​
MORR / THE SEAL, 2023
The Frame, 50x50
​
A list of names of villages and places in Kurdistan, as they used to be called before, barely visible, barely legible, they disappear behind the seal of Atatürk, the seal that ratified the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923.
Their names have been changed since then, turkified! The places, the language, the culture, the life were put under seal!
THE "TURKISH" SEAL
At the bottom of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, Turkey had applied the seal reproduced here. It says: "President of the Great National Assembly of Turkey Mustafa Kemal". The seal is still in Ottoman Turkish or Osmanli Turkish, the official language of the Ottoman Empire. It is from 1923 that the linguistic reforms were carried out by Atatürk, with in particular the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to write Turkish.
This "Ottoman-Turkish" seal symbolizes the full sovereignty of Atatürk's Turkey, the beginning of forced population exchanges and the oppression of non-Turkish cultures and peoples. The “Turkish” Seal symbolizes this oppression.