The streets of Istanbul: Resistance and Poetry

Stories, poems and dance about the literary map of Istanbul, five years after the Gezi-protests.

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Information

Date and time Saturday 20 January 2018 20:55 tot 21:40 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1

During the Gezi-protest of 2013, the streets and squares of Istanbul were places of resistance against authoritarian politics and ruthless market forces. It was an attempt to trigger change in Turkish politics.

Five years on, how does the young poet, essayist and critic Efe Murad see the situation in his country? And what does the literary map of Istanbul look like right now? Murad talks about the city, wanders through it and reads from his work, including poems from Kapital Öldürür!, written with his generational cohorts Sinan Özdemir and Ismail Aslan, which constitutes one of the most direct confrontations with the Turkey of recent years.

Poet Çaglar Köseoglu looks at Istanbul from The Netherlands thus enlarging the map. His poetry alters the history of the Republic of Turkey and the situation in The Netherlands towards something new, showing how violence, language and geography alternate.

During this short performance, Irina Baldini follows an improvised dance trajectory across the map of Istanbul across streets, along skyscrapers and luxury condominium towers; while moving, she reminisces about the search for clearings in a city where the state has taken over the public space.

Efe Murad

(Istanbul, 1987) studied philosophy at Princeton and is working towards his Ph.D. in Ottoman History and Arabic Philosophy and Theology at Harvard. He has published five books of poetry and five books of translations from the Iranian poets M. Azad and Fereydoon-e Moshiri and from the American poets C.K. Williams, Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian in Turkish. Together with Sidney Wade, he prepared a selection from the œuvre of Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday. His poems, writings and translations in English have appeared in a wide range of journals, such as Guernica, Jacket, Five Points, and The American Reader, and in exhibitions including the 13th Istanbul Bienniale. He is currently working on the complete Turkish translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. He published Matter-Poetry Manifesto together with Cem Kurtuluş in 2004, and his new work combines paleography, Islamic manuscript tradition, found footage and soundscapes.
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Çağlar Köseoğlu

(1985) debuted in 2015 with 34, a poetry collection with a critical point of view towards the history and the present of Turkey. His poems were published in Samplekanon, nY, Kluger Hans, Deus Ex Machina and Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen. He is editor at nY and Contrivers' Review and teaches at Erasmus University College in Rotterdam.
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Irina Baldini

is a dancer and creator. She has performed at festivals, galleries and museums, including the Venice Biennale and Tate Britain, and choreographs for theatre and on location. She co-founded the 4bid Gallery, non profit place, project and platform for encounters between visual and performance arts, and created the performance events Highs & Lows at OT301, both in Amsterdam. As a dancer, Irina Baldini responds to chance and circumstance and works with temporary methods. During the 2023 Winternachten Festival, on the evening of Friday, 21 April, she moved to the words of poet Marwin Vos and respond to the question: what is the raw material of the poem?
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