A Call for Peace

Kaya Genç on Artist Şener Özmen’s “There Is a Way Out”

In 2009, the Turkish government announced its Kurdish initiative, an attempt to solve the country’s century long conflict with Kurdish citizens. In Ankara, the mood in Parliament resembled the 1920s, and politicians voiced their refusal “to sacrifice the basic principles based on pluralism, freedom, and democracy eighty-nine years ago”. This, we hoped, would be the beginning of a new era of democratization.

Starting in February 2013, peace talks started to come under scrutiny; peacemakers who contributed to the process were criticized by nationalists on both sides. The peace process somehow managed to continue under great duress until July this year. In the seven weeks that followed, more than 202 people died (one hundred and seven security officials, fifty-eight PKK insurgents, and thirty-seven civilians, according to the International Crisis Group). For those who had watched the Kurdish initiative from the beginning, the new upsurge in violence meant that the message the initiative had carried—that there was a way out of the bloody conflict that has been stifling this country’s progress and peace for almost a century—was now torn to pieces and would no longer be heard by the public.

“There Is a Way Out”, the title of a new exhibition by Diyarbakır-based contemporary artist Şener Özmen, opened two weeks ago in Istanbul’s PİLOT gallery. Known both as a novelist and artist, Özmen’s life has been strongly determined by the conflict. At the entrance of PİLOT gallery’s ground floor you can read Özmen’s letter, dated October 2014, which he wrote after he could not participate in an artistic panel discussion at the Istanbul Biennial alongside artist Hito Steyerl and curator Fulya Erdemci.

“As you also know,” Özmen writes in the letter, “’Kobane Protests’ that have caught on like wildfire primarily in Diyarbakır and the neighboring cities and districts prevented me from attending the talk. I had a 7:15pm flight to Istanbul and wanted to spend more time with Robin.” Özmen’s son Robin is seven-years-old and, arguably, the star of the exhibition. In Özmen’s letter we learn about how Robin talked with his father about the reasons why he can’t travel to Istanbul to attend the Biennial. Then they take a walk in the city.

“I held Robin’s hand and took him to the new mall near our home, to the Dinosaurs Exhibition. I took a couple of photographs with my cell phone. We hung out around the escalators, we wandered around the floors. There was not a soul around… It took an hour or so. We went back home, reluctantly.”

For his PİLOT exhibition Özmen has turned this very personal and touching letter into an “A4 size light beam”. “This text...