Kaya Genç
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Articles by Kaya Genç
Six journalists detained as Egypt treats independent reporting as a security threat
At 12 noon on Friday, Cairo time, Eman Ouf, the rapporteur of the Women’s Committee and the Freedoms Committee at the Egyptian Press Syndicate, was rushing to the public prosecutor’s office. Technically, it was her day off, but the public prosecutor was working as normal, and she – along with other members of the syndicate’s board – feared that the six detained journalists who make up the editorial team of the fact-checking newsroom Matsada2sh would be brought before prosecutors without warning.
LGBTQ+ activists vow to resist their "very existence" being outlawed
This has been a chilling week for Turkey’s LGBTQ+ communities, perhaps the most unsettling in many years, as police raids against their members sent shockwaves among the country’s marginalised, precarious but well-connected queer groups. Turkish police have detained multiple individuals from LGBTQ+ rights organisations across Turkey’s 15 provinces, conducting raids on queer association headquarters, confiscating documents from activists, blocking access to websites and social media accounts.
After teargas, protests and legal strife, Turkey has a new opposition party. Is this the man who can oust Erdoğan?
In May this year, police in Ankara stormed the headquarters of the Republican People's party (CHP), the oldest political party in Turkey. Officers used teargas to enforce a controversial appeal court decision that reinstated the CHP's 77-year-old former leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu – seen as less of a threat to the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP).
The anxiety of distance
In his introduction to the current issue of Varlık, editor Mehmet Erte reminds us of a time when a literary magazine published in any province of Anatolia could find its place on the shelves of Istanbul bookstores. Magazines printed in Istanbul, meanwhile, reached readers all over the country. Those days are over.
AI is shrinking video game development teams to one
As a teen, Emirhan Gül was a keen gamer, so he was thrilled to join a gaming startup in Istanbul as a developer after university. Over five months, as Turkey rode the wave of mobile gaming, he worked on the design of 23 games, and soon experienced burnout. “Budgets were high, there was a lot of work, and they hired anyone, even if they didn’t know much,” the 24-year-old told Rest of World. But “the idea of churning out a game a week didn’t really appeal to me much.
AI is shrinking video game development teams to one
Apps 5 hours ago I found the 7 easiest Claude connectors for people over 50 — start with these Tom's Guide - Amanda Caswell • 5h If you have tried the apps within ChatGPT, you might like Claude Connectors.
The Trial of Erdogan’s Challenger
For decades, Silivri was considered a sayfiye yeri, a place for cottages, country and summer houses. All around the complex are small family-run farms and villas with private pools, protected by watchdogs. Construction of the Marmara Prison Complex began in 2005 and lasted three years. It contains eight closed correctional institutions and an open prison where the court is located. It is Europe’s largest prison complex.
Being Powerless but Ethical in Erdoğan’s New Turkey: İlker Çatak’s “Yellow Letters”
The director of the Golden Bear winner and the Oscar-nominated "The Teachers' Lounge" vividly captures moral dilemmas and life decisions. Yellow Letters (İlker Çatak, 2026). İlker Çatak likes to follow his characters as they make tough choices about how to live their lives. We mostly enter his ethical tales in medias res.
Semiha Berksoy
Semiha Berksoy, Annem ve Ben ve Kardeşim (My Mother and I and My Brother), 1982, oil on hardboard, 39 1⁄4 × 27 1⁄2″. Semiha Berksoy (1910–2004) was a renowned Wagnerian soprano as well as an expressionist painter. With a career spanning eight decades, her versatile practice would pose a challenge to any curator. Istanbul Modern’s Berksoy retrospective, “Tüm Renklerin Aryası” (Aria of All Colors), overcame that difficulty.
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When I set out to become a novelist in Turkey in the early 2000s, Leylâ Erbil had yet to publish what is perhaps her most accomplished work, What Remains (2011), an experimental bildungsroman written in verse about a woman obsessed with Istanbul’s stones, and published in an English translation last fall. Back then my favorite novels were Flaubert’s Parrot, The Name of the Rose and My Name is Red—the fruits of monkish devotion to historical scholarship transmuted into postmodern fiction.
Kaya Genç on Güneş Terkol at SALT Galata Review
Güneş Terkol, Anabala, 2026, appliqué and embroidery on fabric, 73 5⁄8 × 116 1⁄8". Güneş Terkol has been a mainstay of Istanbul’s experimental art scene since the mid-2000s. She is one of the founders of Ha Za Vu Zu, an avant-garde art collective that combines videos, textile installations, and objects such as flags and disco balls in performances that blur the lines between participants and audience.
