foundation of our decolonial approach and join a particular structure which is the movement of the relative and molecular process that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize in their theoretical reflection on space, in which these notions are presented to render an account of this transdisciplinary aspect that 776 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 777 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production prefigures the real space. For Deleuze and Guattari, questions of space concern the ‘matter that will occupy space at this or that degree’ and this movement of imminence reacts with the notion of territoriality and how territory is created, marked, appropriated and described by means of signs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 46, 55, 177, 181, 214). This Deleuzian approach is useful for questioning artistic thought. The term ‘territoriality’ is, then, used around the concept of ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ movements to analyse the mobility of artistic creation, cultural production and thought around these three stages. Art sometimes transcends culture, but also culture has in itself the potential for reterritorialization as an authentic reflex that constitutes thought, actors networks and movement. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: ‘Territory is, in fact, an act that affects environments and rhythms, which “territorialises” them’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 386). For Deleuze, to deterritorialize ‘is to leave a habit, a sedentary lifestyle. More clearly, it is to escape from alienation to processes of precise subjectivation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 162). However, one should avoid believing that deterritorialization is an end in itself, a deterritorialization without return. For Deleuze and Guattari, this concept is not conceivable without its counterpart ‘reterritorialization’: ‘Consciousness finds its territory, but in new ways until a next deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 306–7). As Deleuze and Guattari add in their book What Is Philosophy: ‘Deterritorialization and reterritorialization intersect in the double becoming. We can hardly distinguish the native from abroad because the foreigner becomes an aboriginal person in the other who is not, at the same time that the native becomes a foreigner, to himself, to his own class, to one’s own nation, to one’s own language’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991: 105). On the basis of this analysis, I would like to show to what extent these two wandering movements are endowed with a critical potential and, more precisely, the utopic critical potential for the artistic production of an oppressed people. The potential for the Kurdish minority lies in their ability to question the ways of relating to space (Kurdish territory and space) and is only conceivable to the extent that the link between space and Kurdish identity is made visible. The fact that Kurdish subalternity of artistic perceptions unblock these from the colonial political situation that victimized and oppressed Kurdish identity enables for a reappropriation of some form of freedom and allows them to create a new decolonial relationship to space, both critical and singular. Through reterritorialization and deterritorialization movements, we seek to explain the production of the Kurdish space and explore the decolonial 777 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 778 [775–802] engin sustam character of this creation and how it relates to the concepts of territory and national identity. The Changing Geography of Kurdish Cultural Production Kurdish cultural production since the 1960s has been taking place in a number of locations and influenced by several distinct processes. As mentioned above, the repression of Kurdish culture and language in the states that have a Kurdish population has created a restrictive environment, which adversely affected its development. However, the situation began to change in the second half of the twentieth century through the political struggle by Kurdish movements and efforts by Kurdish individuals and institutions. Cultural activities in the diaspora started to take place from the 1960s onwards and from the 1980s, the efforts by Kurdish activists and intellectuals began to take a more organized form leading to the establishment of various institutions, such as the Paris Kurdish Institute and the Kurdish Library in Stockholm. The Kurdish language has been taught at Paris INALCO’s Department of Kurdology since 1983. Kurdish migration to Europe accelerated and as a result during the 1980s, the number of Kurds in European countries grew significantly. Many of the Kurdish activists settled in the Scandinavian countries and Sweden became a centre of Kurdish cultural activities in the late 1970s and 1980s. In contrast with the chaotic and repressive political period vis-à-vis the Kurdish language in the Middle East and Turkey, the exiled Kurds and political refugees began to produce literary works in the Kurdish language and contributed to the development of modern Kurdish literature. This came about as a result of the efforts of Kurdish activists leaving behind their commitment to political militancy and devoting their time to producing literary works. Authors such as Mehmet Emin Bozarslan, Rojen Barnas, Mehmed Uzun, Mahmut Baksi, Rohat Alakom, Firat Cewheri, Cigerxwîn, among others, continuously produced work in the Kurdish language. This new generation of Kurdish writers organized themselves in cultural and political associations, such as Yekitiya Nivîskaren Kurd (Federation of Kurdish Authors in Stockholm), Komela Nivîskaren Kurd Swêdî (Association of Kurdish Authors in Sweden) and the Kurdish Institute of Paris (Alakom, 1991: 16–20). Other Kurdish artists who escaped the persecution they faced in Turkey and settled in Europe included film director Yılmaz Güney, who following his escape from prison moved to Paris in 1981 and produced his two influential films, Yol 778 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 779 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production (The Road, 1982) and Duvar (The Wall, 1983) in France. He won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 for Yol and remained in Paris until his death on 9 September 1984. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of cultural journals and political magazines were established in Europe by Kurdish activists to promote the development of Kurdish language and its use in literary and artistic works, including Pale (1978, journal), Armanc (1979, journal), Hevi (1981, children’s magazine), Berbang (1982, journal), Pêseng (1983, journal). Several publishing houses were also established in this period, including Wesanxana Roja Nû (1979) and Wesanxana Deng (1980), which published works of Kurdish classical literature and children’s books. These publishing houses published important new work by Kurdish authors, including works by poets Ș êrko Bêkes, Cigerxwîn and Rojen Barnas, and novels by Mehmet Uzun, Mahmut Baksi, Mehmet Emin Bozarslan and Firat Ceweri, which in the subsequent years contributed to Kurdish cultural reawakening. In addition, artistic performances (cinema, music and Kurdish literature) have become commonplace in many West European countries and contributed to the development of the feeling of belonging to the Kurdish nation among the diaspora Kurdish community. From the early 1980s, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) also began establishing a presence in many of the West European countries and organized among the Kurdish communities there. An important aspect of the PKK’s activism revolved around culture and at the start its ‘cultural activities were comprised of the music group Koma Berxwedan (The Resistance Group), which was formed in 1981 in Germany’ and in 1983 a cultural organization, Hunerkom (Association of Artists), was established in Germany, which organized activities to promote Kurdish cultural development and revival (Gunes, 2012: 113). Kurdish diaspora in Europe remained influential in the production and consumption of Kurdish culture. The London Kurdish Film Festival has regularly been held since 2001 (Gündoğdu, 2010: 9–36). In the past two decades, Kurdish film festivals started to be held in Berlin, Geneva, Paris