“This (Seeking Justice Collection) gives us the narrative about resilience and that even in every hopeless situation, there is hope when we act collectively and determined.” – Eylem Delikanli

The Memory Museum for Historical Justice is Turkey’s first digital museum and human rights archive. Its foundation stems from a digital project developed through academic studies and research programs, driven by the concepts of historical justice and memory studies. This project later evolved into a research initiative led by the Collective Memory Working Group of the Research Institute on Turkey in the summer of 2020—a group consisting of human rights activists, lawyers, writers, and academics. The collective’s primary aim was to gather data on the 1980 coup d’état—the most violent coup in Turkey’s history—and to trace its ongoing effects through historical documents and personal testimonies. Today, MMHJ is managed by a team under the Democracy and Memory Research Association, bringing together experts in memory studies, archiving and documentation, communication, law, and oral history.

The Memory Museum presented its first physical exhibition titled The Past is Present at Tütün Deposu, Istanbul, between 12 September and 11 November 2023. The exhibition was visited by a record number of visitors, reaching over 4,000 visitors, including groups of visitors from nine universities, nine NGOs, and eleven high schools.

The Memory Museum’s permanent collection consists of 235 digital and 93 physical court files, thousands of pages of legal documents, 50,000 memory objects acquired from 35 different donors, 120 oral history recordings of over 300 hours, 518 physical documents, 65 newspapers, and 150 books. The exhibition The Past is Present also presented the works of ten contemporary artists such as Nil Yalter, Gülsün Karamustafa, Günes Terkol, Aylin Tekiner, Sevim Sancaktar, Gülçin Aksoy, Doğa Yirik, Özlem Sulak and Tan Oral with some works specifically commissioned for this exhibition.

Exhibition graphic design with exhibition name in Turkish, Photo by Elif Carrier

My interview with the museum director Eylem Delikanli delves into the Memory Museum’s collection, as well as the team’s curatorial methodologies in transferring the vast digital archive of the museum into the physical exhibition space. Most importantly, the interview focuses on finding out how as a team they succeeded in showcasing the unbroken lineage of the violent narratives of the past that are still traceable in the present time of Turkey where democracy is a constant struggle. In my view, the exhibition The Past is Present is not only relevant within the boundaries of Turkey but in any land that endures the impacts of hegemonic systems and, as a result, their rendered, biased, and fabricated discourse of truths. It is through the personally, culturally, and politically anchored stories that the exhibition brings to light the methodologies, characteristics, and the manners of violence that can be witnessed under any totalitarian regime. And the representation of truth is powerful. It is resilient and it is unifying with the agency of hope for the present time and hope for the future. The very same traits that the coup itself aimed to demolish, the exhibition The Past is Present rebuilds.

Before we go in detail into the exhibition, I gather below a summary of the 1980 coup taken from the exhibition and from the Memory Museum website.

About the 1980 Military Coup

The main target groups of the coup were social and political parties, left-wing organizations, universities, Kurds, and Alevis. The immediate strategy employed was to use policies of oppression and violence with a long-term strategy to deconstruct the constitution and disable political empowerment.

Torture was the most widespread and systematic form of violation that was employed. Thousands of people were abruptly taken into custody from their homes and brought to police stations, police departments, public buildings, private estates, and facilities that would from then on be used as places of torture. In these buildings, in addition to the military staff, the members of the police department and MİT (National Intelligence Organization) carried out acts of torture that would continue in an intensified manner over the next decade.

Based on research and collected data, the Memory Museum created Turkey's first torture map consisting of 8,757 names out of 650,000 detainees, 478 locations of torture, 45 types of torture, and more than 500 names of those responsible. The torture map continues to be updated with new data.

Map of Torture, Memory Museum Website, En.bellekmuzesi.org

Interview

Elif Carrier: The Museum of Memory for Historical Justice website states that “it prioritizes positioning itself as an open, democratic, collective platform and narrating history from the bottom up.”[1] Can you please tell us about how you employed the “bottom-up” methodology throughout the exhibition?

