Creative geographies of Islam: the case of Islamic and traditional visual arts scene in Istanbul

Introduction

Research in geographies of creativity abound. Over the past decade, the so-called creative turn has marked its presence in geography and other disciplines on issues that range from the instrumentalization of creativity for neo-liberalizing urban economies and state-craft practices as well as social and material practices at the level of the body and the everyday. ¹ Critical approaches to creativity have sought to demystify the ‘ideology of enforced creativity’ in the context of neoliberal capital and demanded a geographically sensitive approach that is inclusive of ‘vernacular’ and non-economic forms of creativity as well as one that recognizes the Eurocentric and Anglophone bias in critical human geography. ² However, as Gilbert et al. ³ suggest, there has been scant attention to the role of creativity in relation to religious traditions and cultural practices and a significant disconnect between geographies of religion and geographies of creativity. This gap becomes particularly apparent with regards to Muslim cultural practices in the Middle Eastern context where a pressing dominance of Eurocentrism intersect with Western secularism in shaping our understandings of what counts as creativity and cultural industry, and where to look for it.

This article aims to address this gap through a case study of an art scene that has emerged in Istanbul from the mid-1990s onwards: the Islamic and traditional visual arts (ITVA). ITVA in this context refers to art forms historically associated with manuscript production and book illustrations such as Arabic calligraphy (hat), miniature (minyatür) illumination (tezhip), paper marbling (ebru), and bookbinding (cilt). While what makes these art forms ‘Islamic’ and/or ‘traditional’ is subject to debate, it can be argued that the special sacred status of Arabic calligraphy is because it is the language in which the Quran was first written and practiced. ⁴ The purpose of this paper is to situate this art scene within the trajectory of cultural transformations in the history of the Turkish republic, primarily against the backdrop of the secular and Western oriented modernization that set the stage for these art forms to become obsolete and thereby emerge as ‘traditional’ currently. These art forms were survived by only a handful heritage institutions and a few informal master-apprentice networks who continued training artists while primary manuscripts were left to collect dust in museum storages. ⁵ It was with the first Islamist urban government in Istanbul in 1996 that an organized effort to revive these art forms began. What started as a populist strategy to appeal to religious and nationalist sentiments of the urban working classes and the newly forming Islamic bourgeoisie, set in motion the formation of a new art scene with its artists, networks, and institutions flourishing alongside Istanbul’s neoliberal creative policy turn in the 2000s. The current scale of this art scene was marked with a biennial under the auspices of the Presidential Office in 2018 in Istanbul which was celebrated as the very first ‘local’ and ‘national’ art event that reflects ‘our culture and values’. This biennial was also met with apprehension as another reflection of the alignment of cultural politics with nationalist and religious discourses pursued by the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) and the sea change in cultural and creative geographies in Turkey in the past few decades.

Research on cultural and creative geographies in Turkey have primarily focused on cultural politics and urban geographies, reporting extensively on contemporary art institutions in Istanbul and the centrality of arts and culture for urban economic growth from the 2000s onwards. ⁶ Cultural and creative geographies in this context encompass processes that range from government policies that directly effects mechanisms and institutions of cultural production, as well as broader discursive frameworks that shape the production and reception of cultural artifacts. Studies on political Islam on the other hand have documented how religious discourses have challenged the predominance of republican secularist governance that has presided over the state and society ⁷ and the socio-cultural transformations marked by the increased representation of religion and religious identities in public. ⁸ Research on the cultural politics of Islam meanwhile identified a nostalgia for the historic hegemony of an Islamic-Turkish identity in popular culture which reverberates in urban cultural politics and foreign policy. ⁹ Yet, neither in studies on contemporary cultural institutions, nor on the cultural aspects of political Islam have creative geographies of Islam and ITVA have found a tangible engagement or recognition. ¹⁰

Through a study of ITVA through the lens of cultural and creative industries this research explores the creative geographies of Islamism that took shape in the context of Turkey’s engagement with secular Western modernity as well as the proliferation of religious and nationalist discourses under the JDP rule in the past few decades. My analysis is divided into three sections: (1) the Western-oriented early republican secularization processes that largely removed ITVA from the field of visual culture and the re-introduction of ITVA through the populist urban governance strategies of Islamist local governments, (2) Istanbul’s creative policy turn in the 2000s and the concomitant proliferation of ITVA institutions, and finally (3) the 2018 Yeditepe Biennial in the context of the post-2011 authoritarian turn of the JDP establishment with sharpening of Islamist nationalist discourses. By analysing ITVA through the lens of cultural and creative industries and in the light of my ethnographic observations, I seek to demonstrate that creative geographies of Islamism are more than a by-product of political Islam in Turkey and provide a window into the internal dynamics and dilemmas of Islamist nationalist discourses in shaping this art scene.

