The freshly founded Black Band platform ('Siyah Bant') will document censorship applied to arts in Turkey.

Black Band is an internet platform that researches cases of censorship applied to arts from various sides and by various methods. The website provides documentations of these cases and discusses them. It names the sources of censorship and shares examples for censorship abroad.

The platform does not only look at the concept of censorship under legal aspects. It rather studies the whole scope of different kinds of censorship applied by different parties.

The site gives several examples of institutions and persons that apply censorship such as state institutions, political groups, political parties, individuals considering the interest of the state, district organizations, cultural and arts institutions, curators, professional organizations, industrial representatives or funding agencies.

The Black Band website is accessible from June 2011 till February 2011. The platform will research cases of censorship applied since the year 2000 in the fields of fine arts, visual arts, cinema, music, dance and theatre. Methods like punishment, prohibition, targeting, threats, frightening, humiliation, obstruction, attack, delegitimization and othering will be disclosed.

Meeting the censoring and the censored

Within this process, the cases will be researched in order to be able to document them on the website. Field researches will be conducted in certain cities. Throughout these visits, the Black Band members will talk to artists, cultural and arts institutions, non-governmental organizations, the people who apply censorship and the people exposed to it. Eventually, a book entitled "Black Band - Freedom of Expression in Arts" will be published.

Black Band is an initiative run by the International Performance Arts Research and Production Association (PARC) and supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands and the Open Society Foundation.

PARC is an Istanbul-based non-profit arts organization that provides support and consultancy services focused on research and production in the field of performance arts. PARC also aims at contributing to the artistic development. (NV/ŞA/VK)