english . vasif kortun

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2007-10-30T14:30:00.000-07:00

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Interview with Huseyin Alptekin

2007-10-25T05:17:00.000-07:00

Brochure for the pavilion of Turkey, 52nd Venice Biennial

"One of the most bewildering paradoxes revealed in our time is that on the fast globalizing planet politics tends to be passionately and self-consciously local."
Liquid Times, Living in an Age of Uncertainty
Zygmunt Bauman

Vasıf Kortun: Steering clear of any resemblance to illuminated advertisement signs, you preferred to use LED (Light Emitting Diode) in your work "Don't Complain". So, how do you relate the fact that this material comes from China, the Far East with the work itself? The system of marking your city, yourself is a particularly chaotic and individualistic one in a city like Istanbul. Since it isn't a well-regulated one, the outcome is of an incredible visual richness.

Hüseyin Alptekin: Especially in Istanbul, there is a technologically ever-morphing practice within the city's transient texture of posts, signs, billboards and design. This is a phenomenon that has interested me since the early 90's. I reflect this state of perpetual flux especially in my installations where I draw upon this texture, this city and this life while working. Parallel to the shifts in sign manufacturing techniques from Plexiglas to vinyl folio, and similar changes in the use of illumination and embellishments, my work also imparts these abrupt changes (in technology). Formerly, sofit (a kind of neon cable) had replaced neon; a cheap and technologically low-profile material that would feed on the urban kitsch culture with its flickering long form. Later, other forms of lighting products penetrated the urban texture of Istanbul with global circulation. I had used various lighting materials starting with neon. Besides illumination, I was engaged with the use of billboards with large sequins at the beginning of 2000. Right now, even the smallest of traders is entering into business relations with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as a dreadful consequence of globalization. Indeed, all of Karaköy's tradesmen are in tune with the latest developments. The shipment of the LED is significant in this context. Practically, it has entered the urban traffic somehow, but at this moment LED's lifespan is a mystery both here and elsewhere.

V: You also worked with light lace. Those works were elegant, different from the other ones, small, handmade.

H: That was quite short-lived. A kind of neon lace. It was spreading under different names, like the light emitting cable. This product disappeared in a blink. The buzz was it was invented in Israel and developed by Russians and Americans, it flopped. In the course of my own adventure with materials that started with the neon, there is the sudden eruption of the LED, it is a new and practical solution largely spreading from the Far East; it's likely to pose a challenge to the never-ending supremacy of neon. LED lifespan is not accurately known so far, although a duration of 55,000 hours is among rumors; in any case it is possible to replace old parts with the new ones, and certainly new materials will hit the market soon. The city is like an organism capable of sheltering its distinctive popular texture by renewing it.

V: The message of "Don't Complain" seems to be unrelated with what you are telling save for your methods of dealing with globalization and tackling with the spontaneity of the city. Couldn't you have written something else just as well?

H: You are right, earlier with other such materials, the material and the text was conceptually and practically in direct relation to the linkage between globalization and the semantic texture woven between the dictum and the sign, and the linkage between the global and the local. The linkage between the dictum of "Don't Complain" and globalization can be only established in indirect and arbitrary ways. It seems to be about a link that is universal in human terms, and mundane in material terms.

V: Could you elaborate on this?

H: My interest in "Don't Complain" as a motto and a form of rhetoric coincided with the eruption of the LED in the market. For some reason, I didn't want to write in another way. Of course, using light emitted by the LED by covering it up is extremely practical and economical, but an attempt at operating by displaying the High-Led stuff, it turned out that this material can also be quite costly. It is a suitable material fitting the double meaning of "Don't Complain", even though the LEDs can only be used as light sources through concealment or visibly as spots of flooding light. The immediate applications of the LEDs, suddenly appeared to me as a material fitting my relationship with the City (Istanbul) with its changing skin and my way of reflecting this relationship in my works; for conceptualizing the dictum of "Don't Complain"; for bracketing it from its everyday meaning. This application emerges as the local's global sensibility's craving for elegance and a pragmatic formula in the "streets" and in "life". In this domain, what lies between the elegant and the kitsch is a slippery ground. At this point, we are talking about the sudden emergence of urban ornamentation and a creative design reflex which derives from the local and reflects the global network of commerce and consumption with the formal and spatial framework that the material enters and circulates in. For instance, while the sequin was an elegant and exotic material with limited areas of application (cabarets), nearly a century later it had degenerated into a street style material, and from there was abruptly elevated back to the field of fashion and a "trendy" status in a strange way. In a way, it was fashion this time which reappropriated the glitter unexpectedly flashing in the streets, and the street took hold of it again through "imitations". The paradoxical aspect of this operation lies in the fact that the local is virtually the raison d'être of globalization, the power mechanism.

