In Istanbul, Marcel Dzama’s Visual Myths Reveal the Fragile Machinery of Power

July 24, 2025 / Sophie Clearwater /

“Marcel Dzama: Dancing with the Moon” is the artist’s debut exhibition in Turkey. Courtesy Pera Museum

The work in Marcel Dzama’s first exhibition in Turkey may come as a surprise—not only given the nature of the artist’s previous output, but also for the decision to present such a provocative body of art in a country that has seen its liberal freedoms increasingly constrained under a more conservative and centralized government. Yet the backdrop feels familiar, echoing shifts taking place in other traditionally democratic nations and revealing a set of unsettling global parallels.

Dzama, known for his rich symbolic language and imaginative visual worlds, has long embedded within his intricate compositions a mix of subtle and overt references to political events, both historical and contemporary. In “Dancing with the Moon” at Pera Museum in Istanbul, the American artist cloaks a sharp political critique beneath a lyrical title. The works speak openly to governmental failure, ecological collapse and the violence of war. And yet, through his use of myth and allegory, Dzama recasts these pressing issues on a broader, more timeless scale, underscoring their resonance across cultures and historical periods.

A provocative image featuring a cow-headed figure with intense eyes, surrounded by grasping hands and chaotic slogans like "VOTE TYRANNY" and "OH BEAUTIFUL TYRANNY." This piece is charged with political satire and dystopian overtones. — Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon, *Oh beautiful tyranny*, 2016. Dan Bradica

The exhibition’s more openly satirical tone reflects the contributions of Dzama’s longtime friend Raymond Pettibon, who collaborated on several of the visually dense narratives and provocations on view. The show ultimately doubles as a celebration of their enduring friendship, creative exchange and shared artistic sensibility, where irreverence meets complexity, and critique unfolds through layered imagery and dark wit, charged with political satire and dystopian overtones.

Drawing on the narrative ambiguity of his figurative dream logic, Dzama conjures visually rich, imaginative worlds populated by masked dancers, hybrid creatures, soldiers and harlequins—figures suspended in enigmatic, ritual-like scenes that evoke fragments of forgotten myths or distorted political allegories. His symbolic lexicon remains intact, with a surreal cast of recurring characters: bears, bats, ballerinas, rifles and trees appear across diorama-like stages and tightly choreographed tableaux that beckon the viewer into a fairytale slipping into more fantastical realms. In these works on view, however, a parade of recognizable political figures ruptures that suspension of reality, pulling us back into the absurdist roleplay of contemporary global politics.

broader view of the exhibition space, confirming this is a curated group show or a solo exhibition with significant spatial diversity. The two standing sculptures evoke costume, armor, or character archetypes—again in line with Dzama's recurrent themes. — Curated by Alistair Hicks, the exhibition presents Dzama’s explorations of misgovernance, the misuse of our environment and the destruction caused by war. Courtesy Pera Museum

Throughout the show, the visitor is caught in a persistent tension between amusement and danger, moving through an oscillation between a childlike aesthetic and darker, more unsettling themes. Violence, authoritarianism and power are set against imagery that celebrates the feminine generative force, the destruction and resurgence of eroticism and the potential for escape into magical or spiritual realms while underscoring the inherent instability of power and identity. What initially appears to be a dystopian, humorous and lyrical mise-en-scène gradually reveals itself as a carnivalesque mirror of contemporary society or a satirical procession through the paradoxes of today’s politics, ideologies and collective behaviors.

Dzama’s graphic acuity allows him to sharply delineate characters, symbols and critical phrases, while simultaneously abstracting them through the suspension of disbelief enabled by his cartoon-like aesthetic. And yet, the titles and wall texts offer little ambiguity, delivering the show’s political stance with striking clarity.

“The world is not well-governed. Much of this is caused by the corruption and conceits of our so-called leaders, whether we elected them or not,” reads one text accompanying his recent Lords of Misrule series. In these works, world leaders from the past and present are laid bare in their greed and moral collapse, as Dzama confronts the persistent threat that even seemingly liberal democracies can quietly and insidiously slide into autocracy.

A striking portrait of a woman standing in a field of sunflowers with explosions behind her. She holds a drawing of a peace dove, making a poignant anti-war statement. The aesthetic aligns with folk surrealism, political allegory, and stylized naivety. — Marcel Dzama, *Blood on a sunflower*, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

As Dzama freely moves between political critique and satire, the works begin to echo the warnings of Plato’s Republic, in which the ancient philosopher traces a cycle of political decay: from aristocracy (rule by the wise and virtuous) to timocracy (rule by the honor-driven), then subtly into oligarchy (rule by the wealthy few) and democracy (rule by the people or the mob), before collapsing, inevitably, into tyranny (rule by a single despot).

