We can’t talk about climate change without talking about occupied lands, disability, displaced populations and gender equality. It’s a crisis yes, but it’s not transcendent. It’s important, yes; but not more important than any ongoing human rights struggle.
Read MoreWhen I watched the movies I watched and listened to the music I listened to, I felt like Rapunzel, looking through a window at people living their lives and desperately trying to emulate it up in my own little tower. I didn’t like looking at the white world through a window and not being able to experience that life in my peripheral country, but I couldn’t help it.
Read MoreIstanbul’s particular legacy of continual destruction – that of nature, history and the city itself – is certainly a source of great chagrin and resignation for its denizens. But not just that: a great deal of fight, discourse, resistance, civil solidarity and determination swirls around these issues, renewing one’s faith in humanity in new ways every day.
Read MoreAs if suffering nearly nine years of what the United Nations has deemed the “crime of extermination” at the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship wasn’t enough, Syrians still have to deal with Westerners determined to whitewash Bashar al-Assad and his regime’s barbaric use of chemical weapons.
Read MoreThere was no colloquial equivalent for the word “lesbian” in my mother tongue, and that may have contributed to my feelings of shame and solitude for a large part of my childhood.
Read MoreMangal Media is approaching it's fourth year at the start of a brand new decade! As winter starts to thaw, we decided that the time has come to bring together all our friends in Istanbul who have been a part of this journey. Our hope is to carry the coziness of our online community into real life and create an occasion to bring together writers, artists and everybody else who are interested in our upcoming projects. We hope to see you in Arthere on March 14.
Read MoreIt’s a steep learning curve to manage your first-world preferences when you go back to a beloved society which still prefers to cook over a flaming hole in the ground. So if you, like me, moved to London and became a vegetarian because you wanted to ruin your grandparents’ lives, here’s how you can still enjoy yourself.
Read MoreWritten with hindsight, Wasif seems to long for times, when the three religions lived together. This nostalgia sounds less like a tribute to the Ottoman rule and more of a yearning for a unified Jerusalem.
Read MoreThis type of reckoning with the past is a familiar experience for millennials from peripheral countries. We grew up watching the same cartoons, nagging our parents to buy the same toys and observing the world around us shrink at the same pace. Most importantly, we all had a moment when we thought this new and exciting shared global culture would make us all equal. When it didn't, we ended up experiencing the same sense of disappointment. All the cultural capital we acquired to fit in just made us look more suspicious. Whitey gawped at our ability to speak his language as if we were an entirely different species that miraculously learned to communicate through speech.
Read MoreThat photo says it all. Peter Handke on genocide safari in Srebrenica, mere months after the unspeakable crime. The great white European poet is front and centre, blocking the view of the Cyrillic town sign he presumably can’t read. In the background, we see some people, a car, an industrial plant, houses and hills (and the watermark of the Austrian National Library).
Read MoreOpen source archives are important because they are the memory of revolution and counter-revolution. They allow future generations to recollect fragments of resistance so they can stand up tall against regime propagandists and snooty Western intellectuals. These tenacious memories might just be what it takes to prevent the world from sinking into fatalistic notions of futility.
Read MoreThe depiction of constant movement and decamping, drove artists to come up with nascent tools under shifting and tense conditions. With a clear tendency to overcome that rigorous relationship (identity, self, roots) towards a freer and more direct interaction with the artwork, immersing a new sense, realizing aesthetic and sensational details. Finally, processing them on the canvas or into sculpture.
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