Mediating the Past, Making (in) the Present: Contemporary Artistic Practices from Türkiye and the Construction of Memory around 6-7 September 1955

On September 6, 1955 organised mobs attacked businesses, houses, and other sites belonging to Greek and minority residents in cities across the Turkish Republic. Photographs documenting acts of violence were confiscated by the government and remained heavily censored until the 2000s. The pogrom’s remembrance today as a practice lived and contested in material ways instigates a crisis within given regimes of historical truth. This article examines the changing status of photographic material related to the pogrom, including two interventions and reworkings of archival imagery within the field of contemporary art. It mobilises the civil gaze as theorised by Ariella Azoulay to bring together anonymous images from Fahri Çoker’s collection with Dimitrios Kalumenos’ photographs, the 2005 exhibition of Çoker’s photographic collection by Karşı Sanat, and a virtual reality reconstruction of the pogrom. While aiming to contribute to a larger archive to come, it interrogates the visibility of violence and how artistic practices re-stage processes of witnessing.