and Vienna. A Kurdish cultural festival attended by many Kurds from European countries has been held annually in Germany since 1992 (Koçer, 2014: 476). Another significant development that took place in the diaspora was the development of Kurdish media. A milestone was achieved when Kurdishlanguage television broadcasts started in 1995. This began when MED TV, the first Kurdish-language television channel, was established, with a licence from the UK’s Independent Television Commission and began broadcasting 779 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 780 [775–802] engin sustam from its studios in Denderleuw, Belgium. However, MED TV’s licence was revoked in March 1999, but a new channel, Medya TV, broadcast between 1999 and 2004, and following its closure, Roj TV between 2004 and 2012. Kurdish-language broadcasting has continued by Nûçe TV (2012) and Stêrk TV (2012) and Med Nûçe (2013). Television channels in Iraqi Kurdistan also began broadcasting in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Currently, there are several channels in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, including Kurdistan TV, Kurdsat, NRT, Newroz, Rudaw, among others (Hassanpour, 1996; Keles, 2015). Another channel, Kurd1, dedicated to broadcasting mainly cultural and artistic content, was established by the Paris Kurdish Institute and broadcast from France between 27 April 2009 and 31 December 2012. More recently, a Diyarbakir-based children’s channel, Zarok TV, has been broadcasting in the Kurdish language since 21 March 2015. In Turkey, a similar process of institutional development in the area of culture took place with the establishment of the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre (NÇM) in Beyoglu, Istanbul, in 1991. It had the objective of promoting Kurdish culture and arts and became an important centre of Kurdish cultural development. It organized music, theatre, cinema and folk dancing classes, as well as many cultural events and performances. The music groups Koma Rojhîlat, Koma Çiya, Koma Gulen Xerzan, Koma Amed, Koma Agire Jiyan were established as part of the NÇM and they played a leading role in the popularization of Kurdish language music. Another cultural centre, MEDKOM, also based in Beyoğlu, made a significant contribution to the cultural life of Kurds in Istanbul, forming a rich archive of works in theatre, cinema and especially music. Currently, Tev-Çand (Mesopotamian Democratic Movement for Culture and Arts, 2010) is active in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, as well as in the diaspora and one of the most significant institutions that contributes to the development of Kurdish culture. Hence, from the mid-1990s onwards, Kurdish cultural and artistic activities began to take place more in the Kurdish regions in Turkey. This was facilitated by the establishment of several cultural centres during the 1990s, as well as newspapers and journals in Kurdish. Several high-profile Kurdish writers and musicians, such as Mehmed Uzun, Aram Tigran, Ciwan Haco, Sivan Perwer, Berken Bereh, who worked and produced in Europe were allowed to visit Turkey and perform and participate in festivals, coinciding with the Kurdish cultural awakening in Turkey. After the Kurdish parties began to take control of municipalities in the south-eastern and eastern provinces in Turkey in 1999, the ground for the revival of Kurdish culture was strengthened. 780 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 781 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production While the Kurdish space witnessed a cultural and social revolution since the beginning of the 2000s, some cities in Turkey including Diyarbakir, Mardin, Batman, Van and Dersim became a collective space of cultural expressions, despite all state pressure and obstructions. Mardin Biennale has been regularly organized since 2014 with the participation of international artists and it managed to become a significant attraction centre for the entire Kurdish region in Turkey. The Diyarbakir Book Fair has been regularly held since 2012 and the Amed Book Fair has been organized by Diyarbakir Municipality Council since 2015. The Yılmaz Güney Kurdish Film Festival has been organized in Batman since 2011. Diyarbakir became the most important place of Kurdish cultural production and distribution, with art galleries active not only in the cultural sphere but also in contemporary arts. We can then say that in these years, Kurdish music, linguistic studies, literature, cinema, contemporary arts, theatre, popular culture and gastronomy has managed to produce cultural and symbolic capital and contributed to the formation of a new Kurdish cultural memory (Sustam, 2016a: 152–9). Also, in recent years, many new Kurdish-language journals and magazines have been published, including Qijika Reş (post-colonial anarchist journal), Kovara Derûnnasiyê: Psychology Kurdî (the first Kurdish psychology journal), Wêje û Rexne (academic journal of criticism), Zarema (journal of criticism), Democratic Modernity (journal of political theory), PopKurd (journal of popular culture), Kund (literary criticism), Golîk (comic), Ziryab (journal of music), Derwaze (Kurdish journal of social sciences and humanities), among others. New theatre groups have been established, including Sermola Performans, Şa Performans, Teatra Jiyana Nû, Tov Şano. Stand-up comedians, such as Murat Batgî and Mehmet Erbey, regularly perform in Kurdish regions as well as in western Turkish cities. Cultural and artistic activities in Iraqi Kurdistan flourished with the establishment of de facto Kurdish autonomous rule in Iraq in 1991, which provided the fertile ground for Kurds to return from exile and produce in their own country. In Iraqi Kurdistan, after 1991, universities and schools of art were founded, all corresponding to factors that contributed to the flow of works of art, especially in literature, cinema and music, towards the region. In the past two decades, film festivals and other cultural events have become commonplace also in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Film festivals in Sulaymaniyah and Duhok are now well established and take place annually, with the participation of Kurdish films as well as films from many other countries. The International Erbil Book Fair is organized annually and attracts many 781 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 782 [775–802] engin sustam publishing houses. In addition, many music, theatre and cultural festivals are held, and the cultural life of the region has flourished. Works of art in other Kurdish spaces as Iran and Syria did not show much difference when compared to the ones in Turkey, while those in Iraq and diaspora were products of a more independent atmosphere. Despite this, cultural activities have been taking place. For example, the Meriwan International Theatre Festival that has been held for the last thirteen years. Iranian Kurdish filmmakers, such as Bahman Ghobadi, Hassan Sonboli, Keywan Karimi and Rahim Zabihi, remain active and produce films that narrate the stories of Kurdish people, despite the censorship of the regime (Moradi, 2002). Since the emergence of a de facto Kurdish autonomous region in Syria, there has been a reinvigoration in the Kurdish artistic and cultural activities. The autonomous administration organizes many cultural activities despite the conditions of warfare. For instance, Rojava Film Commune organized the International Kobanê Film Festival (Festîvala Fîlman a Navneteweyî ya Kobanê) in Kobanê in November 2018, on the fifty-eighth anniversary of the Amudê Cinema fire, which resulted in the death of more than 200 Kurdish children and is a significant traumatic event in the history of Syrian Kurds (HawarNews, 2018). Similarly, the Rojava Culture and Arts Festival is also regularly organized since 2014. Cultural activities are organized by Tev-Çand (Art and Culture Movement) since 2012. Tev-Çand has established an autonomous structure in all cantons of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Kurdish Cultural Production: From Victimization and Trauma to Subalternity and Rebellion The militant cultural environment of the 1970s gave way to a cultural resistance that leaned on the collective memory. The distinct periods in the development of Kurdish culture highlighted above also depict cultural rituals through which a new Kurdish subjectivity