‘Seeking Borealism in Istanbul: Contemporary Musical and Cultural Connections between Iceland and Turkey’, in International Journal of Cultural Policy, Online First, Routledge, Sept. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2025.2562832, pp. 1-18.
In the changing political and economic consitions in Turkey, I argue that the continued interest towards Nordic culture and music is an act of secularist resistance. This is centered in a cosmopolitan ’youth’ culture established in Istanbul in the last two decades, mainly expressed by various musical venues. Using qualitative methods and focusing on interviews with Icelandic performers and the Istanbul venues that hosted them, I intend to trace the past, present and future of this relationship, and its relationship with the longing for secular spaces. Although, it is possible to say that Borealism, the exoticization of the North, has been played out in Turkey through the music-scapes of artists such as Sigur Rós, Björk, Múm, Amiina, Ólafur Arnalds, etc. the last couple of years, within the Turkish audience, this has turned into the longing and desiring of freedom and democracy, which the ’North’ represents.
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