Sex, Liberation, and Obsession in 1970s Istanbul
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it,” begins Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence. That melancholy line hangs over the glossy and moving—if occasionally tone-deaf—Netflix series of the same name. The series, which topped Turkey’s streaming charts, marks the first major adaptation of Pamuk’s work, surprising for one of the country’s only Nobel laureates and its most famous author.
A new wave of defiance: the Turkish film-makers standing up to autocracy
Climate of fear … Tansu Biçer in Yellow Letters. Photograph: © Ella Knorz/If Productions/Alamode Film ‘I want calm in our building,” says the landlord of a couple who have been purged from their jobs in the film Yellow Letters, before asking them to leave the premises. “We’re all responsible for keeping the calm here”. Turkish cinema, however, has never been less inclined to keep the peace.
Hera Büyüktaşçıyan Channels Istanbul’s Haunted Histories
e Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits Spectres haunt ‘Phantom Quartet’, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan’s first institutional show in Turkey. Born in Istanbul to a Greek mother and an Armenian father, the artist came of age in a city shaped by erasure.
Rethinking Institutional Trust in Istanbul’s Art Ecosystem
As Istanbul’s cultural establishments continue to battle reputational issues, Kaya Genç advocates for greater accountability amid the country’s growing illiberalism Last year was supposed to salvage the reputation of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), one of Turkey’s leading art institutions. And yet, despite an initial bout of optimism and a visionary roadmap resembling some sort of progress, recent events have swiftly brought the institution back to reality.
Peace be the promise
While lasting peace between the Turkish state and the Kurds seems a genuine possibility, Ankara’s assault on Turkish democracy continues. Sırrı Süreyya Önder, the longtime dissident who died last year, remains a symbol of hope in a better future for Turkey. Sırrı Süreyya Önder, who died in May 2025, was an extraordinary person. He was a filmmaker and activist, a columnist and politician. He wrote filmscripts and produced music. He was a witty raconteur and communist firebrand.
Review of Nilbar Güreş at Arter by Kaya Genç
Nilbar Güreş, MAYZU: A Tree with Coconuts and Bananas, 2022, mixed media, 13' 1 1⁄2" × 21' × 6' 6 3⁄4". Nilbar Güreş’s protean artistic practice employs staged photographs, videos, paintings, and embroidery works to consider societal injustices and cultural identity while playing with gender norms. In “Velvet Stare,” her first institutional show in Turkey, Güreş couples recent and early works.
Review: 'The Things You Kill' Depicts Turkey's Crisis of Masculinity
In The Things You Kill, the new film from Toronto-based Iranian director Alireza Khatami, a harrowing instance of femicide serves as a mirror to a society buckling under the weight of patriarchy. The unnerving psychological thriller—Canada’s submission for best international feature film at next year’s Academy Awards—follows Ali, a literature professor reeling from his mother’s suspicious death, who, in the process of confronting the toxic masculinity around him, instead becomes ensnared in it.
18th Istanbul Biennial
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The dark side of AI adoption in Turkey
An unexpected alliance of defence industry players and religious authorities is steering Turkey’s enthusiastic embrace of AI. KAYA GENÇ explores the implications of this in a country already classed as an “electoral autocracy” ON 23 JULY 2025, Selçuk Bayraktar, chairman and CTO of Baykar, one of Turkey’s leading defence industry companies, announced the launch of NEXT Teknofest Sosyal, a new social media platform.
Tezer Özlü-the Rebel of Turkish Letters
Books & the Arts / September 30, 2025 Tezer Özlü—the Rebel of Turkish Letters Journey to the Edge of Life, a striking composite of memoir, biography, and criticism, dwells on the connection between art and death. Ad Policy (Courtesy of Transit Books) Tezer Özlü had a reputation for being gloomy. “Sorrowful princess” was among her monikers. During my college years in Istanbul, in the early aughts, friends would be alarmed if a classmate had their nose in Özlü’s books for too long.
Review of Didem Erbaş at Sanatorium by Kaya Genç
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To Understand Erdogan's Turkey, Watch the Films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Over the past three decades—22 years of it under the rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan—Turkey has transformed from a secular society searching for its spiritual identity to an increasingly self-confident, self-interested, and self-aggrandizing one. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s republican, Europeanizing, old Turkey has given way to what the governing party has christened “New Turkey.” There has been no better chronicler of this transformation than Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
They left Syria as refugees. They’re returning to build its tech industry
Over 2.6 million Syrians live in Turkey as refugees, but for tech workers, it’s still a small world. In 2019, a group of refugees formed a nonprofit, Digital Istanbul, to discuss their careers. It has since grown to 450 members. Since the collapse of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime last December, some of them have turned their focus back to Syria to help rebuild its tech sector. They launched a professional network in Damascus in January to support tech investors and entrepreneurs.
