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Even if it is difficult to let go of certain clichés, one can nonetheless be aware of them. On the anniversary of the German-Turkish recruitment agreements, the exhibition The Fictional Occident is being shown in Istanbul. By Ingo Arend

In 1879, the French writer Pierre Loti sat on an ottoman in his suit in the Istanbul quarter Eyüp enjoying the view of the Golden Horn. The fin-de-siècle man of letters is a classic example of what literary scholar Edward Said castigated as the Oriental look. On his bohemian seat, the Palestine traveller, who once helped defeat the Boxer Rebellion in China, imagines himself a world made up of harems, scimitars and palaces. Yet, this Orient did not exist in the past, nor will it tomorrow, Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet once fumed at his French counterpart.

The fact that these imaginary worlds do not exist does not make them any less powerful. Every day, the tourists make a pilgrimage up the steep pathways of the Muslim cemetery to the café where Loti once puffed on his beloved narghile. The Pera Hotel, in which Agatha Christie is said to have written her Murder on the Orient Express in the early 1930s is also a tourist magnet. The least of us are probably aware that the German taxpayers operate an “Orient Institute” on the Bosporus. At least its residents also focus on Postcolonial Studies.

To produce an exhibition entitled of all things The Fictional Occident at the point of origin of the fictional Orient seems both incorrect and daring today where, with the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the German-Turkish recruitment agreements, an undeclared apology is expected for the condescending view. This was the view of the Occident, the German section, at the men in tight-fitting suits and heavy five o'clock shadows who suddenly stood with battered suitcases and prayer beads in hand on German railway platforms.

Yet, to attempt to reverse Said’s tenet makes sense for there was also a companion piece to the projected view of the Orient. For centuries, Islamic writings were immersed in an idea of the fictional West that bore just as distorted and fabulous features. And even if the naïve view taken by the "guest workers" in the mid-twentieth century of the west had little in common with the exoticism and threat – the elements from which Orientalism brewed up “its” Orient – both sides dreamed up an image of their counterpart. “Fifty years ago, to us Germany was a dream,” recalls painter Yalcin Karayagis, rector at Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, at the opening of the exhibition.

It suits this collective dream that artist Irfan Önürmen moulded in chocolate a solemn worker holding a hammer. His installation Worker of 2011 simulates a statue that the Republic of Turkey erected for the fiftieth anniversary of its founding in a park in Istanbul right next to the Tophane exhibition building, an old Ottoman armoury. What to the west was a sensually enticing Orient was to the Orient the land where money, work and luxury flowed. The fact that the sculpture is a vandalized torso today says something about the erosion of a transcultural fantasmas.

The Mohammed Model

Seen from a mythological viewpoint, the Turkish-German migration was followed at first by what the Essen-based social scientist Hasli Hacil Uslucan, at a migration conference held alongside the exhibition at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, called the “Mohammed Model”: leaving one’s homeland to return strengthened to a strange place. And although none of the 19 artists from Germany and Turkey experienced this time themselves as migrant workers, they are quite successful in illustrating the emotional side of a phase of life that often went deeper than planned.

One touching example of the loneliness and isolation that many suffered through is the fate of Ziya Ekici, born in 1937. The first generation guest worker came to Germany from Kirsehir, Anatolia in 1970. First he worked in a Düsseldorf arms factory, then as a teacher until he died in Duisburg in 1995. He secretly examined his state of mind in poems, which his daughter Nezaket Ekici, born in 1970, had translated after his death. The guests at the opening silently harkened to the verse: “We sway in the air.”

Ali Kepenek shows us how difficult it still is to escape from the clichés that dominate everyday life. Actually, the photographer wanted to make a sculpture of himself and then tear it to bits to demonstrate his torn identity. “I am neither German nor Turkish. I simply act it all out,” says the artist who was born in Bursa in 1968 and lived many years in Berlin before finally turning his back on Germany because of its routine racism and now resides in London.

For Kepenek, the transnational identity that twenty-first century migration may one day generate – and which the Istanbul symposium eyed rather sceptically – is still a painful experience. The erotically charged bodies in the work Religion – Sex and Violence that he ended up showing are marked. Yet perhaps one fine day it could become appealing to say, “I am many, therefore I am.”



This test is an abridged version of an article that appeared in the “taz” on 5 November. The complete article can be found here.