Writing on the Wall: The Cultural, Historical and Political Significance of Graffiti in Istanbul's Gezi Park Protests (2015)

Undergraduate: Karen Sieber

Faculty Advisor: Robert Allen
Department: Interdisciplinary Studies

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Long associated with hasty scrawls on bathroom walls or with gangs, graffiti is finally being looked at as an important form of artistic protest in politically unstable areas throughout the world. Nobel Peace Laureate Jose Ramos-Horta believes that ¿¿¿graffiti is always relevant because it provides at the very least a snapshot of current opinions and attitudes, of stored feelings and concerns from the past, and of fears and hopes for the future¿¿¿. This relevance is particularly evident in the graffiti related to the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul in 2013. Graffiti became a visual marker of events in the city and it¿¿¿s residents¿¿¿ reaction to those events. These images I will show, which range from crude and angry to elaborately planned artistic social commentary, seethe with deeper meanings beyond the proposed destruction of green space of Gezi Park. This form of protest is not merely an aesthetic artistic exchange, but the only true means of communication that a protester may have with the world. By looking at the motivating factors behind the graffiti, the artistic choices made by the artists, and repeated themes in the protest graffiti (such as images of Che Guevara or references to American rap songs or video games) it can provide insight into what people felt about a variety of topics in Istanbul as well as how outside cultural influences played a part in these themes. These pieces of art became an important voice for citizens not represented in traditional media.