was born. Advances and amendments in the cultural sphere somehow both described and problematized changing periods of the Kurdish space, transforming it into the memory and narrative of a people. Music is at the core of the Kurdish political subject that flourished in the diaspora. The new Kurdish music stems from the dengbêj (bard) tradition and a new generation of singers, including Aram Tigran, Şivan Perwer, Nizamettin Ariç, Ciwan Haco, Leyla I· şxan, Brader, followed this tradition in their songs, which mainly narrated ‘longing, pain, elegy, 782 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 783 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production rebellion and mourning’ of the spirit of statelessness (bê welat) (Nezan et al., 1996; Scalbert-Yücel, 2009; Sustam, 2012). Rebellious and militant music incorporated around the culture of ‘kom’ (group) that appeared in the 1980s was, on the other hand, accepted as part of the ideological culturalism of the time. The period of koms, including, among others, Koma Berxwedan, Koma Amed, Koma Gulên Xerzan, Koma Dengê Azadî and Agirê Jiyan, united the militant-protest Kurdish music with the traditional folk-dancing culture (govend) and emphasized the idea of rebellion for the national cause.1 Koms dominated the Kurdish musical production during the 1980s and 1990s but began to decline during the 2000s as more individual artists began to take centre stage in musical productions. This development increased the diversity in the Kurdish musical scene as new artists, such as Rojda, Çar Newa, Metin-Kemal Kahraman, Ferec, Siya Şevê, Bajar, Ahmet Aslan, Mikail Aslan, Hivron, Burhan Berken, Bê Sinur, Mem Ararat, Koma Zelal, among others, launched their albums. During the 2000s, Kurdish arabesque gained more visibility with the formation of a Kurdish popular culture (Sustam, 2016a). The genre had already existed before and Emin Arbani, Bismilli Zeko, Şehrîbana Kurdî, Beşir Kaya, Şahê Bedo, Awazê Bazîdê, Murad û Fate, Zinar Sozdar among others, had already performed Kurdish arabesque in Kurdish regions (Diyarbakir, Van, Mardin, Dersim) during the 1990s and 2000s. Besides, arabesque singers making Kurdish music in cities like Diyarbakir bear all the traces of migration, victimization, social pathology and conflict and conveyed the language of the new generation fed by the culture of mourning. The origin of the emergence of a counter-cultural movement and Kurdish popular culture in Turkey can be traced to the presence of Kurds in all social spheres of big cities. Popular music such as ‘Kurdish arabesque’ carries the images of the subcultural resistance of Kurdish subjectivity and places minority decolonial codes on popular culture. When we speak of Kurdish arabesque music, it seems important for us at first to explain that this music trend is a counter-culture of a musical branch from the Kurdish slums in Diyarbakir, or Istanbul, and is excluded by forced political migration and the repressive state into public space during the 1980s and 1990s. This genre is a production of the popular culture of the following Kurdish arabesque pop music under the influence of the cultural industry of Turkish arabesque music of the 1970s and 1980s. Even if the arabesque music uses the form of a heartbroken victim to express its resonance to expel and expatriate, 1 For a discussion on traditional Kurdish music, see Merwanî (2010). 783 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 784 [775–802] engin sustam it still lends a voice to the cultural revolt from below and against the hierarchy of the elite culture in Turkey. The culture of arabesque music is stigmatized at a given moment by the state institutionalization, which wanted to reject this as ‘shantytown culture’ (Özbek, 1991). Kurdish arabesque music is also connected to the lives of people from the shanty towns and popular stereotypes and metaphorically represents political positions and experiences of Kurdish migrants in the dominant and urban society while making anti-colonial practice and subculture visible (see Hebdige, 1979). This tradition evolved and new musicians who speak from within the resistance, figures like Serhado, Sherif Ömeri, Dillin Hoox, Ado û Zara, Shakur 93, Mohsen Farhang, Tolhildan, MM47, Rap Er and Dj Mert, make Kurdish political arabesque rap in Europe or at the outskirts of Istanbul. This new situation uniting the dengbêj tradition with the Western sounds of the modern times can well be called the spring of Kurdish music ranging from popular culture to sociopolitical resistance. It must be stated that traumatic events have always been the centre of Kurdish artistic production and the post-1990 period is not an exception. This situation that mostly shows itself in Kurdish contemporary arts and music drives forward artistic productions as political criticism intertwined with a political aesthetics and an anti-war language (Imago Mundi, 2017; Sustam, 2016a). Trauma, at the hands of the artist and the singer, ceases to be a social pathology and gets into the form of the counter-memory of a language of resistance. While the political arts of the 1990s mostly dealt with victimization, an artistic perspective that became political in the 2000s leans on the experience of trauma and turns victimization into the language of resistance. This is also related to the carnivalesque curative effect of art, healing the social memory afflicted by war and destruction. In other words, while melancholy and depression were re-established as part of an artistic attitude, we witness the restitution of trauma and the social eclipse of reason with a sarcastic language. In line with Şener Özmen’s important book Travma ve Islahat (Trauma and Reform, 2007), and especially his work ‘Schizo-Notebook’, the irony that lies in the question ‘why can an artist in Diyarbakir not make HD quality works of art?’ both reveals the situation of an artist who produces in the midst of war and problematizes the subaltern position of a low-resolution attitude beneath the paving stones (for a concept ‘subalternity’, see Spivak, 1997a). Undoubtedly highlighting impossibilities created by the conditions of war, this attitude makes a clear reference to the political signs art has created in an atmosphere of trauma: ‘Diyarbakir had a trauma. We cannot expect people to be in their right 784 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 785 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production minds afterwards. What appears now is a schizophrenic character, meaning that the language is also schizophrenic’ (Özmen, 2011: 28). Here the discourse of trauma, as a testimony, becomes a politicized memory and shapes the attitude of the artist. Trauma becomes a narrative that might as well be the spine of artistic production, especially cinema. The visual power of the trauma narrative does not appear to create further victimization, rather it is an emphasis on the subaltern position of the Kurdish subject in the eyes of the artists. Within the same perspective, it can be said that the artisanal or subversive artistic translations of the artistic experience that deal with trauma not only have a literary and philosophical origin but also politicize artistic forms of trauma within the context of social relationality, while arts in general question the social accordingly (Benjamin, 2011). Artists focusing on cultural and artistic production, in response to the crisis in the sovereign cultural sphere created by music and cinema, added a unique quality to the ontological dimension to resistance in the Kurdish space. Arts and artists witnessing their time, amounting to a ‘testifying’ of an era, both multiplied the political memory of the reproduced works of art and added pure symbolic power to resistance. It would be enough to look at the short film by Fırat Yavuz Toros Canavrı (Toros Monster, 2011), which focuses on the forced disappearances of the 1990s, to illustrate this reality. Many Kurdish political activists were arrested by shadowy organizations linked to the Turkish state security services, such as JI·TEM (Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-terrorism), and taken away in a white Renault Toros to unknown locations.2 The bodies of some activists were recovered in remote places but many of them have been officially classified as disappeared and the whereabouts of their remains have never been established