Images of Urban Defiance
A look at the 14th International Bursa Photography Festival (Bursa FotoFest) ahead of its closing weekend
Once known as “Green Bursa” for the forests surrounding its great peak Uludağ and its lush landscaping in Ottoman times, Turkey’s fourth-largest city has become famously smothered in concrete as its population soared from a half million people in the 1950s to more than 3.2 million today.
This “transformation from green to gray… [is] also the transformation of a way of life and a mood,” Bursa-based photographer Mustafa Mesut Şık writes in the text that accompanies his photos at the 14th International Bursa Photography Festival (Bursa FotoFest). “Gray is not just the color of the city; it’s also a symbol of lost hopes, the vanishing nature, and intertwining chaos.”
First organized in 2011 by the Bursa Metropolitan Municipality, Bursa City Council, and Bursa Photography Art Association (BUFSAD), the Bursa FotoFest is now the largest and longest-running photography event in Turkey. This year’s event, which ends 20 January, was curated by photographer, academic, and critic Laleper Aytek around the theme of Urban Defiance, and features solo shows by 33 photographers as well as a large open-call exhibition.
Interpretations of the festival theme vary widely, ranging from award-winning Magnum photographer Emin Özmen’s artful documentation of the literal, life-and-death resistance of Ukrainians rallying to defend their country in the first days of the Russian invasion in 2022 to young photographer Reyhan Mente’s poetic meditations on pieces of discarded plastic and fabric moving through the city like ghosts.
Although the festival has “international” in its title, the participating photographers are nearly all from Turkey, other than Dina Oganova from Georgia with her primarily portrait-based work capturing the character of her homeland. Given the rapid and often controversial “urban transformation” many cities in Turkey have undergone over the past decades, it’s not surprising that a large number of the works on display focus on inner-city decay and the people (and animals) struggling to survive within it, feelings of urban alienation, and the surreal new developments sprouting on urban fringes.
But despite some visual and thematic similarities between shows, this is a strong selection of work, highlighting a fresh crop of photographers who have something to say. The minimal labeling (the only text is each artist’s statement, in Turkish and English) means many of the image locations go unidentified, reflecting the growing sense of sameness in the country’s cities as (re)development strips them of their individual character – and threatens to do the same to their inhabitants. Those artists who do focus on a specific place, though, often stand out in sharper relief.
Ateş Alpar’s melancholic images of the historic town of Hasankeyf as it gets submerged under the waters of a massive dam (a body of work previously exhibited at Merdiven Art Space in Istanbul) and Suzan Pektaş’s surreal scenes of the destruction wreaked in ancient Antakya by the February 2023 earthquakes are stark, if artful, reminders of the devastation that urban planning policies and practices can lead to, while Aylın Kızıl’s photographs of daily life in Diyarbakır show how people carve out space for themselves amid urban transformations – itself another kind of resistance. Other memorable photo series include Erdem Varol’s surreal and often humorous Istanbul scenes, Fatma Çelik’s tender portraits of forced migrants finding solace in nature, and Çiğdem Üçüncü’s dreamlike underwater pictures of swimmers and jellyfish during a mucilage outbreak.
Though six of the FotoFest 10 venues are clustered together in Bursa’s historic city center, the others are more far-flung. Humble gecekondu-style homes, typically built by poor migrants, cling to the ruins of the old city walls leading to the Zindankapı venue, awaiting gentrification. The Nilüfer Pancar Deposu – itself a former warehouse for sugar-beet crops turned “multi-purpose interaction workshop” – and the Bursa Akademik Odalar Birliği (Bursa Academic Union of Chambers) sit in the shadow of strip malls while the Meteor Balat Kültür Evi is in a new development on the urban fringes. Visiting them all conjures a real-life journey through the festival’s theme.
The Bursa FotoFest is free to the public and runs through 20 January, though the official closing event is Sunday, 19 January, and some venues are closed on Mondays. (The Bursa State Fine Arts Gallery is closed on Sundays.)