Eylem Delikanli: The Memory Museum for Historical Justice (MMHJ) is founded on guiding principles that are geared towards challenging the official narrative of the 1980 coup d’état. The MMHJ is the first digital museum and the human archive that searches, documents, and analyses the human rights violations and the crimes against humanity perpetrated before, during, and after the 1980 coup. Through our Oral History, Memory Objects, Court Files, and Seeking Justice Collections, not only do we compile an extensive number of documents, testimonies, and materials, but we also produce new information and knowledge to showcase the crimes perpetrated without leaving room for doubt. The official narrative, which states that the Army intervened to secure democracy and to end the bloodshed between brothers and sisters, and that the violence ended when the coup was staged, gives us a partial and blurry picture of what really happened. The most effective way to challenge this narrative is to open a space for all those who were targeted by the military and those who extensively suffered from the violence of the military regime. Every single oral history interview, memory object, or private collection at the museum’s permanent collections serves the purpose of narrating this nuanced past with such detail that is omitted from the official story. The Past is Present exhibition reflected the most comprehensive content in a physical space to give voice to those who were subject to these atrocities and provide an open platform for them to utilise their agency for memory activism. We work actively with the witnesses, who are also on our advisory board and collectively build the museum with attention to detail to serve this purpose. Our mission is to make connections between the past and the present to understand how we arrived at where we are as a society and remember that defending democracy is a constant struggle. The Memory Museum places an emphasis on becoming an active constituent of this ongoing struggle in the country.

Elif: I would like to showcase segments from the exhibition to our readers in conversation with you in the following questions:

The exhibition at Tütün Deposu, Istanbul, was a vast production of digital works translated into a physical space consisting of oral history archives, video works, installations, digital interactive works such as the Torture Map or the interactive Sites of Memory, as well as wall spaces and installations showcasing personal items, photos, IDs, letters, and documentation, newspaper articles, legal papers, and banners under variously titled collections. These collections were “Oral History Collection,” “Seeking Justice Collection,” “Memory Objects Collection,” and “Court Files Collection.”

Let’s start with the Memory Objects Collection, which includes objects and documents such as handmade postcards by women detainees at Bartin Prison, the photo of mothers in front of Metris Prison with a banner saying, “We will not let our children be killed,” IDs, handwritten letters of mothers to the military chief of staff asking for the whereabouts of their children, and if they are alive or not.[2] How are these collected and archived objects essential in documenting violence from the past into present?

Exhibition view with visitors, Photo with courtesy of Memory Museum

Memory Objects Installation View, Photo by Elif Carrier

 

Eylem: The Memory Objects Collection is our largest collection with more than 50,000 materials varying from photographs to printed materials such as daily newspapers, magazines, ephemera, and physical objects. It is also one of the hardest collections to compile. We contacted every single donor to build this archive and continue to do with a sense of urgency, as the donors are ageing and it is becoming an obstacle to reach these private archives. Our museum director Aylin Tekiner is leading the work from acquisition to their integration into our archival system. The purpose here is simple: every single item is either a testament to the violence perpetrated by the military regime or gives us the visual memory of the period as a whole. Without the visualisation of the era, it would become harder to complete our counter-narrative. When we look at the pictures, we understand the cruel treatment by the soldiers of the detainees, see the sadness of the children when they visited their imprisoned parents, or feel the energy that resistance gave to the parents. Thanks to the memory objects, we deeply understand an abstract concept, perhaps one that is foreign to us, and put that in perspective by seeing them in a physical world. They are proof of the crimes perpetrated by those the Memory Museum holds accountable: the military, the political actors, the police force, the National Intelligence Service, and the civil accomplices.

Elif: The Seeking Justice Collection includes oral history interviews, one of which belongs to Esra Koc who talks about the establishment of the Human Rights Association with the families of detainees from Metris and Sultanahmet prisons. What is specific to this collection in terms of “witnessing violence” as an agent of change?

Oral History Collection, Photo with courtesy of Memory Museum

Eylem: The core idea of this collection is hope. I think this is what defines the content of this collection the best. The Memory Museum has content that is traumatic in nature. We have witnesses speaking about torture, executions, or disappearances. We have visuals supporting these testimonies. We have court files that have descriptions of these atrocities, as well as the impunity that shielded those who were responsible for these crimes. In contrast to all of these, we also have the families who resisted outside of the prisons and advocated for their children. This collection gives us the narrative about resilience and how, even in every hopeless situation, there is hope when we act collectively and determined. Witnesses have been the driving force behind effective memory activism around the globe. It was the Holocaust survivors that changed the course of testimony during the Eichmann Trials. In Argentina, the Plaza de Mayo Mothers are synonymous with the human rights movement in the country. In Germany, it was the witnesses that dug out the Nazi headquarters that formed the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin. It is the Saturday Mothers / People that put the forced disappearances on the agenda in Turkey. Witnessing a crime gives the subject an important role as an agent of truth. Therefore, reaching those who witnessed the crimes and the violations of the military regime is the most crucial work we do. Overall, the collection also gives us the history of the formation of the civil society in Turkey. Although we have our reasons to be gloomy these days, we do have a strong civil society and an ever-growing movement in Turkey. We feel that learning the roots of this movement is crucial for the next generations.