until this day. Although the contribution of trauma studies and psychoanalysis in cinema to consciously or unconsciously decipher the unknown might well be considered as the memory of a certain period, it also 2 The Kurds use the phrase of ‘dirty war’ to describe the violence unleashed on them by the ‘deep’ state and various of its agents of violence. Since the military coup of the 1980s, state violence has infiltrated into the daily lives of Kurds in Turkey’s Kurdish regions. The consequences of this ‘dirty war’ in the Kurdish regions were manifold and included the disappearances of people, burning of villages, murders by unknown assailants. The mothers and relatives of the victims of violence have organized since May 1995 and are known as the ‘Saturday Mothers’. They have been campaigning to discover the fates of their loved ones and have been organizing a weekly sit-in in front of Istanbul’s Galatasaray School in Beyoğlu. The ‘deep state’ refers to the coercive power resulting from the use of a system that relies on state apparatuses and semi-state apparatuses such · as Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), the army, paramilitary groups such as JITEM and other special combat units. Many of these organizations went far beyond the legally allowed use of force and acted with impunity. 785 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 786 [775–802] engin sustam reveals the political perspective of artistic and cultural productions, which mutually nurture the spirit that enhances the formation of an archive of testimonies. We can see that this is also happening in Ali Bozan’s contemporary art production titled ‘Bu Bir Toros Değildir’ (This Is Not a Toros), which includes intertwining narratives in close reading (Sustam, 2016b). The narrative of pain and trauma that is at the core of the perspective of these works both examines today and reminds us of other cultural memories from the era of dengbêjs, turning them into a great source of inspiration for artists’ imagination. It can then be said that traumas and serhildans (insurrections) constitute the visual memory of artists and cultural actors, being the milestone of their works wrapped up in the spirit of their times. Despite the destruction and wounds in Kurdish consciousness created by the social pathology caused by violence and repression targeting Kurdish people in Turkey, it is noteworthy that works of such artists, being the actors of a stateless people, were shown in important galleries, archived in museums and participated and received awards in international festivals. The work of individual artists who have lived and produced in Diyarbakir and Istanbul have been exhibited in Tate Modern in London (Erkan Özgen, Wonderland), Georges Pompidou in Paris (Halil Altındere, Dengbejs). From 1995 onwards, we witness the emergence of a new generation of artists making an entrance in the artistic scene, and a new artistic situation occurring in the Kurdish regions of Turkey and around internationally recognized institutions. These include artists and filmmakers associated with the NÇM’s Mezopotamya Gösteri Sanatları (Mesopotamia Performing Arts): Kazım Öz (director), Şener Özmen (author, artist), Kawa Nemir (poet, translator), Nazmi Kırık (actor), Şermola Performans (theatre group) and Aynur Doğan (musician), whose work has greatly contributed to the development of Kurdish art and culture. A quick look at the works of art created by Kurdish artists of the war generation of the 1990s reveals that their works revolve around inquiries of identity and traumas of war. While the generation of the 1990s made use of collective memory through resentment, an anti-colonial reading and the language of artistic counter-violence emerges in the works of the subsequent generations who, despite adopting a singular and distinct language, were not so far away from the influence of the previous eras. Although all generations manifest relationality, continuity and ruptures, works of the generation of the 1990s were not so distinct from the arts, literature, theatre of the post-1960 786 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 787 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production exile generation as they, too, assumed a new claim over their local spaces and struggles. Bê Welat: Artistic and Cultural Productions as Spaces of Memory, Statelessness and Deterritorialization The language of war and violence shaped by the ‘disappearances under custody and murders by unknown assailants’ constituted the ‘dirty’ memory of the 1990s. Not only did it reveal the trauma that afflicted the Kurds’ sense of community but also rendered visible forms of epistemic counterviolence that reflect on any artistic, cinematographic and literary work created by the Kurdish artists. The most important features of works created by Kurdish artists revolve around counter-violence and the theme of a stateless society. Various artists in Diyarbakir and Mardin have continued making contemporary art, cinema and literary performances relating to the ‘White Toros’ that symbolizes the forced disappearances and murders by unknown assailants. This symbolization technique depicts the identity of the ‘unknown’ assailant as the car itself and thus reflects on cinema and contemporary art by means of relational aesthetics. The image of the ‘White Toros’ car is interesting in the sense that it evokes a ghost of warmongering governments’ bellicist memory. While the entire panoptic system of the 1990s is based on the state of emergency practised in the Kurdish populated regions, White Toros is an element of violence evoking a parallel reading of the phenomenon of loss, the unrestricted use of sovereign violence, disappearance, oppression and threat. White Toros becomes the symbol of a ghost that is in contact with the wounded body of the Kurdish subject, as well as an object of fear used by the hierarchy of violence and the symbol of the colonial state in the memory of the disappeared people. It is also important to emphasize here that this object of fear is also a war tool. The car thus reminds us of the despotic violence of the state and the disappeared children of the Saturday Mothers. Yet, this is not art’s first move against the rough mechanisms of the regime and its practice of violence. The work ‘Untitled’ (1996), co-produced by Şener Özmen and Halil Altındere, acts as a report on the burnt-down Kurdish villages and comprised two folders. The first folder included the Turkish IDs of the artists, while the other had the names and photos of the Kurdish villages burnt down and evicted in the 1990s by the Turkish army and paramilitary groups. 787 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 788 [775–802] engin sustam Symbols of the despotic war machine of the time were morphed into artistic works constituting a collective topos, while White Toros symbolized the forced disappearances of political activists not only as the symbol of a special war apparatus but also the core of the culture of fear generated by state violence that shaped the collective memory of Kurdish people. This decolonial artistic line of resistance peculiar to Kurdish artists infiltrating in the modern applications of identity politics in Turkey paved the way for an epistemological rupture and contributed to the emergence of the political language of the Kurdish subalterns that can be called political deviance. The concepts of deviation and cross-bordering might provide us with significant tools to expand the discussion. With reference to the readings on Howard S. Becker’s (1963) Outsiders, speaking on the ‘silent’ memory of the Other, as well as situating the experience of being an outsider of the dominant norms, enhances the destruction of the restrictive normality judgement and points towards the position of Kurdish artistic works. The language of the Kurdish space is now a part of a new grammatic memory, unlike that of the 1990s and the diaspora. Today, Kurdish cultural works in Turkey cannot be restricted to a counter-cultural reflex. From within this memory, they create their own micro-identity resistance and economic and intellectual capital centred on the popular resistance associated with the Newroz festival, serhildans of the 1990s and the social economy they created. It must also be stated that Kurds now have their own market and institutions, especially in the area of television