Atatürk at the Blackboard: Erasures of Polyphony in Post-Ottoman Turkey

Established at the core of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1923, Turkey continued to institute sweeping reforms for the next decade which would dramatically alter the social, political, linguistic, and even demographic make up of what remained its territories. In 1928, the Latin alphabet was introduced to replace the Arabic script, the hegemonic script used to write in Ottoman-Turkish. What is often left out of this history is that a plethora of other alphabets and languages used in the Ottoman Empire were also rendered defunct and illegible at this moment. This paper offers a historical and iconographic reading of artworks that attend to this moment by two contemporary artists from Turkey: Dilek Winchester and Aydan Murtezaoğlu. Their works take as their reference the iconic photograph of Atatürk at a blackboard, introducing the new Latin alphabet. Murtezaoğlu’s Blackboard (1992-93) embodies the great schism in culture and history caused by this moment, a dialectic of erasure and revision, in the severed hand of Atatürk pointing towards the new script that would erase the Ottoman past and write the new nation. Winchester’s On Reading and Writing (2007) and as if nothing has ever been said before us (2007-2015) take up the same iconography to reclaim the alternative histories that were lost in that rupture by inscribing the blackboards with Armenian, Greek, and Ottoman script, alluding to a polyphonic potential history. This paper asks after local histories of monolingualism, the violent erasures they have caused, and opacity as an operative strategy locally and internationally.