Elif: Can you tell us more about the Oral History Collection?

Eylem: The Oral History Collection is one of our founding collections. Many memory museums around the globe kicked off with testimonies that put the narrative in the heart of the memory work of the site. It is the individual stories that help us understand the unimaginable and connect us with a period where, perhaps, we have no connections. Our initial collection was composed of oral history interviews that Özlem Delikanlı and I created for our previous books Keşke Bir Öpüp Koklasaydım and Hiçbir Şey Aynı Olmayacak. Each year at the Memory Museum, we are expanding the collection by adding new testimonies of witnesses. I lead the collection as the oral historian and work together with Çağrı İşbilir, who works diligently on the recording and editing of the interviews. In 2023, Gözde Bedeloğlu worked with us as our coordinator to help us prepare the material for the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, a system that helps the user search with keywords within the video. Following the same strategy, our oral history collection offers a wealth of information and new data also for our Mapping Torture database. Testimony is a tool for historical justice when all other legal means are exhausted, and in our case it is one of our crucial collections with more than 120 interviews.

Elif: The Memory Museum created Turkey’s first map of torture. Can you explain how torture was used in relation to executing the strategies of the coup, from short-term to long-term strategies?

Exhibition Design Views; Timeline in the front view and Torture Map in the back view, Photo with courtesy of Memory Museum

 

Eylem: Torture was systematically and widely practised by the military regime against thousands of people, resulting in many practices, including deaths under torture, criminalised under international law. It was utilised to oppress dissent so that the social, political, and economic policies of the military regime could be executed without any social disagreement or opposition. To show how widely and systematically it was employed, we created a database detailing the places of torture, people who were subject to it, those who were responsible for it, and the types of torture during this era. This is Turkey’s first mapping of torture and the database contains more than 15,000 names, almost 500 places of torture, and more than 500 perpetrators. Our museum director for legal studies, Hülya Deveci, leads the extensive work, analysing court files and legal documents thousands of pages long to expand the database each year with new data. Our Court Files Collection is far beyond being a compilation of individual and collective court cases. Our legal team makes it tangible for the visitor so they can understand the entire process with short and long summaries and the analyses of these cases. Last year, attorney Deveci completed the first legal report on torture which we published on September 12, 2024. Torture was used by the perpetrators to inflict massive violence on a society to silence them and damage the ideal of human dignity in their conscience. The continuity of torture in our culture is a testament that it has damaged the fabric of the society. We could not find the effective tools to end it permanently.

Elif: Through the interactive digital work of Sites of Memory, the exhibition brings to the viewers’ attention how some of the torture locations of the coup are part of daily life in Turkey now. Sultanahmet prison, where severe human rights violations took place, now operates as a five-star hotel under Four Seasons. Sanasaryan Han, which was a place of torture for the LGTBQ community, is also now a luxury five-star hotel. Can you please tell our readers more about the interactive archive of Memory Locations and the significance of these locations? How do they help us to look at our environment in today’s Turkey?

Eylem: Sites of Memory from Beyazit Square to Taksim Square – 10 Years of Revolutionary Student Movement is the work of the Research Institute on Turkey[1]. We thought that adding the content to the Memory Museum’s comprehensive exhibition would be a good idea, to show how these sites of memory have evolved over the years, whether they still exist and how they were modified or even erased from the collective memory. Memory is an area of constant struggle, and those in power exercise this so well that they never miss an opportunity to erase the remnants of social struggles and upheavals. Dealing with the past is not our forte as a society. Therefore, many of the sites of memory, or torture sites to be more specific, are transformed into places of entertainment or places of everyday life. In many countries where remembrance is a culture and accountability and justice are driving forces, these specific places where humanity greatly suffered are turned into museums for us to remember how and why these atrocities happened, to remind us what we as individuals can do so that it does not repeat. In Turkey, civil society takes the initiative to mark these places through their memory work and analysis so that we at least document the places and remember them.

