You are invited to attend the opening of the exhibition on Friday, 26 April, at 7 p.m.
At the opening, the lute player Boris Šinigoj will play music in which the East and West meet, and you will also be able to enjoy delicious Turkish baklava.
As an integral part of the Svoboda metropole – Freedom of Metropolis project (2017-2022), which explores the freedom of urban, metropolitan life, this exhibition and the book of the same name, also wish to draw attention to changes in urban spaces.
European cities, which were considered spaces of freedom from the high Middle Ages onwards, are experiencing new groundbreaking changes in regard to the concept of freedom in the new millennium. If until recently metropolises, including Istanbul, were observed as a safe haven for anyone who wanted to break free from the shackles of a rigid traditional way of life or flee political persecution, today‘s perception of urban freedom testifies to the fact that freedom can be restricted at the origin of its birth as well. On one hand, blame rests with the authoritarian policies of states seeking to exert control over urban spaces in terms of both capital and politics. On the other hand, responsibility lies with neoliberal capital, which thrives most rapidly within urban environments. And thirdly, reasons also lie in nuances in-between and various personal life circumstances.
Although Istanbul only entered history under the name Byzantium, its role remained the same: it continued to evolve into a center of different worlds and cultures. As a space of direct contact between continents and civilizations, the city was able to absorb, blend, and transform all those who settled in it. From Asian Turks, Syrians, Kurds, Greeks, Bulgarians, Bosniaks, Albanians, Russians, and even Vikings, it formed a multi-layered mixture that extends beyond our imagination, originating from remnants of Orientalist fantasy in the European perspective, and makes this city on the Bosphorus Strait extremely special, if not unique.
Oto Luthar
The exhibition and the book Istanbul, Faces of freedom are part of the Svoboda metropole – Freedom of Metropolis, T R A N S-M A K I N G (European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 734855) project in production of The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU).
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