Six neon figures that light up a single wall at Istanbul’s Pera Museum make no sense until you read the title, “A Few Hours After the Revolution.” Then you realize that the neon letters duplicate the Turkish word DEVRIM (Revolution) in capital letters after the letters have been altered by anti-revolutionaries or police. In Turkey, leftists often write "devrim" on walls only to have the graffiti quickly made incomprehensible by others.

For someone who has lived in Turkey during the left-right clashes on the streets before the 1980 military coup and, to a lesser degree, during the 2013 Gezi Park revolt in Istanbul, this distorted version of “devrim” is almost as familiar as its correct writing.

“This work is inspired by a mutant language, where leftists scribble the word revolution on the walls, only to have the letters deformed by the rightists,” Asli Cavusoglu, one of Turkey’s best-known contemporary artists, told Al-Monitor. “It is not censorship in the full sense of the word. It is, rather, a way to intervene in the way this word is read. It is the creation of new letters, a new language.”

Cavusoglu’s neon work is part of Pera Museum’s summer exhibition “Doublethink: Double vision” that brings together a group of international artists around the Orwellian concept of “doublethink.” The term, one of the pillars of George Orwell’s dystopian novel "1984," was defined by the writer as a tool of the state to control the way the individual thought. It referred to the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and to forget any fact that became inconvenient.