Turkish cultural group brings virus emotions to life

By Firdevs Bulut

ANKARA (AA) - A Turkish cultural institute launched a digital art project that brings together expressions of emotions from around the world during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Turkish nonprofit Yunus Emre Institute began the project when the pandemic struck the globe with a sea of unexpected experiences.

Organizers wanted to create an emotive diary of life during the pandemic, which comes together in the Covidoscope project.

One section of the digital collection is dedicated to widely acclaimed, outstanding examples of artistic works and aesthetic creations from around the globe.

Other sections will enable users to trace works on world maps depicting emotions and themes.

The www.covidoscope.org website will be available at the end of June and the collective archive will be shared on the site in multiple languages.

- Prominent artists, experts share experiences

Author of Book of Human Emotions, Tiffany Watt Smith; historian and documentarist Saadet Özen; psychiatrist and author Kemal Sayar are consultants for the project.

Artistic content created and shared on the web and social media platforms are chosen and collected by a wider team from the Institute which has 58 branches around the world and filtered in consultation with inter-disciplinary experts.

Solidarity formed between people grappling with the same unanticipated ordeals, and the integrating quality of emotional experiences will be the main topics of artworks.

- Staying indoors brought more attention to art

As people spent more time indoors, there was an increase in artistic expressions about how they felt, said officials from Yunus Emre Institute.

The output collectively formed at a pivotal and meaningful moment, and which as a whole, forms an emotive diary of life during the pandemic, comes together in the Covidoscope project.

It assembles a selection of outpourings of feeling spanning from the very first days of the outbreak.

Through diverse inquiries, expressions, and techniques, common feelings born of a shared global experience, and personal responses shaped in unique settings bore many varied fruits, according to Ayse Gokcen Yucel, Arts and Culture Coordinator of the Institute's London office and member of the Covidoscope team.

Turkey’s state-run, non-profit Yunus Emre Institute works to promote the Turkish language, history and culture, and has been teaching Turkish in collaboration with more than 40 cultural centers around the world.