V: If we return to the meanings of "Don't Complain".

H: The one telling not to complain is in essence complaining at the same time, and betrays his objection; this is a tautology and not just a matter of "logic". It is a "complaint". A wish and directive based in a system of hierarchy. "Don't complain!", "count your blessings", "be content, you are better off than so many" There is a hierarchical position inherent in this dictum and its deliverer assumes the superior position. It's the tale of the "wolf and the lamb": The wolf accuses the lamb of muddying his drinking water, but he is on the upper side of the stream. (I recall Michel Serres interpreting La Fontaine's tale in this context) From the perspective of the global framework, this discourse is like a crude excuse for the use of force by the power structures. But this discourse is a bilateral one. It is still possible to do something in a bleak world heading for desolation despite everything, however complaining seals off this possibility, chokes it from the outset. Despite all the setbacks and the malice, inertia and redundancy caused by complaining extinguishes other possibilities of struggle. There are things which may be and will be brought about by going on without complaining. Dr. Riuex from "The Plague" by Camus comes to my mind; he never gives up his struggle despite knowing how it will end. Gandhi's, Naipul's hopes for the future for India, their optimism is a similar thing. The importance and, moreover, the realism of a modest optimism. Therefore, I wanted establish the plastic position for conceptualizing this dictum by an ambience that would remove it from the design dimension, even if to a small extent, and gain popularity by applying the use of these LEDs. This was appropriate for my perspective and my work process as well. My aim is not to come up with a motto, but propose to contemplate on a modest proposal and possibilities.

V: So, this complaint is not specific to Turkey or any other particular place.

H: No, it's not relevant for just not for here or there, but for everyone and everywhere. In this globalized world, all the syndromes and illnesses are alike. Instead of constantly complaining, we must develop modest optimisms within individual, social, cultural positions and operations and shelter some things: within individual, social, cultural positions and operations. Otherwise, even feasible actions cannot be taken. What drives the doctor is not just a cure for "the plague"; it is a resistance to the very concept of "the plague" and adopting a "stance" and "principle" for humanity. The humankind's recovery should not just be physical, materialistic or ethical, it should in such a way to enable him to reposition and assess himself in the face of circumstances and events, even if he does not recover. Across Turkey, or other geographies, the "plague" is already spreading in different disguises. This global and epidemic situation wakes the sleeping virus, the potential malice in the local.

V: There seems to be no hint as to how this will be perceived by the spectator. There is distance between your philosophical reading of your own work and the work which is read after your installation, over the cabins. The visitor has to think of the why and what s/he is complaining about. Because there is a verb, but no subject.

H: I am not too sure, but it is open-ended, yet at the same time it is a simple proposition bracketed with illuminated frames. The bracket which you also saw here is actually connected to the installation. For each film exhibited in the installation, there is a chain of events and situations dedicated to someone. I no longer hide that "Don't Complain" is dedicated primarily to you and then Camila on a personal level. But in this connection, the issue is not complaining about the complaint of "complaining" in its pejorative sense.

V: There is modesty in the cabins and the films installed inside. There, when I comprehend a meta-ethics with a focus beyond the self's concerns, geography and relationships, "complaining" takes on a different meaning.