My analysis draws primarily from geographic research on cultural and creative industries and my own ethnographic observations of this art scene from 2011 onwards. Emerging with a focus on the post-Fordist urban transformations in the North American, West European, and Australian contexts, geographic research on cultural industries have primarily explored ‘creative city’, ‘creative class’, and ‘creative nation’ projects as well as the processes of urban regeneration and displacement under the increasing weight of neoliberalism from the mid 1990s onwards. ¹¹ As Bianchini identified, these policies and research agendas emerged following a shift away from the socially and politically charged community-building oriented cultural policy agendas of the 1970s and 1980s toward the instrumentalization of arts and culture to boost urban economies suffering from the offshoring of manufacturing. ¹² This was also marked with a change in terminology, with the emergence of ‘creative’ industries alongside cultural ones in the 1990s, which captured more clearly the mobilization of arts and culture as a ‘discourse and instrument of policy’ to fine-tune cultural production to neoliberal global economy. ¹³

Neoliberal restructuring in the last few decades has not only dominated cultural policies of urban governments, but also the ‘creative turn’ in geographic scholarship to explore otherwise complex and variegated social and political forces that shape creative geographies. With a focus on ‘clusters’ and economically oriented urban policies, geographic research stayed with the urban economy policy agendas and their consequences. ¹⁴ However, as per Bianchini’s earlier interjection, while economic development and city marketing have been the primary function of cultural policy, ‘old, new economic, community, elite oriented arguments coexist’. What needed recognition was the multiplicity of influences across different national contexts, histories, and approaches to culture and cultural policy actions by local and national governments. ¹⁵ This draws critical attention to the intersection of the cultural and the political to understand how creative industries work sometimes in incoherent or contradictory ways in different national socio-economic and political contexts. ¹⁶

One critique this article aims to highlight is the Eurocentricity of studies of cultural and creative industries ¹⁷ and a call to reconsider the ‘imagined geography’ of creative economies in socially and politically differentiated national contexts and spaces, particularly between the global North and South. ¹⁸ As Banks and O’Connor ¹⁹ suggest, the increased promotion and popularity of creative industries in the context of rapid global economic restructuring presented a ‘coherent forward-looking vision for those regions looking to reinvent themselves in the face of fast-moving national and global forces’. This, I suggest, needs to be reconsidered in the context of old and new forms of colonial and nationalist discourses. In her ethnography of the contemporary arts scene in Egypt, Winegar captures this by exploring the intersecting legacies of colonialism, nationalism, and Western modernity that shape the dominant frames through which ‘Middle Eastern’ art is perceived and produced. Winegar’s ²⁰ research addresses the complex forces, including the circulation of global capital, that create new forms of cultural sovereignty imbued with ‘colonial logics and cultural national attachments’.

In this research I aim to contribute to analyses of mobilization of cultural industries particularly through state-led political agendas and ideologies across the urban and the national, particularly of religious, and nationalist discourses. Studies on the cultural politics of early nation-state-building processes and the state patronage of cultural and artistic production present another critical angle in this regard. Particularly well-documented are the Russian and Eastern European contexts, both prior to and during the Soviet era, where artistic production was geared toward certain representations of society and politics. Drawing on Howard Becker’s (1982) and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) respective concepts of ‘art worlds’ or ‘art fields’, Alexander ²¹ presents the notion of ‘politics of display’ to underscore ‘how the state may use the arts and arts institutions to reinforce desired representations of itself, or conversely, how national patrimony, and the way it is displayed in public settings such as museums, reflects and reinforces the power of the state’. Similarly, geographic research in contemporary authoritarian contexts such as Singapore investigate how state ideology presses against cultural production and creativity while at the same time forging infrastructures for cultural industries. ²² ITVA in this research emerges at the intersection of Western-oriented cultural politics and Islamic and Turkish nationalist state agendas, through the transition from the former to the latter.