and culture, which influence artistic productions. For example, supported by the Diyarbakir Municipal Council as part of the International Kurdistan Art Meeting, ‘The Kurdistan Exhibition’ (organized by Barış Seyitvan) was held between 2 and 10 February 2015 with the participation of 230 artists. It must be emphasized that, despite the repression, a movement towards the accumulation of new cultural capital has started in the Kurdish regions, and this might turn into a market encompassing Kurds from other parts of Kurdistan and independent from the Turkish artistic market. It is indeed true that the body of cinematographic and musical works by Kurdish artists in Turkey acts as an important laboratory, despite all political pressures. The language of the Kurdish cinema focusing on victimization until the end of the 1990s started to change in the new period and a new political cinematographic language orienting towards images and symbolizations that shift the attention from victimization to an active decolonial subject appeared after the 2000s. The documentary film Bakûr (North, 2015), by Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu about the lives of the PKK 788 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 789 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production guerrillas, was delisted and banned from the Istanbul Film Festival in 2015. Though censored in Turkey, the film was shown in international festivals and shared on online platforms and in alternative cinema halls. Let us add that the documentary genre is used more than the genre of fictional film in Kurdish cinema (Koçer and Candan, 2016). This is because the documentary films use shots from memorial archives, refer to the real events and in doing so restore them on the screen as well as interpreting them with current political events in the Kurdish area. The language used in Bakûr and Nû Jîn (A New Life, 2015), a documentary directed by Veysi Altay that narrated the Kurds’ resistance in Kobanê against ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), does not depict the victimization of a people, but the visuality of a political cause nestled in the ontology of resistance. Especially the sequences featuring women’s bodies and political stance examine the positioning of women’s micropolitical resistance against masculine violence in Kurdish society. Rather than making political cinema Nû Jîn politicizes the cinematographic language and symbolizes the space when it speaks on behalf of a dual micro space (Kurdish and women) under the guidance of the slogan ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadî’ (Woman, Life, Freedom) closely associated with the Kurdish resistance in Kobanê. This is where the respective artistic reflexes of the 1990s and the post-2000s draw apart. Despite the ongoing resistance, the language of the 1990s seems to be wrapped up in the feeling of victimization, just as the memory of being exiled. Documentaries narrating the stories of Kurdish regions of Turkey and Rojava (Kurdish regions in Syria) treat symbols of women’s emancipation as the expression of social awakening. Women’s voices and presence are rendered visible in the grammatic rage of the slogan used by the speaking women addressing male oppression. The cinematic and artistic productions of the post-2000 period rely more on singular installations and the collective narration. The language used in cinema, literature and art in this period features the epistemic definitions of the author himself/herself, the positive energy of the resistance culture, the mundane life of the neglected ordinary Kurds, rather than the idealized Kurdish subject. The main protagonist of the new generation of Kurdish directors is an ordinary Kurd on the street – who can be also seen as an antihero – and his traumatic social memory. In other words, the language, life and body of the marginalized segment of the society (women, the village idiot and homeless children) come to the fore, enabling the power of art to critique the male-dominated social world to emerge. It can aptly be said that this analysis is valid for literature, music and contemporary arts. For example, 789 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 790 [775–802] engin sustam Kawa Nemir’s poetry collection Selpakfiroş (Selpak Tissue Seller, 2003) narrates the misfortunes of Kurdish children, a phenomenon of the 1990s in the central Taksim district of Istanbul and portrays the traces of the social pathologies of forced migration. The book makes an analogy between the ‘Selpak tissue sellers’ of modern times and zembilfiroş (basket seller) of the ancient times that features in classical Kurdish poetry and in doing so elucidates the continuity of migrant experiences. His poetry, through navigating the street life of Kurdish immigrants in Istanbul, describes how the trauma of the lower classes becomes differentiated. The same theme is also explored in contemporary art installations, such as in Bridge (2006), which was a photographic exhibition by Ahmet Öğüt and Pilvi Takala. The video of Fikret Atay, Rebels of the Dance (2002), which looks at the lives of Kurdish children living near ATMs, also deals with the social pathologies of migration. While the sovereign historical interpretations alter when the subaltern starts to speak, just as Spivak (1997a, 1997b) says, this political deviance also activates other tools on the side of the subaltern. Here, art fills the rhetorical gaps and endeavours to narrate micro historiography against the macro history. The Kurdish subaltern speaks, leaves stains and destructs certain parts of the central public story (Özmen, 2007). The Kurdish subaltern who speaks responds to the central meta-narrative with a ruinous voice (Sustam, 2012). Therefore, social themes tackled by artistic and cultural works are archived in the language of their own temporality within the micro and macro historiography. What is at stake is not just a social revolution in the Kurdish social and political space, but an overall molecular revolution including the cultural and artistic sphere, as well as life itself. This reality is wrapped around the phantom of institutional life, while the insurrection peculiar to the molecular revolution settles in daily life, acting as the visual aspect of a political domain that actively builds a position to pave the way for alternative emancipatory spaces (women’s liberation, LGBTIQ, ecology, childhood trauma, alterity etc.). The short film Kurneqiz (Neither a Boy nor a Girl, 2016), directed by Gökhan Yalçınkaya under the production of Rosida Koyuncu, is the first film in Kurdish cinema to explore social gender codes and the exclusion of LGBTIQ individuals from the masculine living spaces. The film tells the story of a Kurdish transsexual boy and was shown around the world in international queer film festivals. Art exhibitions were not the main focus of many of the art centres established in Diyarbakir in the past decade. Rather, their efforts have focused on providing artistic education by organizing pedagogical programmes for 790 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 791 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production the public and creating a space to nurture local artists. Journals, cinema, art and theatre, especially in the Kurdish space, went beyond the recurrent themes of the nation-state, diaspora, colonialism and the nostalgic paradigm and oriented towards more daily issues as the women’s movement, ecology, feminism, queer studies, daily life, academic problems, migration, children, psychology and so on. This clearly shows that the discussion peculiar to the 1990s leaning on the need to prove oneself and the Kurdish subjectivity transformed itself, and the language of the 2000s Kurdish space ceased to be a language about the victim; instead, it became a subject on its own account through subsequent speech acts and turned into the memory of creation and resistance formed as part of a micro-narrative. Kurdish Cinema: Cultural Counter-power and Political Aesthetics In this section, without presenting a detailed analysis of films, I will discuss the memory, changing narrative techniques and aesthetic relationality of Kurdish cinema. Rather than engaging with the questions of whether ‘a Kurdish cinema exists or not’ or ‘when it was initiated’, I will discuss the language and image axis used in Kurdish cinema to highlight the influences of certain sociopolitical events and the signs that constitute its ontological universe. The cultural and political baggage of the Kurdish cinema and its long-term relations with the diaspora also determine its cinematographic language around the narrative of ‘deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980). Kurdish cinema both leans on a general sense of ‘statelessness’ (bê welat – without a homeland) and a collective assemblage around the exile narrative, dealing with the metaphysical narrative of the Kurdish immigrant caught between the city and country, and borders (Arslan, 2009).3 Kurdish cinema has an ironic language at the cultural edges of Kurdish subalternity and a melancholic universe of images. Poetic artistry reflected on linguistic realities, pathological mental frontiers, the political sensitivity of a crossborder situation all contribute to the formation of a hybrid language in Kurdish cinema with an anti-colonial circulation. 