Turks: A Journey of a thousand years

Burks A Journey of a Thousand Years needed a more detailed history, not only of the No one thought anyone was going to derive Exhibition at the Royal Academy, January to April Reviewed by Terry Conway am glad I had the opportunity to see Turks: A Journey of a although my feelings about many aspects of the exhibition remain mixed. Many of the rooms were too crowded to be able to see the exhibits properly. This is the increasingly experience of blockbuster exhibitions in London, whether covering a broader cultural sweep as it true of Turks, or individual artists or small groups, as The National Gallery and the two Tates tend to do. show was according to the Royal The Academy's own website in the tradition of 'outstanding exhibitions exploring world cultures, of which the Aztecs exhibition in 2002 was the last - and one I thoroughly appreciated. Africa: the art of a continent also came from the same stable. At any rate Turks and Aztecs could not have been more different. This is not particularly to do with the beauty or interest of the artefacts themselves, which in both cases were stunning, but more fundamentally with the societies from which they came. The thousand years journey packed into less than a dozen rooms in central London was not only a journey in time but of geographical migration from what is now China to present day Turkey, taking large parts of both the Middle East and central Europe en route. Not surprisingly, they absorbed, changed and reflected many different artistic influences as they went. All this made for surprises, as it was difficult to tell the difference between many works in the earlier part of the exhibition and artefacts from China or Japan from comparable periods. But to make a coherent whole, I certainly Turkish people, but of what the other peoples in the areas of the world they were moving through were doing, politically and culturally Demanding? Yes but that is what the exhibition sets itself up for by taking on such a scope. And the conclusion I came to as I left Burlington House that has stayed with me since, is that it is today's realities that posed the real problems I have been to many cultural events that are predicated on different ideological outlooks to my own, revolutionary Marxist approach. Sadly it is rare for that not to be the case, and most of the time it does not act as a barrier to my critical appreciation. But what underlay my sense of frustration with what I had just witnessed was the lack of coherent approach. any political lessons from the Aztecs. But several of the broadsheets drew the conclusion that this exhibition had been timed to coincide with Turkey's application to join the European Union. If that was the only issue however, one might have expected a more concerted attempt at an ideological packaging of the artworks and their context. The complication was and is, that there is another reading of all of this. This was undoubtedly what drew a significant number of people to this exhibition who stood out as being different from the normal crowd at 'great' cultural events. Along with the usual audience of tourists and Londoners there were noticeable groups of Muslims - mainly young people, women in various different headgear and none, groups of young men crowding round beautifully illustrated copies of the Koran in particular. For Turks does not reflect so much on contemporary Turkey, despite the fact that much of it came from the Topkapi palace in Istanbul, but also on a significant part of the history of Islam. In contemporary whether through anti-terror legislation or harassment on the streets, for Muslims to see so many positive images of Islamic culture is a huge breath of fresh air. But unsurprisingly, this message was not explicitly promoted. As in so many cultural exhibitions the works of art - including elaborate textiles, woodwork and metal work, exquisite carpets, intricate mother of pearl book rests and calligraphy and leather book bindings of breathtaking artistry - were 'left to speak for themselves'. There is no doubt that for many Muslims and some others this exhibition was an antidote to Islamaphobia. But for most of the visitors, there was little in the presentation that forced them to challenge the received and ever-increasing of western cultural superiority: a missed opportunity - but not an accident. 31