Borrowing from Erdoğan’s playbook
Turkey’s academics, independent media and artists are feeling the threat of the USA’s rising authoritarianism and unfair treatment of immigrants – but it is not the first time they have dealt with repression, writes KAYA GENÇ ON 5 FEBRUARY 2025, two weeks after Donald Trump assumed the role of US president, Argonotlar (“Argonauts”), a queer art publisher in Turkey, issued an urgent letter to its readers.
The people who clean up your TikTok feed are starting to fight back
Hasan Hüseyin Yavuz sat in an unpaved parking lot among protest posters, trying to draw attention to the human toll of trending TikToks. Across the street from his former employer in the coastal Turkish city of Izmir, he told former coworkers and other passersby about the struggles of content moderators, who have been denied union representation. He said he was fired for trying to launch a union for the tech workers who scour social media for violent, racist, and sexual posts.
Creative Resistance in the Heart of Istanbul
Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits In the early 2000s, the seedy streets of Beyoglu in Istanbul were the heart of the city's contemporary-art scene.
The Turkish government’s grip on journalism is tightening
The alarming escalation in the persecution of Turkey’s media workers is part of a calculated strategy. With the detention of Istanbul’s democratically elected mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19 March, the Turkish government has sent a chilling message to the public: nobody is safe, anyone can be arrested, so everybody should take caution. Journalists make up a significant sum among the more than 1,879 detained in last month’s protests, 260 of whom were formally arrested.
Turkey: The Voice That Carries
The protests over the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu are the biggest display of anti-government feeling in Turkey in more than a decade. People are being punished for challenging the country’s culture of silence, but they remain determined to make their voices heard and to close the rift between private and public life. On 29 March, hundreds of thousands gathered at Istanbul’s Maltepe beach area – and some even say it was 2.2 million.
Melbourne's Asia TOPA 2025
At the 2025 Asia TOPA—Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts IN A RENEWED COMMITMENT to reconciliation and inclusive recognition, Asia TOPA, Australia’s triennial focused on performance from across the Asia-Pacific, grounded itself for the third time in Melbourne, on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung and Boonwurrung people.
Above the Clouds: Underground
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The voice that carries
On 29 March, hundreds of thousands gathered at Istanbul’s Maltepe beach area – some even say it was 2.2 million. Waving flags and chanting slogans, the protestors demanded the release of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul who had been detained the week before. On 23 March, İmamoğlu and 47 others were arrested on corruption charges; that same day, the People’s Republican Party (CHP) announced İmamoğlu as its candidate for Turkey’s 2028 presidential elections, after holding a symbolic ballot.
Cengiz Tekin
Cengiz Tekin, born in 1977 in Diyarbakır, a Kurdish-majority town in eastern Turkey, belongs to the generation of contemporary Kurdish artists who rose to prominence in the early 2000s. The so-called Diyarbakır School included Conceptual artists such as Halil Altındere, who published the magazine Art-ist, and Şener Özmen, a poet, novelist, and video artist who now lives in Chicago. The trio, who studied at Çukurova University in southern Turkey in the ’90s, have collaborated periodically.
Turkey’s brain drain is taking its female coders with it
In the summer of 2013, Gülçin Yildirim, a database administrator, received an invitation for a meeting at an Istanbul chocolate shop with 11 other female coders. They were there to do something about the sexism they experienced in their workplaces. By the meeting’s end, they had formed a group that aimed to connect women in tech to fight gender-based discrimination and prejudice in the industry.
Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work
Turkey’s sophisticated translators are moonlighting as trainers of artificial intelligence models, even as their profession shrinks with the rise of machine translations. As the models improve, these training jobs, too, may disappear. “Translation has become a job for a limited number of translators who are really good at it. Machines translate the rest,” Mehmet Şahin, head of the translation department at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, told Rest of World.
Mourning Turkey’s Last Progressive Radio Station
Soon after it started broadcasting on November 13, 1995, Acik Radyo (Open Radio) became the radio station of choice for Turkey’s intelligentsia. For years, leading professors, authors, journalists, and artists produced programs and appeared as guests on the station, which declared itself “open to all the sounds, colors, and vibrations of the universe”. But in October, as Acik Radyo prepared to celebrate its 30th anniversary, its programmers received distressing news.
Murdered for music
In Turkey, musicians are being targeted for their political views, for their Kurdish background or for simply performing, writes KAYA GENÇ ON 2 MAY 2023, Cihan Aymaz, a 30-year-old Kurdish musician, sang a song with his saz (a traditional folk string instrument) by the Kadikoy ferry pier, a seaside hub in Istanbul’s Asian side. Hundreds walked past him on their way to the ferry during the day: he had performed there for the past two years.
