A bomb blast wrecked a bus carrying police officers on Tuesday in the southern Turkish province of Mersin, injuring 18 people in an attack that security sources blamed on Kurdish militants.
Seventeen of those hurt were police officers, Deputy Prime Minister and government spokesman Bekir Bozdag told parliament, branding it a terrorist attack.
“Turkey‘s battle against terror will continue under any circumstances in a strong and determined way,” Bozdag said.
Security sources said militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were believed to have carried out the attack. They also said that none of those wounded were in a critical condition.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Local mayor Burhanettin Kocamaz told broadcaster Haberturk the attack took place on a street where the local governor’s office was located and had hit the police vehicle as it passed.
Images from NTV showed smoke billowing from the area, in Mersin’s Yenisehir district. Ambulances, police and fire trucks were sent to the site of the attack, security sources said.
Turkey is battling a three-decade insurgency in its mainly Kurdish southeast. The PKK frequently carries out bomb attacks on security forces in the southeast and elsewhere.
The PKK is considered a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union as well as by Turkey. More than 40,000 people, most of them Kurds, have died since it first took up arms against the state in 1984.
“Obscene, pornographic? Well, obscenity is everywhere, pornography, sadly, is everywhere, certainly not in this work of art,” said Bernard Blistene, director of the Pompidou Centre Museum.
“This work of art is funny, it is an obvious nod to the relationship of abstraction and figurative painting that co-exist in Dutch art in the 20th century. Spiritual yes, obscene no.”
Already displayed for three years in Bochum, Germany, the sculpture had not courted any controversy until now.
Van Lieshout insisted that his work defined the domestication of animals by humans for agriculture and industry as well as highlighting the ethical issues surrounding that.
“I don’t think it’s very sexually explicit. I mean, I don’t know what I can do to make it less sexually explicit,” he said.
It’s not the first time the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) has been at the centre of an artistic sex scandal in Paris. In 2014, vandals attacked a giant green inflatable sculpture in one of the capital’s most famous squares after its resemblance to a sex toy sparked an outcry.
At the time Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the incident was an unacceptable attack on artistic freedom.
“I can understand that it can shock some people, because it’s true, it’s bound to be linked to bestiality, this kind of thing,” Marketing student Colombe Gaucherand said after looking over Domestikator.
“But it’s artistic freedom and I think we shouldn’t censor a work of art even if it doesn’t appeal to everyone.”