H: The second issue about the installation and the films concerns the style and strategy of their production. A kind of minor art. Disregarding the technological developments and possibilities, working with anything at hand, producing under all circumstances without complaining. Furthermore, within a self-sustained ontology. Running in intervals, the films I have named "Incident-s" consist of studies and collections that spontaneously come about in life and stay unregistered, outside the historical and mediated context. Events, myths, mythologies that go on for a year, for four seasons in a street corner or at a beach by a city for 3-5 hours Reconstructing "history" by entirely bracketing it, breaking the linear and joining the broken pieces. Digging into the history without heroes, the invisible, insignificant history of the present, so to speak. Meanwhile, the mental setting which informed the space for the "Incident-s" originated from a restaurant's structure haunting me since our 24-hour visit to Georgia. If you remember, at a restaurant that was divided into separate compartments assembled around a shared area, we had a weird dining experience where we confined ourselves to a space that turned into a private lodge with the group of people that took us there, and ate and talked together until ending up in a peculiar state of delirium and catharsis. In the small discrete spaces within this somewhat imaginary space, different groups of people were actually going through the same experience privately among themselves. This systematic privacy could owe to some paranoid reason like subjectivity, or designed in response to a form of "social shyness". I had come across similar structures in Mongolia, heard of similar places and venues in the ex-socialist societies in Asia. The Jamaica Bar I saw in Bristol was another amorphous structure with various compartments and walls creating physical illusions and thus giving time to flee from any sudden foreign threats for the ongoing private or the illegal party in the space.

H: The films installed in the cabins are about the pursuit of "sameness" by a voluntary exile, a fugitive who penetrates the local and locality in different cultures and regions. For a long time, I have been more interested in the sameness and common threads shared across humanity rather than differences. We are sick and tired of the notorious "other". We assume that once we turn ourselves into the other, the condition of otherness will cease to exist for the other, yet even if this strategy is conceptually correct; it is fundamentally limited to an intellectual position and perspective like "tolerance" and "empathy" reflecting a chain of command and is derived from a materialistic and hierarchical attitude and system. Understanding the other eventually turned into a pragmatic way of self-awareness. This is a good thing, but if we are to set out from the "sameness" and "commonness" shared by the humankind, we must realize that we are obliged to not just accept but also comprehend its differences and otherness.

V: Why did you build an installation with five compartments? I was thinking of a seasonal scheme based on climates.

H: It couldn't be four, couldn't be double or symmetrical. The four seasons has ceased to exist as well as climatic differences. The symmetrical things and human conditions have diminished. Like the weather going through accelerated changes with global warming, the human condition is also changing, symmetry and mutuality has disappeared from our relationships with the nature. Eventually these five compartments, five cells can end up in accommodating thematic, categorical installations which will spontaneously form themselves with such patterns of propagation that even I cannot grasp right now- with the production of the wooden construction. Making four parts from two things is possible with division and subtraction, while five parts from three things is about multiplication and dispersal. The most economical structure out of a public space, an open courtyard in the middle of a small and symmetrical venue was to facilitate a five-cell structure by spreading out the three units. Furthermore, the convergence of the mental setting with physical reality gave rise to such a five-cell structure. This installation seems to consisting of five cells illustrating and elucidating such disciplines and practices like History (broken history); Geography (displacement); Economy/Ecology (waste, reuse/recycle, renewal, the myth of the garbage collector, contribution to economy and ecology); Politics/Ideology (missing people); Philosophy (beaches and silhouettes / sameness and otherness) in their own intimate structures. Or it can be constructed with utterly displaced realities where everything intermingles, we'll see. For instance, I'm thinking of an entirely personal and melancholic piece next to the film about missing people in Chechnya and Kosovo in one of the cabins. This was also the case with the production process of the films. For example, while I was chasing around another project in Pristine, I remember seeing the snow-covered portraits of missing people attached to the railings in front of the Parliament building, and right after this heartbreaking scene which I mentally registered for no reason, a song of long lost, far away love by Jay Jay Johanson caught me in a record shop. Amid a thousand unrelated heterotopias of the streets populated by armored vehicles passing, rows of massage parlors and vendor stalls ranging from rabbit tail to neckties, this whole scene took on a meaning retrospectively. The reason for the juxtaposition of the missing people in Kosovo with the ones in Chechnya owes to the similarities in the presentation of this reality, this pain and hope. The latest one was a register I produced in the memory of journalist and writer Anna Politskovskaya at a completely personal level.

V: What did you decide to juxtapose with Anna Politskovskaya?