A key objective for this research is to critique the pressing normativity of Western secularism as the framework through which cultural production and creativity has been primarily perceived cultural geography as well as the lack of attention to creative practices in geographies of religion. As Gilbert et al. ²³ suggest religion and religious activity have been largely excluded from cultural policies of governments and also the academic research on culture and creativity have ignored religion due to broader understanding of religion as ‘uncreative or anti-creative’. Research on ‘vernacular creativity’ have paved the way to capture the often overlooked, mundane, and marginalized forms of cultural production that do not easily fit into the logics of creative city agendas or the ‘refined’ esthetics of ruling elites. ²⁴ However, as Gilbert et al. suggest, even then there has been lack of attention to the creative work of faith communities and the role played by religion and religious communities in the processes of place-making. Geographies of religion on the other hand have primarily focused on the everyday practices, material culture, and embodied religious identities. ²⁵ While documenting the significance of religion in place-making, geographies of religion have understood culture primarily as lived and everyday expressions of organized religion that include geographies of sacred spaces and mobilities, embodied, and material expressions of exegetical traditions. ²⁶ There has been scant attention to creative practices that emerge from within religious traditions and spaces except for Gilbert et al.’s research on place-making and material culture in West-London faith communities and Kuppinger’s analysis of creative practices of Muslims in Stuttgart. ²⁷ These studies constitute the critical edge in geographies of creativity by taking creative religious practices seriously, yet their engagement with creativity still focuses on the material ritualistic and everyday spaces and practices, and do not look into artistic creative practices in these contexts such as ITVA.

In the following pages, I analyze the development of ITVA by situating it within the trajectory of cultural politics of modern Turkey starting from early republican reforms to the rise of political Islam in the 1990s through populist and neoliberal forms of governance, followed by the JDP’s authoritarian cultural politics in the post-2010 era. I present this analysis in the light of my ethnographic research of the art scene, which is constituted of my conversations with artists and participant observations in workshops, classrooms and the exhibitions of the Yeditepe Biennial in 2018. I start my analysis of the creative geographies of Islamism with a study of ISMEK, İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Hayat Boyu Öğrenme Merkezi (Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Lifelong Learning Center – formerly known as Istanbul Metropolitan City Art and Vocational Training Courses). Founded in 1996 ISMEK emerges as the institution to revive the cultural practices that are claimed to have been erased by early republican reforms. This will be followed by an analysis of the development of this art scene through the tenure of Islamist urban governments and in the context of neoliberal renewal of the creative city. In the last section I discuss the cultural and political context in which the Yeditepe Biennial took place and the transformations in JDP’s cultural politics in the light of authoritarian Islamist and nationalist discourses. My analysis is based on academic resources on Turkish cultural politics and urban geography of Istanbul, my own engagements with this art scene from 2011 onwards and the ethnographic fieldwork research I conducted in Istanbul over 5 months in 2018 and 2019. ²⁸

From the ‘rupture’ to the ‘revival’: the foundation of ISMEK

I was first introduced to this art scene in 2011 during a research project on the lived experiences of headscarf wearing women, wives of military officers, who have been seen as the most visible markers of rise of Islamism and a security threat for the secular Turkish state. ²⁹ I learned about this art scene through one of my respondents (now a friend) who is an illumination and miniature artist and who ran private classes and workshops from her apartment. I was amazed by the number and enthusiasm of young pious women who lined up to learn these art forms and the rapidly increasing number of private classes, art centers, and galleries dedicated to ITVA which I knew very little about until then. At a conjuncture where I examined the grievances of religious identities under an authoritarian secularism, ITVA emerged as a site of happiness and self-fulfillment where these women found themselves a place, a passion, and a profession, that was compatible with their lifestyles and religious world views. As I found, many got drawn to ITVA in the 1990s primarily through the courses offered by ISMEK when they faced barriers in higher education due to the harsh headscarf bans and the vigilant secularism against the ‘threat’ of Islamism. They later became instructors for the next generation of artists at both ISMEK and newer ITVA institutions. I witnessed many conversations at these workshops and courses where women reflected on their lived experiences of oppressive secularist forms of governance. In one illumination workshop the instructor talked about her experience of being arrested and kept under police custody for one night for protesting the headscarf bans at her university campus in the early 2000s. Another miniature artist reminisced how it was impossible to open an art exhibition on traditional arts before local Islamist political parties came to power. It is in this context that practicing ITVA gained significance for them as a cultural practice in validating their identity and in remedying the ‘rupture’ Western-oriented secular modernization created in the texture of culture and society.