Elif: The exhibition had a record number of visitors, reaching a height of over 4,000 visitors. Can you please tell our viewers about some of the other contributing factors to the success of the exhibition, such as educational tools and programming? Some examples are the storytelling workshop led by artist Güneş Terkol with the Saturday Mothers, (a protest group who have been gathering weekly since 1995 to ask about their missing relatives) and an editorial collaboration with Birikim Magazine on issue 413. What were some of your goals while planning the programming and educational events for the exhibition?

Exhibition view photo with courtesy of Memory Museum

 

Eylem: The Past is Present was the most comprehensive exhibition to date about the 1980 coup. We owe the success of the exhibition to a multitude of factors. First and foremost, the content was the game changer. Sevim Sancaktar did superb work from design to the curation to deliver the results we were aiming for. We displayed archival work along with new analyses and knowledge backed by testimonies and in conversation with artistic work. The Past is Present combined the content of the museum with contemporary art, allowing them to speak to each other harmoniously. Visitors could see the artistic works of Turkey’s leading contemporary artists, Gülsün Karamustafa, Nil Yalter, Güneş Terkol, Aylin Tekiner, Özlem Sulak, Tan Oral, Sevim Sancaktar, Doğa Yirik and our dear friend, the late Gülçin Aksoy. Tanıl Bora contributed with his Words work along with the work of ‘We Are Children, We Are Together’ initiative. Obviously, the strong curatorial framework and the impressive execution were key to its success. The golden balance between utilising technological solutions without stealing from the strength of the content was crucial for us. Creativity is employed at the highest capacity only to underline all the efforts the MMHJ is undertaking in terms of historical justice, accountability, and human rights advocacy.

The Past is Present is the Memory Museum’s slogan, and we also used it as the name of the exhibition. It was and still is the message we wanted to convey that there is continuity in both the form of crimes and the resistance against them since 1980. We continue to build the museum collectively together with the witnesses and the advisory board from a wide spectrum of intellectuals and professionals including almost thirty attorneys of the period. The collective efforts were also the driving force behind the exhibition. Our guided tours were in high demand. Our visitors took guided tours with our witnesses, listening to their experiences first-hand, which made a huge impact especially among high school and university students.

The exhibition site, Depo, allowed the exhibition to be accessible to visitors coming from different parts of the city. Depo itself is a site of memory and has its own followers. Also, without the support of the dedicated team of Depo, we would have had a hard time solving everyday problems.

We prepared the special edition of the Birikim for the September issue, for which we also asked Osman Kavala and Gültan Kışanak to answer our questions about the coup. Their invaluable contribution also became content for the exhibition. Their letters were clear examples of what we want to convey with our slogan.

The exhibition had a clear message and a strong branding. Our Museum Director for Communication Özlem Delikanlı worked with our creative team to deliver our message and reach our audience in the most effective way. Our creative team at 4129 Grey lead by our Design Director Koray Doyran, art directors Berat Kösemen and Kübranur Özdemir produced a distinctive visual work that carried the weight of the exhibition. Lamarts worked long hours with a dedicated team to prepare, print and install the creative work. Certainly, without Techizart’s technical support and digital solutions, we would not be able to make the impression among our audience.

Gülçin Aksoy, Anonymous I, 2014, Installation, Photo by Elif Carrier

Exhibition graphic design with photo of Erdal Eren, Photo by Elif Carrier

 

Elif: Visitors are welcomed into the exhibition space through the photo of Erdal Eren. He was sentenced to death by the coup’s military regime, and his death sentence was executed through hanging, despite the fact that he was only 17 years old at that time, but his age was changed for the execution. Can you please tell us a bit more about how you selected this photo, especially in line with the exhibition design materials such as logo, typography, and graphic design for the digital museum as well as for a physical exhibition? This is also the first photo on the digital platform when a visitor enters the online museum.

Eylem: Through our deliberate research, we now know that almost 20% of those who were subject to torture were children. This is a very high number, and the larger the database becomes, the better we will understand. Therefore, we place a special emphasis on children, and Erdal Eren obviously is the symbol of this narrative of injustice done to children by the military regime of the 1980 coup. He is also one of the names that comes to everyone’s mind when we talk about the coup. We use one of the lesser-known pictures of him, and our creative team delivered a well-balanced artwork to carry the whole weight of an important exhibition of the museum.

