Resistance in Gezi Park on canvas of artists

MUĞLA - Doğan News Agency

The workshop, which focused on the Gezi Park events, hosted several artists depicting events on their canvas.

The International Knidos Arts and Culture Academy (UKKSA), which was established three years ago in the Aegean province of Muğla’s Datça town, has formed a symposium in which the artists reflected the Gezi Park protests on their canvases.

In a village of Datça called Yaka, an old school building was renovated and turned into an arts academy which recently hosted artists from Ankara. The workshop, which focused on the Gezi Park events, hosted several artists including the former dean of the Hacettepe Fine Arts College, Professor Zafer Gençaydın, the founder of Hangar Arts Formation Cezmi Orhan, Cebrail Ötgün and Atilla İlkyaz.

Gençaydın emphasized the disregard to the arts and artist taking place in Turkey and added, “Having a population of 76 million without any Post Modern Art Museums and having only 78 Arts Associations countrywide, after all having 35 thousand mosque making associations, these clearly show where we are as a country. If a society is ignorant, senseless and devoid of arts, it is considered to be barbarian. Youth at Taksim are using disproportionate intelligence. They are much more intelligent than the police and the statesmen. They have such interesting discoveries that amaze the society. In an environment in which everybody was in despair, the extraordinary movement for freedom that young people did made us all proud.”

“Artists are the witnesses of their age.”

Orhan, who has featured masked police and the resisting people in his work, reminded us that artists are the witnesses of their age and said, “An artist that does not understand and absorb the time they are living cannot turn those into an artwork. I am not doing these to witness the age only but my feelings, emotions and intuitions don’t let me do otherwise.”