Only Disconnect | The Point Magazine
Oğuz Atay was my first literary idol. The Turkish writer had been dead for 21 years when I discovered his debut novel, The Disconnected, in 1998. Atay’s narrator questioned the “unconscious indifference” with which Turks embraced “the colorless, odorless existences” of people around them. He described a society where even going alone to a cinema was considered a sign of degeneracy.
A Turkish Photographer Captures the Experience of Dispossession
Cansu Yıldıran was born in 1996 and spent the first seven years of their life in Çaykara, a town in the Kuşmer Highlands, in northern Turkey, on the Black Sea. As a teenager, they found photography, and began taking self-portraits on a smartphone, posing for androgynous images, savoring the medium’s genderqueer potential. They enrolled in photography school in Istanbul and purchased a digital SLR, a Fujifilm, using their mother’s credit card without her knowledge.
Kaya Genç on Itziar Barrio
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The Tangled Politics of Erdoğan’s Culture Route Festival
How resistance to a government-funded festival is energising Turkey’s art scene On a scorching day this August, Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, took to the podium in Bodrum, a resort destination popular with British tourists. He was also standing where Kissebükü (Anastasiapolis), an early Byzantine settlement located between the port cities of Caria, Keramus and Halicarnassus, once stood.
The science of purges
KAYA GENÇ speaks to two Turkish academics and finds that persecuting scientists is by no means a new phenomenon ON 20 JULY 2016, five days after a failed coup attempt in Turkey, the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared a state of emergency and began issuing a set of emergency decrees known as KHKs. On 7 February 2017, he issued a KHK to “cleanse” Turkish academia of scientists that Erdoğan claimed were “linked to terror”, purging 330 scholars.
Kaya Genç on Şakir Gökçebağ
Şakir Gökçebağ, a Turkish-born alumnus of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf who has lived in Hamburg since 2001, has had shows in his home country before (at Baksı Museum in Bayburt in 2019–20 and at Istanbul’s Ferda Art Platform in 2021), but “As It Seems,” curated by Emre Baykal, is his most extensive presentation in Istanbul to date.
Digital Divinity
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Technology has transformed how we spend, study, live, eat — even how we sleep. And for the 6.75 billion people around the world who consider themselves religious, technology is also changing their faith. How people worship, pray, and commune with the divine is transforming from Seoul to Lagos. Earlier this year, Rest of World set out to document the myriad of ways that religious believers are using new technologies in their daily practices.
By Viola Zhou Verified, Nadia Nooreyezdan, Kaya Genç, Lucía Cholakian Herrera Verified, Lucia Herrera Verified
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Rest of World
Verified
Prayer tracking apps bring new tech to Islamic worship
When Ayşe Yılmaz discovered the Zikirmatik Pro app during Ramadan last year, she said she appreciated the discipline and calm that it brought to her day. The app reminded her to do the dhikr — a form of Islamic worship where Muslims repeat prayers and holy phrases, while seated in a meditative pose. “I don’t forget which dhikr I was chanting this way,” she told Rest of World. “I also look at the stats of my dhikrs and see how many I do daily, monthly, and yearly.
A Place to Disappear: The Istanbul of “Crossing”
Levan Akin’s new film exoticizes neither its characters nor the city in which it is set. Levan Akin’s Crossing is now showing on MUBI in many countries. Levan Akin’s tender, pensive new film begins in Batumi, the Georgian city where his family is from, and soon finds itself in Istanbul, “a place where people come to disappear,” as one character later muses. Forces of prejudice and patriarchy oppress these sister cities.
“Painting Today”
In preparing “Painting Today,” a meticulously researched show that displayed works produced in the past half decade by twenty-eight artists who live in Turkey or are part of its diaspora, Burcu Çimen and Didem Yazıcı rejected a thematic approach. Also, this offering of small tastings of contemporary Turkish painting was not a comprehensive survey; many of the living “stars” of Turkish painting, from Mehmet Güleryüz to Bedri Baykam, were absent.
Arrest of Telegram's Pavel Durov: more questions than answers
Many things can be true at the same time. Telegram is used by dissidents, including those in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, to get information out of severely restrained information environments. It is used to share child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), trade in drugs, weapons and other illicit materials, and coordinate riots and the transmission of weaponised disinformation.
Contents – The final cut: How cinema is being used to change the global narrative - Index on Censorship
The Summer 2024 issue of Index looks at how cinema is used as a tool to help shape the global political narrative by investigating who controls what we see on the screen and why they want us to see it. We highlight examples from around the world of states censoring films that show them in a bad light and pushing narratives that help them to scrub up their reputation, as well as lending a voice to those who use cinema as a form of dissent.
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