In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, there are nine circles of hell. After the May election defeat of Turkey’s unprecedentedly optimistic opposition reaffirmed the illiberal authoritarianism of President Erdoğan, the nation’s residents, including citizens, refugees, and migrants of all kinds, might have felt that they had descended more than one rung lower from Limbo to Treachery, perhaps landing somewhere between Greed and Anger.

Following the twin earthquakes that struck Turkey’s southeast on February 6, politicization reduced over 50,000 deaths to the promise and privilege of the powerful few from construction zones in Antakya to palace backrooms in Ankara. This merely served to muffle and transmute the severity of the hell that the country has coped with into a new normal rivaling the self-aggrandizing shamelessness of any post-pandemic self-help guru. In response, Turkey’s more progressive art workers responded. They confronted the haze of misinformation with a personal grit that borders on foolhardiness, demanding the type of respect usually afforded to front-line soldiers, those facing the meat grinder of dictatorial state violence with eyes wide open. Though cold and starving, these art workers survived on the belief that there is no higher power than creativity and that art’s role in public life is essential.