At the core of this progression lies Plato’s most disquieting insight: democracy often harbors the seeds of its own demise. In a passage that feels uncannily prescient, and one Dzama stages with biting visual clarity, Plato warns that too much freedom can lead to disorder, much like today’s torrent of information that fractures attention and erodes public trust. From that chaos, a charismatic demagogue rises—something we’ve seen in recent electoral cycles, as growing disillusionment has nudged nations toward more authoritarian rule. Promising to restore order and speak for the people, the demagogue ascends only to silence dissent, dismantle opposition and become the very tyrant democracy was meant to guard against.

With his signature Dadaist irreverence, Dzama blends whimsy with menace and playfulness with subversion to unearth uncomfortable truths of our time. In one work, he paraphrases Magritte: “This is not a monster. It is a drawing of a monster.” Another collaborative piece with Pettibon takes its title from Einstein’s stark warning: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” The works signed by both Dzama and Pettibon most explicitly confront global and U.S. politics, engaging head-on with the rise of authoritarianism and technocracy that have upended both societal and ecological balance—audaciously, and without fear of censorship, in the country where they are now shown, or the one they call home.

A hallway installation that includes mural drawings of bats and anthropomorphic figures, paintings embedded in wall illustrations, and vitrines of sketches or models. This immersive setup deepens the exhibition's narrative and theatrical atmosphere. — Marcel Dzama’s paintings seem at first glance like an amalgamation of stories, often featuring characters familiar from popular culture or current politics. Upon closer look, however, the works extensively explore subjects that have remained universal for centuries. Courtesy Pera Museum

Freely weaving past and present into his poignant contemporary epics of conflict, struggle, and ideological resistance, Dzama’s work ultimately resonates with reflections akin to those of Michael Meade, revealing a humanity suspended in a liminal state—no longer who we were, not yet who we are meant to become. This threshold is marked by political upheaval, climate catastrophe and cultural fragmentation.

While Meade suggests that what is missing is the symbolic framework to guide us through this transitional phase and restore a deeper sense of meaning, Dzama enacts his own form of mythopoetics—one that calls forth the return of the repressed, the shadow, the dark and the denied aspects of the collective psyche—offering instead a profound lens through which to read the present.

It is also for this reason that, scattered across the grotesque pantomime of the now, Dzama sows subtle symbols of resistance: quiet signs that beauty, and the rituals of regeneration, healing and rebirth, still endure. Recurring images of benevolent animals, along with the sun and moon, evoke the eternal cycle of all things—a reminder that the forces of renewal will, in time, overturn those of decay and violence. Mysterious women appear as counterweights in this unfolding cosmology, depicted as suffragettes, mermaids, or witches wielding weapons and performing ancient spiritual rites to restore cosmic balance and energetic harmony. They become vessels through which the flames of creative power and divine force might once again enter the world.

Illustration of masked women in blue dresses and uniforms holding weapons and a banner that reads "Take Notice," with red-and-white radial background rays, flying bats, a uniformed figure above, and Spanish text at the bottom: "La Revolución va a ser Femenina" (The Revolution will be Feminine). A black cat and severed head rest at the center bottom. — Marcel Dzama, *The revolution will be female*, 2017. Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirnerg.

“On a Broadway stage, the aftermath of the world’s end unfolds as a ritual of death,” reads one of the wall texts. “The choreography belongs to a massive skull crowned with a halo of light, grinning as it takes center stage. Unbound by time or place, it casts its glow from the pagan world to post-Trump America, proclaiming: ‘We are still here—because you can’t kill ghosts!’”

The dramatic theater of human vice and failure reaches its final act in four video works included in the exhibition, each unraveling the porous boundary between fiction and reality, historical record and manipulated truth. In at least three of them, Dzama exposes how quickly the scene can shift, from playing a seemingly harmless “Game of Chess” to “shooting Infidels,” as innocent imagery gives way to coded power plays and pointed meditations on authority and violence.

One vintage-style black-and-white film, evoking the silent cinema of the 1920s, reflects on the absurdity of war, where ordinary people are coerced into serving interests far removed from their own lives. A line from the accompanying wall text, drawn fittingly from Dante, underscores Dzama’s critique: “The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

The exhibition as a whole becomes an ambitious exercise in mythopoiesis. Dzama’s storytelling and symbolism trace the cyclical patterns of history and human nature, reawakening an awareness not only of past failures but of the forms of resistance and refuge that still persist—even in times as precarious as these. His myth-informed imagination reintroduces a vertical dimension, linking contemporary experience to timeless archetypes, metaphors and moral reckonings. Rather than offering escape, Dzama’s work insists on a deeper engagement with reality that resists ideology in favor of a more layered, symbolic understanding of the world we inhabit.

Marcel Dzama’s “Dancing with the Moon (With a little help from his friend Raymond Pettibon)” is on view at Pera Museum in Istanbul through August 17, 2025.