Critical caricatures from Turkey

In 2015, the cover of the Turkish satire magazine LeMan depicted the German chancellor with a puzzled look on her face, sitting next to the Turkish President Erdogan wearing a sultan's attire. She wonders, "Where in the world have I landed?" LeMan is one of Istanbul's three leading satire magazines. Turkey's Prime Minister Davutoglu once called it "immoral."

The failed coup in July 2016 fundamentally changed Turkey. Since then, 150,000 people have suddenly lost their positions and 40,000 have been imprisoned - journalists, authors, activists. Many of them are held in detention awaiting a trial that's never held. The drawing shown above, by 66-year-old cartoonist Izel Rozental, dealt with this issue in August 2016.

Erdogan has accused Fethullah Gülen of plotting the attempted coup, and has since persecuted alleged members of the exiled cleric's movement. Cartoonist Yigit Özgür has caricatured the fact that many Turks believe Erdogan's exaggerated blanket accusations: One man says, "90 percent of all water melons are said to be Gülen followers." "Hmmm, could be," replies the other.

With 51.3 percent Yes votes, the constitutional referendum held in April broadened Erdogan's powers. During the demonstrations ahead of the referendum, the media was not allowed to freely cover supporters of the opposition's No - "Hayir" - position. This led Ipek Özsüslü to draw this cartoon in March. "Your resistance is calcified," says the plumber with a Hayir on his bottom.

Among the works on show at the exhibition "Schluss mit Lustig" (Get Serious), Erdogan is not the only one targeted by Turkish cartoonists. This drawing criticizes Trump's "Muslim travel ban." Referring to US soldiers, the child asks, "When will we finally expell them, papa?" The father darkly replies, "When our oil is all used up."

As one of the rare female cartoonists in Turkey, Ramize Erer addresses feminist topics and breaks taboos surrounding sex. She depicts explicit female sexuality, often offending the country's conservatives. One of her recurring characters is the busty, men-devouring "bad girl." Sexuality is one of the biggest taboos in Turkey.

Artist Mehmet Cagcag shows his views of the current state of the planet with this drawing: Dynamite is attached to world clocks, and from Baghdad to Athens, from Berlin to France, international cities are ticking bombs. The cartoonist does not reveal when and if they'll actually explode.

With his drawing from 2014, Murat Basol reacts to the then-being-built third bridge over the Bosphorus. Unlike Erdogan, the cartoonist does not see the bridge linking the Asian and European sides of Istanbul as a demonstration of Turkey's progress, but rather as a polluting construction project that will lead to more traffic and exhaust fumes.

Free spaces are no longer available everywhere in Turkey; one has to look for them and even fight for them. That's the idea transmitted by Zeynep Özatalay's cartoon. The authors, musicians and painters depicted in this drawing succeed in pushing back the void. The cartoon was published in the newspaper BirGün, an open critic of Erdogan's party, the AKP.