H: After her murder, I put up a striking full-size photograph of her that was printed in the Guardian in my office, the blatant operation for putting an end to her struggle which I was following, made me shudder and experience an odd feeling close to pride. In a way, this was similar to doctor Rieux's struggle with the "plague"; reckless and open to risks. A source of encouragement for everyone. Those days, I was constantly listening to a Russian song about the war in Chechnya sang by an accordionist street musician in Komi Republic, which a friend had sent and later I had tracked down.? Even though I couldn't make much of the song which sounded like a lamenting blues song, I edited this song with photographs of the missing people in Chechnya I found over the web. I realized this: we do not look at the missing people as individuals and human beings when they enter a mediated circulation, we see them as photographs and the reality of these lives evades the mind. Analogous to the striking intonation of this lamenting, reproving, complaining song, I edited these frozen images one after another to form a sequence. This way, I tried to save these missing people from the anonymity they had been condemned to by as dull images, this was a token of respect marked and commemorated by music for these people, the missing: for individual human beings whether they go missing, disappear, or die. This little film became a gesture of respect and commemoration for Anna Politkovskaya in their presence. Actually, she had also taken her place among the missing people. During her funeral, the same mothers seeking their missing relatives in Chechnya were also similarly seeking her with her portrait in their hands.

V: You have dealt with Anna Politkovskaya, there is also Hrant Dink who a lot common with Politkovskaya and who was murdered blatantly like her. Turkey's participation in the Venice Biennale is marked by his silhouette in this way.

H: The situation in Chechnya or Kosovo which I have dealt with, or if you please, constructed by commemorating and commemorated by constructing is actually two-sided. The missing are not only Chechens, but also the youthful Russian soldiers. The accordion song is significant for this reason. I don't know whether the photographs of the missing people belong to Chechens or Russians. In my emails to the "Human Rights Watch" website from where I borrowed these photos, I asked for contacting the photographer, obtaining information and the permission to use the pictures, but there was no reply. Therefore, it does not matter which side claims the photographs and the relatives holding them. What matters is that they are missing. The same ambiguity marks the missing people in Kosovo. Leaving out the Serbs does not lead to a simple solution. The point of my interest and my view does not lie in any one of the sides, it is not a issue of being right or wrong neither. What matters is the stance of the personal in the sense of humanity in this place and time in question. The murdering of people by cutting their throats is a barbaric disgrace to humanity, but torturing them before killing them is a socio-pathological shadow cast by an entirely different catastrophe.

V: I asked because you exposed the issues of conscience between the similar ones and the sames. The media is more and more hungry for catastrophic representations, it doesn't matter what and where they show, just the influx of these images with an increasing dose. The spectator is involved in this. Boris Groys was saying that the real catastrophe starts out when these images come to an end.

H: What interests me here, let's call it the politics if you want, is the missing people independent of which side they are from. I want to question our numbed callousness in our ways of seeing and perceiving by stopping these people from being anonymously mediated images. Actually, we are the ones destroying them. The image within image and this way of posing, making others pose is a rather pornographic construction. A group of people holding photographs of some missing relatives. This is the general picture that comes to our mind. Not their uniqueness, personality, individuality. My political is not specifically about Chechnya or Kosovo and it could well be -, it is about the perception and the mediated mis-en-scène of the missing people. The similarity in operation and our position, our stance in the face of this fact. Tragedies hit close to home for others, but it can be our home one day. If I have made a work in memoriam for Anna Politkovskaya, it goes for every journalist blatantly killed for the same reasons and causes. A reference and homage for all of them in the presence of one. Yet, the operation of the global apparatus regarding these broadcast murders and their projections, the online networks and presentation of these situations runs along so similarly that the underlying sameness is as striking as the compelling sameness observed in the murders. An atrocious epidemic similar to the "plague", a contagious sameness. Another instance making my hair stand on end, was how the people holding photographs of their missing relatives were posed to stand in front of a wall covered I'm urged to say almost decorated with bullet holes in a picture at a web site. Yes, it would be catastrophe if there weren't any more images, but what is removing the image from reality and seeing it as just a picture, if not an approval of the catastrophe to the point of no return.

V: So, why did you become so romantic lately? There is a tint of melancholy in your works about the garbage collector, the beaches. And it becomes even sadder with the music on.