Elif: In Gültan Kışanak’s letter in regard to 1980 coup d’état, in which she answered questions through her lawyer from the prison for the exhibition, she mentions that one of the things that was lost in the 1980 coup was the organised social life which before the coup consciously, in an organised manner, sought solutions to its problems. However, through the usage of “security discourse” as a justification, the coup pacified society and divided it into hostile groups as a method of separation.[3]

Eylem: Her answer also brings into mind the “civilian perpetrators as part of the installation work on the first floor of the exhibition, showcasing those responsible for the coup. These were the civilians who willingly reported on their neighbours, on their students as teachers, or as doctors by not reporting the acts of torture.[4]

Elif: What tools can viewers take from the exhibition to fight against this polarisation that feeds hostility and instead work towards being a society that could seek solutions to problems in a conscious manner?

Civil accomplices are an important category for us for two reasons: 1) every individual has a role in the face of extreme evil and violence; 2) understanding this role will give us a better understanding of why it is crucial to defend the rights of others. We try to implement these two themes in our Defending Democracy public outreach programmes and also expand the content in our archives to showcase how civil accomplices acted during this time. Mrs. Kışanak’s case is a good example for understanding the repercussions when we stay silent about what happened to her or the political party she represents. Unless those who aspire to live in a truly democratic society unite against injustices upon whomever they were inflicted, we will not be able to find solutions or live in a system we desire.

Elif: How do you foresee the role of the Memory Museum in the near future to continue to transmit the injustices of the past into present? Can we foresee a Part 2 of The Past is Present exhibition? Do you foresee some of the objects, documents, and collections being part of national or international exhibitions? Saying that, I would like to inform our readers that right after the exhibition finished, the digital format of exhibition was added to the Memory Museum website.

Eylem: We are a small but dedicated group of women who run and manage the work of the Memory Museum with the tremendous support of our advisors We work with limited resources, and unlike many countries around the world, without the support of the official institutions. In a normal setting, Turkey would have its sites of memory dealing with this traumatic past, but we are far from that discussion. Therefore, we have a massive undertaking compiling what should have been done before us decades ago. We do believe that we have room to grow, but eventually our efforts will pay off when the Memory Museum becomes synonymous with historical justice and human rights advocacy. We always try our best to deliver better than what we have accomplished, so towards that goal our audience can expect much more creative work, diligent research, and effective advocacy coming out from the museum in the very near future. We are working both nationally and internationally to make this happen.

Curators: Eylem Delikanlı, Aylin Tekiner, and Sevim Sancaktar, and exhibition design by Sevim Sancaktar, from Karşılaşmalar.

Memory Museum Team: Eylem Delikanlı – Museum Executive Director; Aylın Tekiner – Museum Director; Hülya Deveci – Museum Director – Legal Studies; Özlem Delikanlı – Museum Director – Communication.

Eylem Delikanlı is the founding executive director, human rights advocate and an oral historian at the Memory Museum for Historical Justice. She holds an MA in Sociology (City University NY) and an MA in Oral History (Columbia University). She is the co-author of the books Keşke Bir Öpüp Koklasaydım (with Ozlem Delikanli in Turkish, Istanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları, September 2013) and Hiçbir Şey Aynı Olmayacak (with Ozlem Delikanli in Turkish, Istanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları, November 2019) Her oral history research covers the 1980 Coup D’État in Turkey. As a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University AHDA program and a researcher at the Truth, Justice and Remembrance Program at Bosch Stiftung in Berlin, she developed the digital museum project focusing on the 1980 Coup. She is a member of Çocuklarız Bir Aradayız initiative – a group working towards building a collective memory of the Coup D’État in Turkey. As an oral historian, Eylem defines her work as oral history for historical justice and her research focuses on theories of post memory, collective memory, mass violence and silence.

Elif Carrier is a researcher, curator, writer, and art consultant. Her work focuses on facilitating artistic productions that challenge the historical trajectory and how we act in the contemporary world, in line with her interest in the use of art within society to respond to current urgencies from decentralised positions. She is a regular contributor to the OnCurating journal and leads projects at the OnCurating Project Space. She holds an MAS in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts and is a PhD canditate in Practice in Curating at University of Reading.