Ekrem İmamoğlu’s cultural policy: Art is booming on the Bosphorus

Istanbul’s recently confirmed Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu from the opposition CHP is campaigning against Islamization – with culture.

View of the Bosphorus in the megacity of Istanbul Photo: Pond5/imago

Ekrem İmamoğlu beamed. Election campaign calculations were at play when Istanbul’s mayor was photographed in front of Gentile Bellini’s 1480 portrait of Sultan Mehmed, the man who conquered Constantinople in 1453, in a historic shipyard in early March, shortly before the local elections. “I can do Sultan too” was the symbolic political signal that İmamoğlu sent with the photo. But the date also had cultural and historical significance.

After all, the man who many already see as Turkey’s future president had just opened the city of Istanbul’s first public art museum: İstanbul Sanat Müzesi – a first-class renovated stone building directly under the Golden Horn bridge.

300 works hung in the opening exhibition “Ah, beautiful Istanbul” – including works on loan from a certain art lover named Ekrem İmamoğlu. Because the mayor himself collects art, from graphics to sculpture, from the feminist icon Fahrelnissa Zeid to the AI ​​shooting star Refik Anadol. His private collection is said to number 400 works. In any case, even those familiar with the Istanbul art scene rubbed their eyes at the new museum’s top-class program.

The cultural offensive that Istanbul’s city administration (IBB) is currently staging on the Bosphorus is a real sensation. When was the last time you heard politicians in Germany say: “Culture is the locomotive that drives me”? In addition to the new art museum, the IBB has opened 17 new cultural institutions since the CHP politician took office five years ago, with 28 more to follow.

Young women in leggings and headscarves pose in front of Calder

The Istanbul Sanat was the temporary, spectacular highlight. It started in 2022 with the Müze Gazhane, an old gas factory in Kadıköy, and in June 2023 with the Müze Feshane, an old Ottoman fez factory in the ultra-conservative Eyüp district. At the opening there were loud protests from pious Muslims against the modern art shown there. Now young women in leggings and headscarves are posing in front of Alexander Calder’s mobiles in the show “The Dynamic Eye: Beyond Op and Kinetic Art”.

Photographs from the Magnum agency are now being shown in the Bulgur Palas, a villa that has been in disrepair for decades and was built by the Italian architect Giulio Mongeri in 1912 for the bulgur dealer Mehmet Habib Bey in conservative Fatih. The view of the Sea of ​​Marmara from the roof terrace is breathtaking.

With the newly opened houses, the city of Istanbul is safeguarding the city’s cultural heritage, which often fell victim to an obsessive building spree. They function not only as landmarks and white cubes, but also as socio-cultural centers for the neighborhood. Maybe they would like to accelerate the already rapid gentrification in Istanbul, but right now everyone is excited about the ultra-modern, stylishly furnished libraries into which anyone can walk unannounced, unpack their laptop and work.

The new art and consumer district Galataport Istanbul Photo: 35111288/Zuma Press/imago

The new Istanbul museum boom has the beneficial effect of creating competition for private museums shaped by the tastes of their upper-class owners, such as the Eczacıbaşıs’ Istanbul Modern or the Koçs’ Art Museum. But there is something behind the cultural policy, which is unprecedented by Turkish standards hidden agenda. İmamoğlu strives for resecularization through culture against creeping Islamization. In other words: Erdoğan is building mosques, İmamoğlu is building museums.

In the footsteps of Ataturk

“We have been in power for 14 years, but we still have problems in the cultural field,” President Erdoğan once complained to the Islamic Ensar Foundation. İmamoğlu is aiming at this sore spot in his opponent. With his cultural policy he follows state founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose famous sentence: “A nation without art is a nation that has lost its lifelines,” he constantly quotes. If İmamoğlu’s politics take effect, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will likely continue to cut his teeth on culture.