Folk / modern: fitting the nation into the past
Ozguner, Artun (2022) Folk / modern: fitting the nation into the past. In: "Folk Cultures" in Everyday Objects, 18 Nov - 2 Dec 2022, Held online by the Design History Society. (Unpublished)
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In 1936 Ankara’s brand new, radically constructivist Exhibition House (Sergi Evi by architect Şevki Balmumcu) housed an exhibition titled the Turkish Arts and Crafts. The exhibition presented various artefacts from lecterns, helmets, ceramics to textiles. Its state-sanctioned rhetoric was to infuse an indigenous essence of craft tradition into the modernity of new nation-state. The work of past craftsmanship was relegated to industrial precision waiting to be rediscovered by the industrialist endeavors of the young nation state and its new political community. The sheer modernist lines of the exhibition space and the avid historical tone of the exhibition presented thus no clash, they were suggestive of this new symbiosis.
Yet, a decade later in 1947, the Exhibition House saw a huge transformation, following the consolidated conservatism of the Second World War era. Through a project overseen by the German architect Paul Bonatz, its constructivist lines were dismantled, only to be replaced by a stripped-down classicist National Architecture style Opera House. This time, it was the new nation’s artistic genius, Bedri Rahmi Eyuboğlu who was invited to paint a mural, renown by his work on the amalgamation of the pre-modern folk elements with a style akin to modern primitivism.
Still standing today, Ankara’s Opera House and Bedri Rahmi’s fresco within are witnesses to the fluctuating role assigned to folk motifs in the state rhetoric of defining the national in the early stages of official cultural politics in Turkey from 1930s to 1960s. The proposal thus investigates the prevalence of folk motifs in the official cultural politics of nation building in Turkey through the lens provided by Ankara’s Opera House in this period.
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