H: That's right, I am also aware of this situation, this mood. I think it is connected to a form of escaping, running away. Running away from yourself, your culture, your dwelling, the communication network, from my friends, my values, my neighborhood, the recess bells from the elementary school opposite, the screeching call to prayers, the traffic, and the visual pollution of the signs around This evokes the romantic artist figure of old times. Working while on the run, penetrating the local essence of another culture you are visiting, maybe being a parasite, dislocation and displacement, engaging in production as a voluntary exile may be the romantic side to it. On the other hand, the emotional aspect infused into the works is not about romanticism. It's a form of melancholy. This is something that is already intrinsic to the things and places I look at, the things I construct and turn into incidents by borrowing them from life. As much as the broken flowers of the garbage collector, the process of establishing clean and beneficial ecological cycles and social myths around garbage is full of melancholy, as realistic as it may be. Yes, garbage is the "plague", but even so the act of building an economical and ecological system without complaining, pulling out a wardrobe out of these, creating a habitat, makes me sad as much as contented. It is a rather melancholic situation that the mainly poor habitants of Bombay create an atmosphere of calm romance just by walking along the beach, some for meditation some for amusement. There is no money, no status, and no identity, mostly nothing involved in this oscillation. The sea, the sun and the silhouettes, this is a melancholic perspective where we can read the peculiarities of the city and its culture from the silhouettes.

V: I start to understand more why you limited your connection with Turkey eventually. You maintain your sanity by staying away. I continue my struggle here in a similar mood.

H: Working in a particular mood results in works reflecting a common mood. Let's identify this situation and its consequences as a pursuit of a different form of knowledge. After few years of disappearance, I came back to the neighborhood with a "historical" work that can be called romantic in the last Istanbul Biennial. One inevitably develops a politics and a strategy when living as an exile. When I returned to the neighborhood with the Biennial, my fears about my place, my neighborhood resurfaced after I finished my work, Every time I returned home, to my neighborhood, the mute black man living near the rubbish bin in the street corner and the myths surrounding him revealed a micro-cosmos of the city, a chronoscopic section of the great global city Istanbul which unfolded in front of my eyes, like a kind of Google Earth. As I came back and forth, I realized that this foreign, illegal, abnormal, unregistered person and the "corner" provided more benefits and solutions to the city than anyone proportionally did with his modest struggle. First, they took away the abandoned car he had occupied, and then the man himself. Because of the complaints from the neighborhood and security reasons. Now every so often he comes with his cart and puts the corner in order all the same and leaves. At this point it is necessary to investigate the reasons of escaping and the state of my voluntary exile. I don't know what else there is, apart from escaping paradigms of the incestuous intellectual and the happy minority, from feudal shadows and contours pervading every class of the society, from the "a la Turca" way of life penetrating the depths of the soul and substance. There is also the versatility fueled by being mobile and itinerant, looking at where you escaped from afar, missing it. The work I produced for the Istanbul Biennial was entirely about having to cope with Hegel and "History" which I detested all my life while looking at Istanbul from outside of Istanbul. I also know that as long as I hated politics I had to get involved in ways I never wanted. It isn't necessary to look for rats for the struggle between the "plague" and humanity.

V: You didn't run away from the local, just kept away from the neighborhood.

H: My distress was rather caused by the Turkishness and feudalism within my own surroundings, frankly it was not an issue of identity. It was something else. It was this way of "a la Turca" that had pervaded every class and segment of the society, from the poorest to the wealthiest, from the most ignorant to the most intellectual, even the top elite and even if further on- the foreigners living in Turkey. It even surrounds and enfolds you and me. To comprehend and long for the neighborhood, keeping some distance is necessary. To keep at a distance enough to focus our gaze on what we want to grasp. Did you know that Nazım Hikmet's only condition for the house he would live during his Istanbul exile was just having a view of the Süleymaniye Mosque from any window? Indeed, I had forgotten that my house had a view of Süleymaniye and was looking at its picture on my desk.

Interview with Paola Nicolin

2007-10-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

May 2007, Abitare.

(a) how did you find when you came back to Istanbul from US?

