2+2 KRDSTN I 2023

Lausanne

Curators: Baris Seyitvan – Serdar Mutlu

“ideal barricades against cultural desertification”

1923 Treaty of Lausanne and its neglected consequences

The Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24, 1923 in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne, by the representatives of Turkey and the representatives of Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Since the Treaty of Lausanne was signed and put into effect, the Treaty of Sèvres, which envisaged the right of self-determination of the Kurds who had lived in the region for millennia, also lost its validity. After this event, the geography where Kurds lived for thousands of years with Assyrians, Armenians and other ancient peoples was divided into pieces by artificial nation-state borders. Natural life crossings, roads, mountains, rivers and kinships were now dominated by sovereign nation-states and these peoples were subjected to countless massacres and exiles with the understanding of “one language, one nation, one flag”.

The power of art to document and reconstruct social memory

On the 100th anniversary of this agreement, which caused massacres and cultural genocides, the importance of art, which is one of the protectors of universal culture and instills aesthetic awareness in societies, is obvious.

In the meetings held in the city of Lausanne in the summer of 1923, under the arbitration of the Swiss state and which provided the remapping of the Mesopotamia and Anatolian geography, where the Kurds were eliminated, the lack of adequate documentation on the existence of the Kurds or the failure to reveal the existing documents is perhaps the bleeding wound of this process.

In this exhibition, too, curators, historians, artists and activists will draw attention to the destruction caused by the Treaty of Lausanne, and will try to pave the way for the re-documentation of the process and the revival of social memory. The fact that the existing documents were never discussed due to the “sensitivity” of the nation-states that were artificially established in the region and the reflections of the political, cultural and racial destructions caused by the chaos caused by the agreement will be discussed in this exhibition.

The striking current ecological consequences of the agreement, on the other hand, continue to hurt. The bombing of the Zagros mountains by the surrounding states or the 800-kilometer-long walls drawn to the border lines almost every day destroys the nature and the living creatures in the region. All of this is revealed in this exhibition, along with notes from history, works of art, and the concepts on which the artists are based.

Curators: Baris Seyitvan – Serdar Mutlu