While modernization began during the Ottoman era from the 18th century onwards, it was with the foundation of the Turkish republic that a secular and Turkish nationalist and Western-oriented cultural agenda was systemically implemented in the areas of law, education, and in the organization of social and cultural life. ³⁰ This meant the introduction of a clear break, a ‘rupture’, with the Ottoman-Islamic legacy marked by the abolishment of the Islamic caliphate and Sharia law in 1924 and foregrounding of a pre-Islamic Turco-centric worldview. A new Turkish identity was designed and the language was ‘cleared’ from Arabic and Farsi influences. ³¹ While these processes constituted the source of resentment upon which Islamist political discourses have risen, the script reform of 1928 was central in shaping the trajectory and the discourses that govern ITVA up to date. The reform enforced a sudden a transition from Arabic to Latin script, and criminalized publishing in Arabic. ³² This had drastic effects on those visual art forms that pivoted around Arabic calligraphy such as illumination, miniature, and water marbling, which, along with the Western orientation on cultural politics, were gradually removed from the general repertoire of visual culture.

When Islamism emerged as a grassroots movement from the 1960s onwards, it monopolized on a general feeling of resentment with Turkey’s modernization project and sought to revive what was repressed and remedy the ‘rupture’. When the first Islamist political party (Welfare Party) won municipal elections of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 1994 under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it pursued an Islamist and populist agenda that addressed the socio-economic marginalization of the immigrant urban poor. Making strategic use of new public administration laws that gave partial independence to metropolitan cities Erdogan pursued ‘populist and redistributive’ urban policies that upheld the ‘communitarian ideal of a just, pious and morally responsible society that took care of its poor, disabled and ailing members’. ³³ The distribution of social assistance and services in the appearance of alms were central in the early stages of Islamist urban governance to create indebtedness and to embolden a grassroots support based on a ‘religio-moral populism’. ³⁴

The foundation of ISMEK in 1996 with a mission to offer free vocational and arts training to the general public and the proliferation of ITVA took place in this context. Identified as a ‘social texture project’ on the former website of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, ISMEK started by offering free vocational training and art classes at three centers on three subjects initially for 141 students. ³⁵ While it also offered various other vocational training courses, ISMEK foregrounded the revival of ITVA at the core of its mission as a strategy to gain public support and establish relations of indebtedness. ³⁶ Girard argues that ISMEK’s provision of ‘arts and handicrafts’ courses was a part of the JDP’s political and cultural vision to ideologically align itself with a Turkish and Islamic heritage in the context of globalization and the shifting power dynamics in the Middle East region. ³⁷

My own observations in ISMEK’s classrooms and other ITVA institutions provide a unique window into the conflicts and complexities of what is assumed a unitary discourse of Islamism in Turkey and its creative geographies (which I aim to explore in more detail in future publications). Constituting a great majority of ISMEK attendees, women artists challenged the patriarchal Turkish-Sunni nationalist discourses by unearthing the influence non-Muslim or Shia artists historically and the significance that women have in these traditions. ³⁸ My visits to miniature and illumination classrooms showed the predominance of the Sunni Islamic traditions and 15th and 16th centuries Ottoman era artistic styles when the empire was at the peak of its military power and cultural influence. Yet some artists questioned the claims for ‘purity’ of the Islamic and Turkishness of these art forms. Some other artists chose to pursue 17th and 18th century baroque and rococo styles, which are frowned upon with claims that they are ‘tainted’ by Western influence and have little artistic value. In a conversation a miniature and illumination artist said: ‘Yes we want to revive these art forms and respect the traditions but there are conservative gate keepers [often older pious men] who seek to control what passes as art and they want their style to remain the norm to their own benefit’ (March 24, 2018). In another interview a miniature artist complained about the repetition of classical forms and the heavy weight Islamist discourses have on ITVA: ‘This has nothing to do with religion. It [real art] holds a cosmic meaning, it pulls you in, makes you look at it. I mean it has a soul. You can do your best in putting the gold smoothly, draw the best contour lines. . .They [art works] all look like print outs! Print outs!’ From the grassroots of political Islam, these women artists continue to play a key role in the alignment of Islamic and traditional visual arts with the JDP’s populist agenda to revive cultural forms that were suppressed by Western-oriented cultural politics. Yet their struggle to navigate the patriarchal religious nationalism reflect a lot on the internal dynamics of Islamism in Turkey. A deeper look into their experiences would reveal the complex interplays of subjectivity, agency, and gender within seemingly rigid and conservative frameworks. ³⁹

