Emre Gönlügür – Blue Anatolia: The Classical Heritage and Modern Imagination in Postwar Turkey
Emre Gönlügür in the Cortile (photograph by Claudia Gori)
The second Getty Global Lecture, featuring Zakarya Khelif on “A Closer Look at the Domestic Architecture of Tipasensis,” takes place at the Academy on Tuesday, April 30.
Emre Gönlügür (2024 Affiliated Fellow) will discuss his project, which aims to develop a revisionist reading of the Blue Anatolia (Mavi Anadolu) debate, an artistic and intellectual movement that developed in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. The movement brought together intellectuals, writers, poets, artists, and architects who embarked on a reinterpretation of the cultural heritage of classical antiquity as a humanistic basis for cultivating a geographically and multiculturally rooted Turkish national identity. Central to the movement was the so-called Blue Voyage (Mavi Yolculuk), a week-long boat trip along Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coastline. This was an annual ritual, a cultural pilgrimage of sorts, whereby participants paid visits to ancient sites, some of which were accessible only by boat, and engaged in lively intellectual discussions and poetry readings on board. Drawing on the work of writers, artists, and architects involved in the movement, Gönlügür argues that the aesthetic project of Blue Anatolianism called for an enlarged conception of cultural heritage and public memory, one that was anchored in geography and the classical past.
Speaker
Emre Gönlügür is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Izmir University of Economics and the 2024 Getty Global Affiliated Fellow.
This program is made possible with support from Getty through its Connecting Art Histories initiative.
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