Exiled Lives on the Stage: Turkey's Artists at the Crossroads of New Aesthetic Practices and Political Subjectivities

Abstract

In this article, I look at the works and practices on the theatre stage by Turkish artists who have left Turkey recently for Europe, under varying circumstances as President Erdoğan’s rule has become more autocratic and the country has been sliding into economic and political crises. This regional focus is informed by my own experience, since I previously lived and worked in Turkey, where I lived through the political events from the Gezi Park uprising in 2013 up until the post-coup witch hunt in 2017. The latter caused my Turkish partner and me to lose our jobs and to move away for security reasons due to our support of the peace petition, titled ‘We Will Not Be a Party to This Crime’, which drew public’s attention to the acts of violence perpetrated by the state in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. Thus, this research comes from a place of practical risk and a profound need to start collecting the voices and works by Kurdish and Turkish theatre practitioners and other artists in response to urgent cultural, political and aesthetic debates.