OBM’s Consuming the Orient exhibition on view in Paris...

Garanti Bank confirms its continuing support to culture and the arts on international platforms with an exhibition conceived and organized by one of its cultural institutions, the Ottoman Bank Museum (OBM). As part of the Turkish Season in France, the exhibition Consuming the Orient will run from January 29 through February 26, 2010. This is the bank’s second contribution to the Turkish Season in France. Earlier, it was a sponsor for the European Education Fair also held in Paris, and at which Turkey was the guest of honor.   

The exhibition is located at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, an important venue in the French art world from 1803 to the present. It focuses on images of the Orient that evolved in western consumer culture, from the end of the 19th century on, in response to the imagination and desires of consumers and on the different sorts of media used to convey these images. In a lecture scheduled for February 3, at the Académie, the curator of the exhibition, Prof. Edhem Eldem explained how powerful, and, in a way inevitable, orientalism remains.        

Originally held at OBM from November 15, 2007 through March 2, 2008, the exhibition Consuming the Orient revolves around four recurrent motifs in western depictions of the Orient: exoticism, ethnography, eroticism and history… It showcases objects and documents reflecting these four themes, selected among travel posters and handbooks, popular novels, comic books, industrial objects, and everyday products of mass consumer appeal. Consuming the Orient addresses the period of dilemma experienced by the Ottoman Empire and later the Republic of Turkey as this “oriental” image created by the West was alternately rejected and accepted until Turkey finally went as far as creating its own orientalism.

The catalog of the exhibition published in French can be purchased from the Académie des Beaux-Arts as well as from the Louvre Museum and OBM.