3 Bê welat literally means ‘being without a homeland’, but here we use it to refer to the sense employed by the Kurds to define the colonial practice and statelessness of Kurdish territoriality. Bê welat is a practice and theory of Kurdish ‘minor cultures in resistance’ and includes semiotics of the refusal of identity against all forms of domination and destruction. Through works of art bê welat proposes to unfold reflexivity and to make visible minor cultures and languages and developing counter-powers based on memory of decolonial subculture. 791 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 792 [775–802] engin sustam Looking at the brief history of the Kurdish cinema, we witness a political production technique influenced by a militant sense of responsibility (Smets, 2015). Deleuze (1985: 39) argues that film proceeds as a relational text that harbours and structures production, movement and syntax. With respect to the political cinema of Kurdish director Yılmaz Güney, Deleuze states what differentiates him from the revolutionary cinema of Rocha is his micropolitical stance and political image that erases borders and goes beyond the urban–rural dichotomy. We can attribute these relational aesthetics to all Kurdish films. In Güney’s films, the personal cause is immediately linked to the sociopolitical sphere and the national consciousness (Deleuze, 1985: 223–84). The dialogues in many of the Kurdish films produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Güney’s Sürü (The Herd, 1979), Yol (The Road, 1982) and Duvar (The Wall, 1983), were in Turkish. Of course, this was not due to the director’s political stance, but rather because, despite being a Kurd himself, Güney did not know the Kurdish language and could not shoot films in it as its public use was prohibited in Turkey. When he was asked about the reasons why he made his films in Turkish in an interview by Chris Kutschera – among others – Güney states that Kurdish was prohibited, and he was ‘assimilated’. Not being able to shoot a movie in a banned language and speak one’s own mother tongue are both conditions that reveal the very history of Kurdish cinema (Kutschera, 1983). He further elaborates on this discussion when he adds that he might nevertheless be considered a ‘Kurdish director’ (Othman, 1983). Güney, himself, spoke of the impossibility of dubbing Kurdish at the time in his films shot in Europe during his interview with Kutschera (1983): The Herd, in fact, is the story of the Kurdish people, but I could not even use the Kurdish language in this film. If we had used Kurdish, all those who collaborated on this film would have been put in prison. In the case of Yol, the main thing was to focus on Diyarbekir, Urfa and Siirt. Although the film was released in Europe, I did not manage to do all dubbing in Kurdish. I tried to create this atmosphere by dubbing, by music. His films mostly leaned on two stances: the political frame of the Kurdish individual endeavouring to survive in harsh geography and political environment, and the narrative of victimization soaked in the cinematographic frames marking the entrance of the oppressed colonized Kurd in the world scene. Nizamettin Ariç, who settled in Europe after the military coup in 792 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 793 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production Turkey in 1980, uses the Kurdish language in the dialogues in his film Klamek Jî bo Beko (An Ode to Beko, 1992). Amir Hassanpour (2006) also situates the emergence of Kurdish cinema within the post-1980 period, pointing to the common temporality of Güney’s Yol and Ariç’s Klamek Jî bo Beko. Starting from the mid-2000s, the language of Kurdish cinema began to change. A critical engagement with the new subjective conditions and a more personal language of the aesthetic regime became visible in cinema. Kurdish cinema of the 1990s, with its limited archive fed by the minimalist victimization narrative of the times, screened the melancholic world of images of the displaced Kurds longing for their lost home. The new generation of directors first intervened in this discourse in the 2000s and then dealt with the lives of lower-class Kurds (street vendors, construction workers, poor Kurds, etc.) popularly referred to as Kurdên perawêz (Kurds at the bottom). The new generation of directors and artists do not deal with the retrospective narrative of a national cause but link the micro memory of Kurdish subjects to the political scene. In that sense, in the 2000s, we mostly witness a realist or hyper-realist artistic stance and films orienting towards relational aesthetics. Early Kurdish cinema presents a wide variety of representations that depict an atmosphere laden with a melancholic feeling of victimization with respect to the national cause. Individual narratives depicting the social existential world or a critical approach towards political struggle also emerge in films such as Bahoz (The Storm, 2008, director Kazım Öz), Zer (director Kazım Öz), Min Dît (Before Your Eyes, 2009, director Miraz Bazer) Press (2010, director Sedat Yılmaz), Dengê Bavê Min (Voice of My Father, 2012, directors Orhan Eskiköy and Zeynel Doğan), Meş (Walking, 2011, director Şiyar Abdi) and Kurneqiz (2016, director Gökhan Yaçınkaya). In these films, the political matter regarding the conflict is personalized and framed within a subjective perspective, while the personalized memory folds over and is framed within the political cause. Bahoz, for example, narrates the story of the serhildan (resurrection) generation of the 1990s, their emergence in universities in western Turkey, the reasons behind their choice to join the PKK guerrillas, as well as life in Istanbul slums in the 1990s. In Azad, the subject of the pathological memory of a child raised under war conditions and his alienated body in the midst of the city walls of the city he migrated to is explored. Meş narrates the post-coup years in Turkey (the 1980s) through the eyes of the village idiot and children and discusses the issue of normality and abnormality in the post-coup period. This illustration of the political scene also visualizes the eclipse of reason created by the growing hegemony of the image. 