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Veronika Bernard

Istanbul’s İstiklal Caddesi Graffiti: Young Istanbul Sprayer Art Doing the Cat-Walk, and Testing Cultural Values

Abstract In recent years Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district has increasingly become a place of graffiti art. This article discusses the cultural implications becoming manifest in Beyoğlu’s İstiklal Caddesi graffiti by reading them as images commenting on a society’s (cultural) values and being informed by them.

Während der letzten Jahre hat sich der Istanbuler Stadtteil Beyoğlu zu einem Graffiti-Ort entwickelt. Dieser Artikel diskutiert die kulturellen Implikationen jener Graffiti, die entlang der durch Beyoğlu führenden İstiklal Caddesi anzutreffen sind und liest sie dabei als Kommentare zu den Werten jener Gesellschaft, die sie hervorgebracht hat.

1 The Changing Face of a Street

Having been a regular visitor to Istanbul for about a decade now, the first thing the author does with each of her stays is to take a stroll from Istanbul’s central Taksim square down İstiklal caddesi1, to see what is new in the quarter. While it was the reconstruction work on the street ahead of the Istanbul 2010 European culture activities and the impossible-to-ignore increase in tourist crowds (and the street traders following them) during 2009 and 2010 that caught her attention; it turned to be the jump in an increasingly wakening civil society’s political protest, and the sharp increase in murals in 2012–2015. Some of the murals being visible to early-bird or small hours...