Creative city with Islamic undertones: the formation of other ITVA institutions in the 2000s

My understanding of the complexity and breadth of this art scene began in September 2013 with a visit to the Istanbul Design Center (Istanbul Tasarim Merkezi), a major hub in this newly flourishing art scene. Located in an old Islamic monastery in the historic neighborhood of Sultanahmet this institution hosts various activities ranging from courses on graphic design, photography, miniature and illumination, and seminars on art and history. I got there right after the 1st International Workshop on Geometric Designs in Islamic Art and in time for the planning phase of a new project. A few tezhip and minyatür artists, instructors, the director of the center, and the owners of a new Islamic/traditional art gallery were discussing the details of a new 40 Hadiths Exhibition, that features the calligraphic compositions of the Prophet Mohammed’s deliberations, accompanied with ‘suitable’ illumination and Ottoman miniature decorations. Since hadiths are the second major source of reference in Islam after the Quran, these discussions were deeply entangled with the immense and sometimes contradictory discourses of hadith schools in Sunni tradition. A few women artists were pressing for hadiths from Her Holiness Aysha, who, as a major hadith chronicler, is known to have introduced a feminine perspective to the religious tradition. Unfolding through these conversations was not only the contested historical and cultural content of Islamic revivalism in Turkey, but also challenges over the rigid understanding of ‘tradition’ and a unitary ‘Islamic’ identity from within the Islamic middle and upper classes.

The profound complexity of what otherwise appears as a unilateral Islamic identity in this art scene takes place through the multiplicity and diversity of art spaces that have flourished alongside ISMEK and the processes of Islamist and urban governance from 2000s onwards. When the JDP came to power at the national level in 2002, the consolidation of power between local and national governments eased the way for neoliberal urban policies and an extensive and systemic commodification of the city. ⁴⁰ Successfully amalgamating discourses of Islamic piety with the accumulation of wealth, urban governments undertook large scale revitalization and gentrification projects that radically transformed the economic and social geography of the city and displaced marginalized communities. ⁴¹ Beneficiaries were an emergent Islamic bourgeoisie, a class of liberal professionals, managers, and intellectuals who publicly integrated Islam into their social and political conduct and daily lives. ⁴² Construction emerged as a key industry in the JDP’s drive for economic growth alongside arts and culture in branding Istanbul as a world class city. Also, against the backdrop of Turkey’s EU candidacy, specific policies and infrastructures were created for cultural industries, cultural tourism and the conservation of historic cultural heritage to put Istanbul on the transnational map as a financial and cultural center. ⁴³

The selection of Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 2010 was key to this process and a telling example on the centrality of religious and nationalist discourses to urban renewal agendas. Besides the economic logic, the commodification of cultural heritage both reinforced the Sunni-Turkish hegemony while also foregrounding Ottoman cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and multiculturalism as a window-dressing in contradiction. Reflecting elites’ interests, ECOC projects failed to meaningfully incorporate Istanbul’s heterodox communities and minority cultures, and resulted in the erasure of historical yet impoverished neighborhoods. ⁴⁴ Defined as ‘Ottomania’ in urban geography and studies on popular culture, the predominance of Turkish-Islamic heritage via reference to the Ottoman culture in ECOC was present also in other urban renewal projects where architectural styles of Ottoman and Seljuk past came alive. ⁴⁵ While the appropriation of Ottoman history and culture is not new, ⁴⁶ from the 2000s onwards these references gained newer meanings and political currency as the ‘go-to’ style of the conservative Muslim bourgeoisie. ⁴⁷

