Emre Gönlügür

Getty Global Affiliated Fellow
January 30–July 14, 2023
Profession
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Izmir University of Economics
Project title
Blue Anatolia: The Classical Heritage and Modern Imagination in Mid-Century Turkey
Project description

Emre Gönlügür’s project aims to develop a revisionist reading of the Blue Anatolia debate, an artistic and intellectual movement that flourished in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the work of writers, artists, and architects who took part in the movement, Gönlügür will argue that the aesthetic project of Blue Anatolianism developed an enlarged conception of cultural heritage and public memory, one that focused on Turkey’s Mediterranean coastline and its classical past. The project will explore how the Blue Anatolianists called for a reinterpretation of the cultural heritage of classical antiquity as a humanistic basis for cultivating a geographically and multiculturally rooted Turkish national identity.