From Aesthetics of Resistance to Aestheticization of Politics

Abstract

Abstract In 2016, as the Turkish military's “security operations” targeting Kurdish towns in southeastern Turkey were in full swing, a series of disturbing photographs began to appear on social media. The photographs, which showed soldiers posing in front of derelict houses covered with graffiti written only a few moments before, had an almost “playful” quality to them whereby the act of killing was presented as an object of amusement. To achieve this effect, those who shot the photographs appropriated certain aesthetic practices of resistance, specifically the use of street art by protest movements in Turkey. This article calls the appropriation of these practices and their presentation in the photographs “the grotesque mimicry of joyful dissent.” The photographs' mimicry seeks to serve multiple, and seemingly contradictory, purposes including the erasure of the memory of both the atrocities that were being committed at the time and the former struggles against the regime. What lies underneath this project of erasure and becomes visible in the photographs' display of power is the instability and fragility of the regime's violent rule, both within the region, which it treats as an internal colony, and beyond.