Research in urban studies and cultural politics show that these processes took place against the backdrop of the withdrawal of the state from the production of culture and inclusion of the private sector and civil society from the 1990s and 2000s onwards. As Ince argues, the JDP opened up the cultural scene to the market by constructing buildings and facilities to ramp up the lucrative value of land and the city without a concrete cultural policy. ⁴⁸ Accordingly, a large share of the JDP’s national and urban culture budgets were allocated for construction of cultural centers. Within a span of 10 years, 110 cultural centers were built nationwide. In Istanbul 69 cultural centers were constructed between 2005 and 2016 either through public funds, or public-NGO or public private models of partnerships. ⁴⁹ Ince argues that, in the whole process little attention was paid to the democratization of culture and diversity of cultural programs yet no explicitly Islamic or conservative cultural agenda was enforced.

However, my research shows that the JDP’s policies also provided opportunities for institutions that aligned with Turkish and Islamic discourses. Among these the establishment of ISMEK was key. Especially following the consolidation of power between local and national governments after the JDP won national elections in 2002, real estate and heritage buildings started being provisioned to the local JDP governments to be repurposed as cultural centers to foster ITVA education. Parallel to its populist strategies of incorporating Islamic charitable and voluntary organizations to urban governance in the 2000s, the JDP fostered partnerships between national/local governments, Islamic charitable foundations and Islamic corporations. An example is the abovementioned Istanbul Tasarim Merkezi which was founded by the Ensar Foundation (an Islamic charitable foundation) in 2008 in a former Islamic monastery that was provisioned by the General Directorate of Foundations to be restored and repurposed as cultural center. Sertarikzade Tekkesi is another former Islamic monastery which was handed down by the General Directorate of Foundations to Eyüp Municipality in Istanbul in 2009, to be repurposed as a cultural center and used as ‘appropriate to the spirit and history of the building’. ⁵⁰ It offers traditional visual arts and music education. Another crucial example is the collaboration of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and KADEM (Women and Democracy Association) which has been identified as government-organized NGO to disseminate the AKP’s conservative discourse. ⁵¹ Partnered with Kuveyt Turk, a renown Islamic finance institution, KADEM runs free traditional visual arts classes at a former monastry within the premises of Sinan Pasa Mosque in Besiktas, Istanbul. More examples can be added to this list that demonstrate the appropriation of formerly religious buildings for ITVA and the wider infrastructural support that JDP governments provided to sponsor these art forms.

Cultural politics of an authoritarian turn 2010s onwards: the Yeditepe Biennial

2010 is often considered the point of authoritarian turn after which the JDP’s cultural politics gained a clear direction to promote a nationalist and religious agenda. ⁵² This meant an increasingly imperialist and militarist policies with explicit references to the former glory of Turkish-Islamic empires and ambiguous claims to the former Ottoman lands in the Middle East (which stretch across North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula). ⁵³ Meanwhile the JDP also sought to reinstate an Ottoman cultural legacy by forcing urban renewal projects to replace representations of the republican heritage and the heterodox urban minorities. This was clearly manifest in the Taksim square revitalization project which led to the Gezi protests in 2013, a nation-wide uprising to challenge the JDP’s neoliberal agenda, authoritarianism, and religio-nationalist discourses. ⁵⁴ The purpose of the project was to re-build the Ottoman military barracks that formerly stood on the grounds of the Gezi Park together with a plan to demolish the Ataturk Cultural Center (AKM), which was seen as an anchor to Kemalist secularist cultural heritage. This brought the JDP into a deep conflict with both the secular republican legacy as well as the complex and diverse anti-authoritarian segments of society.

Contrary to earlier claims to democratize and decentralize the arts by the integration of the private sector and civil society, the post-2010 era was marked by an effort to re-center arts and culture within the ideological rubric of a JDP-led Turco-Islamic nationalism. Funding cuts to state cultural institutions, particularly those founded in the early days of the republic that carried the legacy of Western-oriented secularist republican cultural politics, such as the AKM, have been key. While making claims to ‘free’ cultural production from state influence and ideology, the JDP’s policies were critiqued as efforts to ‘demobilise [. . .] the westernizing and secular cultural orientation that has characterized Turkey’s cultural identity’ and deepen a liberal-secular versus religious-conservative divide. ⁵⁵ The JDP’s intentions were also debunked when plans to found another state art institution (TUSAK) oriented toward religious and nationalist projects were revealed. ⁵⁶ As Aksoy and Seyben ⁵⁷ suggest, these debates and tendencies emerged from the JDP’s effort to rethink its place in a changing global context, and a desire to more concretely imagine what conservative arts and culture means.

