A Creative Response to the Art of Hate

As the world faces a rise in conflicts, crises and cruelty, our creative response to the Art of Hate must be fueled by love.

Feet moving at the pace of a quickstep, eyes lingering on any and every thing that passes by, and heads turning in the same observant manner that owls survey their surroundings. Less than 48 hours after the terrorist attack at Atatürk Airport that resulted in the deaths of no less than 48 people, this is the scene on the busy streets of Istanbul. Yet, it’s incredibly difficult to decipher this maniacal behavior as Istanbullu (“Istanbullites”) on high alert or if this sort of hyper-awareness is the norm in Turkey’s most populous city.

Many would argue that this is perhaps the most inopportune time to visit Istanbul — and rightly so; this iconic tourist destination is known to attract thousands of travelers every day and, as such, is almost inevitably a target for homegrown and foreign terrorism, as evidenced by the sheer number of such incidents that have taken place in the city in the first half of 2016 alone.

However, Istanbul offers more than 1001 reasons to ignore your natural inclination for self-preservation and fall helplessly in love with all of what this enchanting city has to offer — especially its one of a kind selections of contemporary art, such as the “Not All That Falls Has Wings” exhibition at ARTER. Curated by Selen Ansen, this show highlights “the productive force of a disorienting movement that bridges the unexpected and the mundane.”

Unintentionally, “Not All That Falls Has Wings” alludes to the city’s current state of affairs — conceptually, at least. As Ansen says in the exhibition catalog, “All falls and keeps falling.” In the case of Istanbul, it’s the bodies of the lives lost following the attack at Atatürk Airport who fall victim to “an inescapable verticality” and whose “high hopes [were] consumed by reality.”

These bodies — along with the hopes for a better future they once carried — have fallen, and what has risen in their place is an overwhelming fear of the unknown. The public — locals and foreigners alike — has been manipulated into perceiving Istanbul (and Turkey) as unsafe and unsavory for travel.

If as Stephen Kaltenbach says, “the manipulation of perception is a valid goal of art expression,” we must come to terms with the fact that those responsible for the attack at Atatürk airport — and all acts of violence, in general — are expressing a particularly sobering kind of art: the Art of Hate.

While Ansen’s group exhibition — inspired by the love of art — explores the permanence of falling, the terrorists’ group explosion — inspired by the Art of Hate — exposes the impermanence of living.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city — on the shores of the Bosphorus — at Istanbul Modern (a 5-minute drive away from ARTER) another work of art on display speaks to the current state of affairs in Turkey and around the world, albeit in a more critical and direct visual language.

On the lower level of arguably Istanbul’s largest exhibition space for modern art (an over 86,000 ft² dry cargo warehouse) sits a mid-career retrospective of İnci Eviner, a pioneering artist actively transforming contemporary art in Turkey through her alternative perspective of political and socio-cultural conditions. Curated by the museum’s Director, Levent Çalıkoğlu, this show is most notably Istanbul Modern’s first retrospective of a living woman artist.

Tucked away neatly in a corner amongst an inventory of multidisciplinary work that spans almost 40 years, you will find the wallpaper patterns that make up İnci Eviner’s An Explosive Heart (2002). Here, we are once again confronted with bodies, but this time standing, not falling. The repeated wall-size patterns depict a suicide bomber; a young boy with an explosive device strapped to his torso, holding up the detonator in what is presumably the final moment before he triggers an explosion. Hanging at eye-level on this terrifyingly haunting collage is an oval-framed watercolor diagram of a beating heart, which serves as a sort of visual exclamation mark.

As both the title and the subject of this work suggest, Eviner is aware that suicide bombers use their bodies as a medium to spread hate, and in response she is suggesting that we instead use ours to spread love.

Coincidentally, this month, creatives in Istanbul and over 145 other cities around the world will participate in advancing our understanding of love through the CreativeMornings lecture series. As the organizers of this event shrewdly observe, love is “an emotion that is the lifeblood of our being. It can confuse and hurts us, but equally true, it can lift us up into a place where meaning and fulfillment pulsates like a heart” — an explosive heart!

Perhaps it’s no coincidence after all. As the world faces a rise in conflicts, crises and cruelty, our creative response to the Art of Hate must be fueled by love. While the political class remains mired in romantic rhetoric, the creative class must swiftly respond with ardourous action: the response by artists around the world within hours of the terror attacks in Brussels; Ai Weiwei’s F Lotus (2016), a life jacket installation in solidarity with refugees from the Middle East and Africa seeking safety and security in Europe; and Shepard Fairey’s Rise Above (2016) mural in response to the police brutality and gun violence plaguing America. Creative responses such as these ones showcase the resilience of the human spirit in spite of repeated attacks on our shared humanity and indiscriminate expressions of the Art of Hate.

I stand firmly with Chinua Achebe on the position that “serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.” Thus, as a humanity, we cannot succumb to the Art of Hate, especially when we have the redeeming power of love at our disposal.

Even as I put these words together from Atatürk Airport as I await my flight back to New York after arriving in Istanbul just one night before the attack, it’s hard not to imagine the chaos that ripped through these halls less than a week ago. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we must never allow ourselves to be crippled by fear if we ever hope to create meaningful change.