deepanaik's blog

Long streams of language, of detailed, precise and animated talk, pour forth in Kutlug Ataman's video installations. While different in many ways, these works have in common female subjects who insist on giving an account of their lives, on having a voice, a language and a history to tell.

Istanbul is possessed by a "ghost". This "ghost" of a multi-inhabited quarter located in the city center, named Tarlabasi, has been haunting the city for some time.

Photography is an immobile image, whereas the cinematic image has mouvement, different kinds of movements. In general, photography is contrasted to cinema as immobility to movement. True enough. But what's forgotten is that the movement of images in cinema could only be perceived because the people - the public - were immobile before those images.

Contemporary diaspora identities differ to a certain extent from conventional forms of diasporic formations in the sense that the former are no longer characterised by the overwhelming wish to return.

This study by Ayhan Kaya is an attempt to summarize the political participation strategies generated by the Circassians in Turkey since the 1970s.

It is a great pleasure to be in Frankfurt, the city where Ka, the hero of my novel, Snow, spent the last fifteen years of his life. My hero is a Turk and therefore no relation of Kafka’s; they are related only in the literary sense of the word. I shall be saying more about literary relations later on.

Ka’s real name was Kerim Alaku but he was not very fond of it, so he preferred the shorter version. He first came to Frankfurt in the 1980s as a political refugee. He was not particularly interested in politics - he didn’t even like politics: his whole life is poetry. My hero was a poet living in Frankfurt.

Haydarpasa Railway Station in Istanbul stands on the Asian waterfront in the district of Kadiköy. It is a grand and imposing Neo-Classical building and the terminus for train journeys from Anatolia and Asia beyond. Designed by Otto Ritter and Helmuth Cuno and built in 1909, Haydarpasa was a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm to Sultan Abdül Hamit II. Here, the Bosporus joins the Sea of Marmara, overlooked on the European shore by Sultanahmet Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi Palace, all built on the Historic Peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since ancient times, the Bosporus has linked the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and is one of the busiest, most beautiful shipping routes in the world. The two shores combine Istanbul’s twin continents, the meeting of Eastern and Western

“Istanbul is the enemy of nostalgia,” If years of living in this city have equipped me for one thing, it is the ability to live out this aphorism of my own invention.