The Yeditepe Biennial is a product of such desire. The Yeditepe Biennial was promoted as the very first traditional arts biennale where more than 250 practitioners of calligraphy, illumination, miniature, water marbling and other ‘traditional’ art forms showcased their works across Istanbul’s historic peninsula over a month and a half. The name of the biennial, Yeditepe, ‘(seven hills in Turkish), is a historic moniker for Istanbul and its sub-theme ‘ehl-i hiref’ means experienced hands in Arabic referring to the artists who have been crucial to the shaping and continuum of these art forms historically. Also as said by a few of the participating artists, this first biennial’s aim was to recognize traditional and Islamic visual arts and pay homage to the artists who have shaped it, historically and in the present. This was reflected by the slogan of the biennial ‘senin bir sanatin var / you have the art’ which was found controversial as it was attached to a logo that foregrounded the image of a finger print. ⁵⁸ The exhibitions of the biennale where organized either thematically (floral designs, esma-ül husna – names of Allah) or based on different schools or artists and their students (Algan Group, Sehnaz Bicer and her students, etc.), who affiliate with different institutions that have been central to the formation of this art scene in the past few decades, such as ISMEK, Istanbul Design Center, Classical Arts Foundation, or Marmara University Fine Arts Department. ⁵⁹

From the opening ceremony to its slogan, the biennale embodied the multiple narratives and conflicts that currently shape the creative geographies of Islamism, particularly in efforts to reform the wider cultural landscape under an Islamic-Turkish hegemony. Its juxtaposition with the Istanbul Biennial is one reflection. Organized by IKSV (Istanbul Culture and Arts Foundation) since 1987 the Istanbul Biennial emerged as a product of the festivalization of contemporary art globally and locally, and the increased influence of corporate sponsorship for the arts in the context of urbanization of cultural policy to boost urban economies through the 1980s and 1990s. ⁶⁰ It is an internationally acknowledged cultural event and is considered the critical edge of Turkey’s artistic production in alignment with Western oriented and secular cultural politics, and only seven percent of the IKSV budget comes from the state. ⁶¹ Providing full financial support for the Yeditepe Biennial from the presidential office while also making arguments to de-fund state cultural institutions under the pretext of ‘artistic freedom’ appeared as the demonstration of the cultural policy direction the JDP chose to take to transform the cultural field. This even raised concerns whether the Yeditepe Biennale would replace the Istanbul Biennial. To this the curator of the Yeditepe Biennial Serhat Kula responded by simply denying such intention but also pointing out that the Istanbul Biennial has failed to reflect ‘our’ cultural values that are ‘local and national’. This constituted the main discursive axis of Erdogan’s opening speech of the biennial at Hagia Sophia Museum as well.

While an overarching divisive narrative circumscribed the biennial events and its public representation, my conversations with artists and visitors, observations of exhibitions and reflections from the ground present a more nuanced picture. On the forefront were issues related to the creative limitations of working with essentialist claims to religion and national identity and the obstacles this presents in maintaining a functional economy in the art scene. This was best captured by the curator of the biennial Serhat Kula in a public seminar on the topic of the biennial at ITM:

When we look at the needs of this art scene, we see an emerging problem between the artist and the art buyer. Because, the basic needs of the buyer have been met in the past 10 years. ‘We need to buy a hilye for our house, and a besmele for our store’. ⁶² What’s next? They don’t know what else to buy. Because they are not in the habit of collecting art. . .What do we need? We need to question what kind of a connection we can make between the art work on a 16th century palace wall, and the one in a 2-bedroom apartment unit in this messy metropole in 2018? . . .Why are we protecting the tradition? Is it a tool for protest? Is it because ‘oh we are losing our culture therefore we need to protect it’? Or is it a tool for disseminating religious ideologies? Do we just like these kinds of aesthetics because it’s in our genes? We need to be able to articulate the relationship between the artwork and the viewers. But these are taboo questions of course. (March 24th 2018)