793 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 794 [775–802] engin sustam In other words, what comes to the fore is not an emphasis on the national sentiment, but the narrative of the political cause or the transformation periods of post-conflict Kurdish subjectivity. For instance, Dengê Bavê Min deals with the massacre of Kurdish Alevis in Maraş in 1978 from a simple and personal memorial enquiry and the personal history of a father. The film revolves around a decolonial reading based on the narration of personal history through mother-and-son characters, and finally reaches its culmination point in the last scene. In this film, we witness the prevalence of a hybrid language that does not polarize the representative characters or lean on victimization, while the very framing reinforced by artistic narrative forms is politicized. Kurdish cinema tackling traditional social memory, politics, nostalgia, communality and the crisis of the modern narrative caught between the dichotomy of urban and rural does not neglect the subjectivity of ordinary Kurds but situates it within a colonial narrative that preserves an oppositional stance. The film also has certain oedipal bearings in the way it narrates because, for the first time in Kurdish cinema, it depicts the story of a frustrated protagonist who delves into the genealogy of his family. The resolution of a mystery (the memory of the hidden Maraş massacre) between the mother and the son with the voice recordings of the deceased father is overpersonalized in a way that renders visible its almost immediate political articulations. While trauma is treated in the film in the political-geographic space, the existence of a lost language, that is, the Maraş variant of the Kurdish language, is also unravelled through the memory of the parents. We see that the new generation of Kurdish filmmakers does not use a political frame, but rather the frame that is being politicized. The militant position shall not be read as loyalty to a political cause, however, as it is the attitude of the actor who delves into political reflexes of art. As for the Kurdish cinema in Iranian Kurdistan, Bahman Ghobadi can be a significant reference point. In Dema Hespên Serxweş (Time of the Drunken Horses, 2001) the poor living conditions of children in the rural countryside are depicted. He deals with the themes of disabled children, poverty and smuggling with images of border control and colonialism that influence the daily lives of Kurds and constitute their political fate. Similarly, the guerrilla director Halil Uysal (Halil Dağ) is also an important figure in Kurdish cinema as the pioneer of guerrilla cinema (or ‘the mountain cinema’). His films Eyne Bejne (Tall Mirror, 2002), shot in the Qandil mountains (in southern Kurdistan), and Beritan (2006) (the pseudonym of the Kurdish guerrilla Gülnaz Karataş) portray the mountain as a geography and a code 794 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 795 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production symbolizing national struggle and as a space of social revival (Smets and Akkaya, 2016). Acts of survival of a generation in the history of cinema starting from the 1990s until today shall be named a political situation and regarded as the attempt of a dissident people to form themselves through their own history of film. Made Omer’s Rawe Jinoke (Exorcism, 1993), Hiner Saleem’s Long Live the Bride and the Liberation of Kurdistan (1997) made in France and My Sweet Pepper Land (2013), Jaleel Zangana’s Khola Piza (1998), Ali Kemal Çınar’s Veşartî (Secret, 2015), among others, give us an idea of the ways Kurdish cinema makes use of the political frame in a symbolic aesthetic relationality (Sonboli, 2017). In Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) new cinematographic endeavours have been witnessed. The Rojava Film Commune, in particular, makes productions influenced by the French New Wave and the political cinema of Latin America with a focus on resistance and revolution. The camera in Rojava cinema turns towards the public life of the subject that situates itself within the political resistance – rather than fiction – and uses the documentary language to narrate the rage, resentment and joys of the Kurdish subject in the conflict zone. As such, the camera loses its fictional character and becomes a part of the truth-telling reflected on a political reading of the war front lines. In that sense, resistance cinema has become a part of the dynamics of the social movement since its foundation and delves into the codes of rebellion and emancipation with cinematographic narratives and a political-aesthetic approach. Contemporary Art: The Don Quixotes of Kurdish Art In this section, I will focus on the Kurdish contemporary art scene in the Kurdish space and its relations with the sub-culture’s memory, firstly with a brief account on the Iraqi Kurdistan and then a longer comment on the artistic practices in Turkey. In the Iraqi Kurdish space, Sulaymaniyah and Erbil come to the fore as centres of artistic and cultural production. Exhibitions of local and international artists met art-lovers in 2018 in the Sulaymaniyah Contemporary Art’s Museum and Erbil Media Hall, with the call by the Kurdistan Contemporary Art Platform. Helgurd Ahmed organized an exhibition in Sulaymaniyah on 31 October 2018 with waste petroleum products to raise awareness of the issues connected to the oil industry in Iraq and Kurdistan. There have indeed been many institutional endeavours especially with the support of the government of the Kurdistan region after 1991, 795 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 796 [775–802] engin sustam as well as the emergence of a new generation of artists. Azar Othman Mahmoud (Sulaymaniyah), Muhammad Saleh Rosramzada (Erbil), Jamal Penjweny (Sulaymaniyah), Sawar Mohamad Amin (Sulaymaniyah), Roshna Rasool (Sulaymaniyah), Hemn Hamed Şerif (Erbil), Barham Taib Hama (Sulaymaniyah), Zana Rasool Mohammed (Erbil), Julie Adnan (Kirkuk), Pshtewan Kamal Babakir (works with Shene Mohammed on kashkul projects in the American University of Sulaymaniyah) are among these video, photography, illustration and performance artists. In Turkey, the new generation of artists includes Mahmut Celayir, Şener Özmen, Mehtap Baydu, Halil Altındere, Erkan Özgen, Cengiz Tekin, Berat Işık, Ahmet Öğüt, Fikret Atay, Fatoş Irwen, I·hsan Oturmak, Ali Bozan, Mehmet Ali Boran, Deniz Aktaş, Nevin Aladag, Mehmet Çeper, Savas Boyraz and Zehra Doğan. Contemporary art practices in the Kurdish space are particularly striking as ‘tools’ to tinker with certain mnemonic narratives ‘under the paving stones’. The artistic reading in conflict zones makes references to the fragmented memory of geography built on blood and destruction, adapting a grotesque and ironic language against the dystopia created by a paranoid regime. Works produced in this space have a political stance against the allegoric and idealized colonial art both in Kurdish cinema and the sovereign artistic domain. We can then say that the artistic works in the Kurdish space both have the anti-war spirit of intervention and deal with the conflict-related post-traumatic social perceptions and relations with the unique, non-involved micropolitical stance of the artist. From Ș izo-Defter (Schizo-Notebook, 1999) of Şener Özmen, written in the form of correspondences from Diyarbakir to Istanbul and embodying the periphery’s critical approach to the centre, to The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, the Kurdish video co-produced by Şener Özmen and Cengiz Tekin, many artistic productions explore the aggressive relational network around the themes of wandering and errance. The latter, for instance, in its illustration of the figure of an aggressive revolutionary fool afflicted with political trauma and rebelling against the bourgeoisie – rather than the kind wanderer of Gustave Courbet – in rural Diyarbakir plays with and ridicules the concepts of terrorism and reality. The art historian Georges DidiHuberman, drawing on the Nietzschean concept of resentment, states that it is the ‘rage of a bad aesthetics’ against the tendency in today’s art towards the production of perfect arts (Didi-Huberman 1994: 67–8). Contemporary arts, including productions with a decolonial language, need to make use of networks in transversal transitions, visual tools and the daily ‘poor’ materials to escape from the trap of institutionalization. In Art 796 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 797 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production Worlds Howard S. Becker (2006) calls this ‘interaction’. Averring that artistic production is a process of (inter)actions among the artist, society, technical production and distribution apparatus, public, political environment, funders and so on, Becker states that this interaction is formed and sustained as part of a network system. Kurdish artists who are almost completely bereft of support – institutional or otherwise – are included in the itinerary of the contemporary arts through different tactics, agendas and networks in Istanbul and Europe. Mediation for the Kurdish contemporary artists is thus a double-edged sword (Imago Mundi, 2017). On one hand, they must confront certain identity politics in the phase of production due to being Kurdish, while on the other hand, they need to deal with the colonial language prevailing in the Turkish public sphere. Unidentifiability and ineffectiveness of arts in the Kurdish sphere, its exclusion from international