Ayse Erkmen’s looped video shows a young man dancing to Dario Moreno’s song “Istanbul”. The background is completely white. The dancer is Emre, the artist’s son. He is dressed all in black; smiling, with an amused expression. He moves away and draws closer by turns, moving in such a way as to occupy the whole screen.

The title of the song thus refers to Dario Moreno, a singer and actor born in 1921, at Aydin near Izmir, in a Jewish family, to a Turkish father and a Mexican mother. After singing in the clubs of his home town, he discovered Paris, where he recorded his first album. He was an overnight success and simultaneously pursued his career in both countries.

Moreno’s song is about a man’s wanderings in the crowded streets of Istanbul, where he is looking for the love of his life. He meets a woman in the crowd and follows her; he learns that she is from Paris. They return together to Paris. At the end of the song he concludes that “Great happiness is there, at your door / There is no point in going to find it who knows where, in Istanbul or Timbuktu / Love is right there next to you.”

The song first evokes a certain empathy with Western notions of Istanbul, but the video shows the young boy dressed like any other young European in an impersonal context, against a white background. The video thus reflects an opposition: on the one hand the vague and nostalgic image that the West has of Istanbul, pervaded by the voice of the muezzin, and on the other, the modern image of a fairly Westernised young man, dancing and enjoying himself. The artist thus uses a personal element to introduce a more general examination of the Westernisation of Turkey, by evoking the different evolutions that the country has been subjected to throughout its history, by distancing itself from or approaching the West, as is symbolically expressed by the song: “Istanbul or Constantinople… it’s in Istanbul or in Constantinople...”

Yekhan Pinarligil