Halil Altindere

Wonderland

Produced in collaboration with the artist Halil Altindere and the Istanbul-based hip hop group Tahribad-i Isyan, Wonderland is a music video formulated as a violent fantasy. The work opens with a tense, tightly framed chase scene that follows a police car bearing down on a young man (a member of the group) who deftly navigates rubble-strewn streets to avoid obstacles and capture. As the youth escapes down a corridor covered in graffiti, the sounds of sirens and heavy breathing give way to a golden era hip hop beat interwoven with traditional Turkish music. Rising over a crumbling concrete wall, an aerial shot reveals a cluster of high-end apartments, their newness sparkling in sharp contrast to what’s left of the historic district of Sulukule. Previously home to a majority Romani population that had lived in the quarter for more than a millennium, residents of the neighborhood have been displaced starting in 2005 as part of a so-called “urban renewal” project (now infamous for its ultimate failure) that was initiated by TOKI, the Turkish government’s Housing Development Administration. Tahribad-i Isyan describes their impression of the community’s collapse with candid language: you call it urban regeneration, it’s the downfall of the city / my neighborhood is a corpse.

Wonderland’s characters employ the ethos and aesthetic of hip hop culture, and the do-or-die narratives of action films, to confront the serious complexities of gentrification, ethnicity-based racism, and police brutality. Altindere’s influence is evident as well in the work’s use of dark humor, which is used to underscore the potential retaliatory effects of disenfranchisement and marginalization (a policeman is set on fire by the end of the video). Heartbreak, desperation, and disgust for the shifting conditions of Sulukule are plainly recognizable in Tahribad-i Isyan’s antics and lyrics, the force of which demonstrates art’s power to act not only as refuge, but also as an indictment of systemic abuses of power.