biennials, the erasure of artistic practices under the weight of identity all contribute to its transformation into a mere ideological war apparatus. We cannot yet talk about Kurdish ‘resistance art’, but we can very well indicate an artistic dynamic born out of resistance. Dancer in the Dark (2003) and Stop! You Are Surrounded (2004) by Berat Işık illustrate this point well. In a constant play with cult film images, Dancer in the Dark video installation uses a grotesque language questioning the eclipse of reason and darkness peculiar to the lynch culture and certain canonic forms with progressive sequences.4 The video is nothing but a whining and speaking sound in the dark. This voice, with its desire to be seen and recognized, is the privacy and disruptive visibility of Kurdish. At one point, it turns into a scream: Ho! Qey tu min nabînî!? (Hey, do you not see me?) . . . Ez li vir im! (I’m here! 3,000 years later) Ez li vir im!!! (a mechanic voice).5 This obtrusive scream in the Kurdish language on the dark background (Ez li vir im: I am here!) is the outcry of a people struggling to survive. Tinica (2004), the video documentation by Fikret Atay, also works on this endeavour. Tinica is a story of post-migration Batman afflicted with poverty, suicides by women and the pressure of the paramilitary groups such as Hizbullah. The video is about a boy who enjoys himself in playing his make-shift tin battery on the ‘rubbish mountains’ of the city; a child body hit by both poverty and migration who has fun despite 4 Dancer in the Dark video also refers to the last scene of the film directed by Lars von Trier featuring Björk. 5 ‘Hey, don’t you see me? I am standing right before you! Hey, don’t you see me? Hey, I am talking to you! I am here, right before you! Don’t you see me? I am here. Right before you, I am here . . . 3,000 years later (with a mechanic voice), I am he-re . . .’ 797 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 798 [775–802] engin sustam the ongoing conflict. The collective work of Şener Özmen and Erkan Özgen exhibited in Istanbul Modern in 2003, Road to Tate Modern, delves into the image of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza looking for Tate Modern lost in Kurdish mountains. It is no surprise that Özmen (2005: 132) calls them ‘Kurdish chevaliers of the contemporary art’. The silent subject against the despotic machine of the sovereign points to the hysteric memory of the periphery and artists targeting the centre thus make a political point with the help of an absurd irony via Don Quixote and Sancho. The work merely presents the pathological states of the protagonist idly wandering around, while the desired journey of Sancho Panza, the companion of Don Quixote who witnesses the pain of the latter, from the ‘wild’ Kurdish mountains to the ‘civilized’ London streets, narrates the irreparable fate of the Other. In Apriori gezi rehberi: I·stanbul Guide, which was exhibited in 2005 Istanbul Biennale, Şener Özmen defines himself and artists from Diyarbakir as ‘Kurdish chevaliers of contemporary arts’ with an ironic humour, which shall be read not as a determination, but the political text of a Don Quixote-like ‘fool’ or ‘chevalier’ who defies and searches for alternatives of the central artistic authority (Özmen, 2005: 132). The contemporary art practice is not about telling the ‘truth’ or the ‘right’, but questioning the truth itself. Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) refers to the aesthetics of a new relational regime. Similarly, Kurdish artist Fatoş Irwen questions women and social gender identities in her work, defying the hegemonic ‘social phallus’ and masculine identity policies. In the collective exhibition, Nehêle ez te Bieşînim (2015, Don’t Let Me Hurt You, curated by E. Sustam, M. Koyuncu, Stüdyo Açık, Istanbul), Irwen refers to women’s rituals in her work called ‘the pathological memory’, an installation made out of her own hair that she kept for some time, depicting the obsessive hysterical moods of women. The work is a response to masculinity that oppresses women’s bodies. Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey (2004), fotonovelas of Şener Özmen and Ahmet Öğüt including cartoons and fanzine stories, ironically illustrates the position of a ‘cursed artist’ from the Diyarbakir streets (inconsistent rage of the periphery) against the central art market, with icons not so far away from the pop-cultural readings of his time. The symbol of blood, as a ritual, in this co-produced work, is masochistically associated with the sweetness of honey, indicating the trauma of the Kurdish geography. It seems that the symbol of blood refers to reading on the oppression that Kurds are no stranger to, with all its pathologies. Indeed, a historical reading on the concept of blood reveals the long-term memory around the term in 798 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 799 [775–802] Kurdish Art and Cultural Production the Kurdish geography (see, for instance, Mexzena Xwînê (Blood Pot by Renas Jiyan)). Lastly, Ahmet Öğüt’s Stones to Throw (2011), which was an art installation that used painted stones, plinths, photographs and FedEx bills and exhibited at Kunsthalle Lissabon, in Lisbon, reflects on Kurdish children’s stoning of the police officers and invites us to ponder over violence and game in a timeless and gameless setting. The symbolism of the work refers to the political memory of Kurdish children clashing with the police on the streets of Diyarbakir during the 1990s and 2000s. The artist creates a defence strategy by drawing Hollywood cartoon characters on stones, transforming violence and police into a game for the Kurdish boys stoning police officers. He places an emphasis on a cynical and resentful reflex through an act of game-making that turns the paper fanzine into the fanzine of the stone. The intense political irony of the works of art produced by Kurdish artists coincides with the political fate of the geography in its absurdity. Given the fact that sociopolitical narratives correspond to artistic installations, what we witness in contemporary art are indeed bifurcated individual linguistic axioms leaning on the collective memory, rather than an ‘individual’ attitude. Conclusion The concept of reterritorialization of cultural memory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) is useful in understanding the path of Kurdish cultural production. Three intertwined yet distinct periods might be mapped: (1) the exile period beginning from the 1960s; (2) the culture of rebellion in the 1990s; and (3) singular narratives of the 2000s. In these periods, the history of the silenced and disappeared Kurdish subjectivity meets with art and cultural memory, yet it would be an incomplete reading to depict this meeting only with respect to a confrontation with the colonialist cultural identity imposed on the Kurds. It is also a process in which the new Kurdish subject (decolonial subjectivity), formed out of artistic experiences and cultural productions and Kurdish subalternity, became visible and its artistic resistance capacity was restituted in active violation of the dominant sovereign narratives in all spheres of life. The activities that were once localized in the diaspora from the 1960s onwards gravitated towards the Kurdistan Region in Iraq after 1991 and Turkey during the 2000s. During the 1990s and 2000s, theatre, music, cinema festivals began to be held in European countries also extended to the four parts of the Kurdish territories, leading to the propagation of both intergenerational and trans-border artistic and cultural activities. 799 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/27168778/WORKINGFOLDER/BOZARSLAN_RG/9781108473354C31.3D 30.1.2021 8:53PM 800 [775–802] engin sustam The political serhildans in early 1990s Turkey began to evolve towards a cultural serhildan during the 2000s. The generation of the 1990s, while having a militant cause as was the case with the previous generation, found a singular language and distinct artistic aesthetic form. Art fairs and cultural festivals in Kurdish space have become places of interaction for Kurdish artists, bringing them together around a variety of productions. It is not a coincidence that symbolic, politicized cities of Diyarbakir, Erbil, Duhok, Sulaymaniyah became centres of cultural production. 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