I’ll admit that when I saw Ferhat Özgür’s show “Animal Farm” in mid-September, at the end of the Istanbul Biennial week, the show’s implicit premise of comparing Turkey’s current political situation to the Stalinism that George Orwell satirized in his 1945 novella seemed both a bit facile and extreme. But now that my brief wave of very modest optimism about Turkey has been corrected by events of the last month, Özgür’s artistic parables seem apropos to a moment in Turkish political history when the top-heavy, statist system has renewed its campaign of remaking society in the coarse image of its sole leader, with grave implications for those who do not readily fall in line. And, in fairness to Özgür, in the exhibition itself, the artist didn’t borrow as much from Orwell’s novella as the show’s title suggests. Instead, Özgür invented his own allegories in the style of Orwell, complete with a cast of animal characters familiar to a Turkish audience. The stars are rare birds, gray wolves and penguins—creatures that all have their specific and well-known metaphorical implications in Turkey.

The large sculptures and installations that make up the exhibition all began with Özgür finding several objects of interest to him. The first, and most significant, were a series of decommissioned wooden ballot boxes that a friend who works in a school in a provincial city had told him about, and which the artist salvaged when they were decommissioned. In the gallery, Özgür stacked several of the weathered originals—including boxes with paper signs indicating that they held ballots during elections for the city council and mayor—on an old metal shelf, surrounded by a rickety frame of wood in what can be seen as a riff on Brancusi and Judd sculptures to form an ironic (and phallic) monument to the precarious condition of Turkey’s democracy. Özgür disassembled most of the boxes, and used the pieces to construct large sculptures that filled the gallery, including several sheep, a hare and a large gray wolf that dominated the space. That the sheep appear “in the same clothing” as the wolf is part of a network of visual and linguistic symbolism that would be clear in any national context—alluding to the illiberal use of the ballot box to exert a violently enforced majoritarian rule. “Out of the ballet boxes there came a wolf” is stenciled, in English, in small letters high up on an adjacent wall. No Turkish translation is necessary. Everyone in Turkey knows that the gray wolf, referring to the she-wolf Asena who was the mother of several Turkic tribes, is synonymous with a specific history of violent ultra-nationalism, and was adopted as a symbol of paramilitary death squads in the late 1960s. It is a symbol still proudly used by the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, or MHP) and its supporters, whose ideology and adherents have more recently been folded into the flock of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP).

The other creature that dominates Özgür’s “Animal Farm” is the penguin. On one wall of the exhibition are large street-art-style stencils of the flightless birds. One stands apart from the waddle, holding a popsicle in its wing, with a pile of ballot-box wood planks arranged beneath it like kindling ready for a bonfire. The polar bird is not native to Turkey’s wilderness but is a trope of its media ecosystem. Back in June 2013, during a crucial moment in the Gezi Park protests when police were violently attacking encampments in the park, CNN Türk was playing a three-part documentary about penguins while CNN International was broadcasting the events live, which comically illustrated what everyone already knew—even mainstream media is cowed into self-censorship. Memes being memes, and humor being a crucial part of the Gezi spirit, the penguin was resurrected as a symbol of anti-government resistance, appearing on walls wearing gas masks or in large formations representing masses resisting the police. But here, Özgür’s penguin appears lost from its group, looking off in the opposite direction, its popsicle ready to melt in the Turkish sun. So much for the resistance.

Artwork that addresses politics, whether explicitly or allegorically, isn’t necessarily more political than artwork that doesn’t—though it does take the conversation quickly in that direction. In the wake of the Gezi Park protests, there was a surfeit of artwork that sought to capitalize (literally and figuratively) on the iconic imagery that the protesters themselves had used to mobilize support for their cause. To this day, trees, rainbows, raised fists, gas masks, hard hats, penguins—and the many combinations of these symbols—become obvious invocations of the protests. In the context of art, where self-criticality and introspection are requisites, these icons are quite cliché. Despite the penguin stencils, Özgür, in “Animal Farm,” doesn’t go back to Gezi out of nostalgia, but seems invested in creating a symbolic realm that jumps between allegory and reality. For instance, the gallery’s other long wall was covered in a large wallpaper made from illustrations in two copies of The Atlas of Rare Birds that Özgür had found in Bern in 2012, and subsequently collaged together with magazine real-estate advertisements, visualizing the struggle between human development and natural habitats. The rare birds could be metaphors for the diverse peoples of Turkey, whose distinctive habitats are threatened by the many government-backed projects to relocate vibrant neighborhoods into isolated concrete towers; or the wallpaper could be about the many rare birds hosted in Turkey during their annual migration from Europe to Africa that similarly find their habitats impinged upon by excessive development. In this way, Özgur does return to one of the great themes of the Gezi Park protests: the brutal way in which the government treats nature mirrors how it regards its citizens.

HG Masters is ArtAsiaPacific’s editor at large.

Ferhat Özgür’s “Animal Farm” is on view at The Pill, Istanbul, until November 4.

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