• Issue
  • Jan 02, 2024

Istanbul: A Special Place in Hell

Detail of SUAT OGUT’s Completing the Disappeared Landscape, 2023, architecural model, dimensions variable, from "Birdir Bir," AVTO, Istanbul, 2023. Photo by Zeynep Firat. Courtesy the artist and AVTO.

In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, there are nine circles of hell. After the May election defeat of Turkey’s unprecedentedly optimistic opposition reaffirmed the illiberal authoritarianism of President Erdoğan, the nation’s residents, including citizens, refugees, and migrants of all kinds, might have felt that they had descended more than one rung lower from Limbo to Treachery, perhaps landing somewhere between Greed and Anger.


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