Among the reforms that the Kemalist elite undertook in the construction of the Turkish Republic were the Turkish Alphabet Reform implemented in 1928, which posited the adoption of the Latin alphabet instead of the Ottoman; and the Language Reform in 1932, which aimed to rid Turkish of vocabulary and linguistic structures that derived from other languages. These reforms aimed not only to create a national language that would unify the citizens of Turkey, but also to homogenize the population and erase ethnic differences of various minority groups. While the historical, social and political impact of these reforms are very significant and have been widely debated by scholars, politicians and the general public alike, the focus of this paper is the way in which their repercussions have been articulated in the artistic productions of 1990s and onwards. Positing that the national identity project and the language reforms are acts of linguistic and cultural violence, I examine the ways in which this violence has been represented on film and in contemporary visual art, as well as the narratives of censorship surrounding them, which embody the state violence criticized by these works of art in the first place. To that end, I will look at the representation of the intersection between language reform and state violence as embodied in the Blackboard Series (1992-3) by the Turkish artist Aydan Murtezao?lu, whose installations point at the violence inherent in a project that aims to repress and refashion the memory of the new republic; and Vahap Av?ar’s Atatürk and the Alphabet (1990), which gestures at the institutional silence around Kurdish and the unrepresentability of the ethnic other’s language within a nationalist framework. From there, I will move on to Handan Ipekçi’s feature film Büyük Adam Küçük A?k (2001), which deals with the friendship between a young Kurdish girl whose family has been murdered by the Turkish police, and her next door neighbor, an old Kemalist Turkish judge, who has no choice but to take her in. My main focus will be to analyze how the Kemalist ideology and the physical image of Atatürk himself feature in these works, and connect the present day discourses around the language reform to the initial years of the republic through evocations of images embedded in the Turkish collective memory.