These words reflect the transformative power that this art scene contains beyond a simple alignment with mainstream Turkish Islamic nationalism. More than a blunt identification with ‘our values and our culture’ this art scene embodies a radical potential where the core values and essentialist arguments of authoritarian Turkish Islamic nationalism become unsettled. In classrooms and candid conversations, artists challenge the hegemonic definitions of core concepts such as tradition and Islamic in relation to art and culture and beyond. The entitlement they feel to ‘creativity’ as artists trying to survive in a changing cultural landscape and a neoliberal political economy of this art scene reveal the constraints of the ‘traditional’ and the difficulty to create demand from the ranks of Islamic bourgeoisie.

Conclusion

As Pratt ⁶³ suggests ‘the study of the cultural industries presents the best opportunity for a case study in the ‘eye of the storm’ of economic–cultural change’. To this I would like to add political change. In this article I examined the creative geographies of Islamism through ITVA, starting from the Western oriented cultural politics of the republic, to the rise of political Islam and then the sharpening Islamic and nationalist authoritarianism in the past decade in Turkey. Exploring this art scene through the lens of cultural and creative industries addresses the lack of attention to religion in creative and cultural geography research and critiques the primary focus studies on creativity have on neoliberal restructuring of urban economies. It also demonstrates the continued influence of secular and Western oriented modernization in deciding what counts as art and creativity as shown by the lack of attention to ITVA in urban studies and cultural politics research in Turkey.

This research shows that creative geographies of Islam need to be understood in relation to western-oriented modernization and the broader epistemic framework of secularism. As raised by artists in the field, central to the rise of Islamism as a political and grassroots project is the notion of a ‘rupture’ with reference to the break with the Islamic past to and a resentment toward the ‘loss’ of identity caused by caused by secular modernization. ITVA emerged from within the discursive terrain of Islamic-Turkish nationalism as mobilized through the policy changes of Islamist urban and national governments. My ethnographic observations reflect that the foundation of ISMEK to offer free ITVA education to the public in the mid-1990s was to counteract the reactionary secularist policies as it successfully attracted young pious women who were marginalized by headscarf bans and the secular governance of politics and social life. The success ITVA had with young pious women and the significance that women artists currently have in this art scene demonstrate the importance of the historical context and political dynamics in understanding the formation of cultural and creative industries. Yet a closer look into the lived experience of women artists also revealed the diverse positionings women had within the patriarchal and nationalist discourses of Islamism and the issues women artists had with dominant scripts of cultural production.

The study of ITVA and the centrality of Sunni Turkish nationalism also foregrounds the more-than-just-economic and the wider ideological prospects of the state apparatus in supporting creative industries. Collaborations between national and urban JDP governments to the provision heritage buildings for functions that are ‘appropriate’ to the history and spirit of those building and to promote ITVA are clear examples. As my ethnographic observations demonstrate the proliferation of ITVA institutions through the 2000s created the space and diversity where different, conflicting, and generative approaches to artistic production could take place.

Finally, this article observed the turn in the JDP’s cultural politics in the post-2010 era through the Yeditepe Biennial. From its advertising as the first traditional – that is, ‘local’ and ‘national’ – arts biennial with full state financial support to its slogan the Yeditepe Biennial encapsulated the JDP’s policy turn in the past decade to maneuver cultural production to the satisfaction of the new Islamic and conservative bourgeoisie. This biennial constituted an example to the direction the JDP took to disenfranchise state art institutions that carry the legacy of secular and western-oriented republican cultural politics. Positioned in direct opposition to the republican cultural legacy, the biennial exemplified the directed inculcation of arts and cultural production into Turkish-Islamic nationalism. However, despite the official discourse that pragmatically and bluntly enforced an Islamist and nationalist agenda, conversations on the ground showed the limits that political impositions have on cultural production. Regardless of its Islamist and nationalist attachments, ITVA provides a generative space where artists challenge conservative discourses. The push for creativity within the bounds of ‘tradition’ presents a radical potential where dogmatic reference points of Islamist Turkish nationalism are tested.