Except for the biennial, Istanbul was not all that different from those sluggish backwater towns that are now making competitive claims to global visibility. I want to dissociate two things: The congenital aspects of a city, like its extraordinary moments of cultural outburst, like we have seen in Tirana, İstanbul, Mexico City, Zagreb in the recent years is not necessarily coextensive with a city promotion. The preconception is in general that first you have a burgeoning art scene. This is then retooled by city promoters, globalization engineers, large institutions, and etc. But, such a genealogy of cause and effect that puts the contemporary art world smug in the center of this economy can not be taken for granted. However, any new economy city needs a experiential artistic cultural context which has little to do with what we do and how we do it. All the artists and colleagues who made Istanbul for me the place to live have not "sold out." Surely, there is a romance between parts of the art world and the new capitalist class because it is the same desire they are infected with, with their whole range of obesity, from ersatz collectors to mass-media museums. After I came back to Istanbul almost 10 years ago on the last day of the fantastic 1997 Biennial, there was emerging a cozy, critical, and communal context the legacy of which has been quite extraordinary. when you do not have a local demand and are not in the global limelight, you have the time to concentrate. I find that this distance, "the loneliness of the project" is all the more necessary these days.

(b) what were your priorities, goals and dreams when you founded and directed the Proje4L Istanbul Museum for Contemporary Art and then the Platform Garanti?

I should take some of the blame for breaking off with the context I have described and starting Platform Garanti and Proje4L where the focus shifted from my community to the public. The public had to be confronted with the emergent situation. It was the right moment to do so as the country was in a most grim economic crisis, and vile and extravagant sponsorship habits had come to an end. Modesty and responsibility was the new script. Part of this would be to focus on projects that do not have an immediate return. Platform Garanti was set up for the long durée, to retain the memory of the country, with a library and archives, with research and intellectual programming, like an informal academy, and finally residency that is open to the regions surrounding Turkey. Another aspect was to strengthen and normalize the international network so that the artists from here would not have to develop a dependency on here. Our exhibitions have been dealing almost exclusively with the untested. Proje4L, a short-lived affair in its original form, operated like a large Kunsthalle that collected the memory of its exhibitions. It had a youthful arrogance, made space for young artists, and produced some of the most important exhibitions of the decade like Halil Altindere's "I Am Too Sad To Kill You."

(c) Dealing with the Platform, I find the “institutional hospitality project” quite interesting as a complex art process as well as a metaphor of transition, blurring identities and cultural powers. It reminds me also the idea of Xenia in terms of Hospitality, the double Greek concept who links the guest and the host in a mutual relationship of gifts, respect, duties, values, identities and differences, isn’t it?
Could you tell me more about it?

We experiment quite a bit with no foreseeable results. "Institutional Hospitality" came from the question of what the conditions and limits of hospitality would be for institution. Although there is nothing more precious than a smart guest that forces the institution to rethink and reorient itself, guest to host relations in institutions are amazingly restrained, disengaged and ineffective. We have been on the other hand a "Yes" institution. So, we basically invited the artist-run space, Sparwasser from Berlin and SMART Project Space from Amsterdam to take over Platform. There is also a learning curve here in the sense that Sparwasser provided multiple models and informatory circuits for artist initiatives for Istanbul, and SMART was similar to us with a different agenda and had a strong presence in new media. We were also at the time observing carefully institutions like the Rooseum in Malmo, BAK in Utrecht and Munich Kunstverein. Our size is small enough to claim that rather than running the institution, we have been curating it.

(d) How does really work and which are the most successful events?

I am in large part very pleased with our legacy. At the same time we shift gears, reinvent the institution, add and subtract as we go along. Nothing should stay the same but you must not sway. A case in point is the "Open Library" that is a transformation of the exhibition space into a library with a precise design and program. The archive and the library had been two of our strongest assets but we had not been able to share them only with professionals before.

(e) In 1992 and then in 2005 you curated two edition of the main art event in your city, the Istanbul Biennial, and in September 2007 the 10th Edition (curated by Hou Hanru) is opening. The last edition you worked on was selected as one of the best exhibition ever occurred. You insisted in blurring the show inside the city, selecting specific sites with historical characteristics in order to present the Biennial as a tool for the public and for the urban contest to be engaged with this event.
Are there any Biennial effects on the city? I mean, could you list any consequences of this big machine, which brings “la crème de la crème” inside this “megalopolis, [which is] an exception”[vk.katalog text]?

Granted that the critical praise about the 2005 Biennial has made it historical, but it is too soon to put all this in perspective. We took all measures possible not to allow the event of the exhibition to be appropriated by city marketing. All aspects of the exhibition was out to frustrate this desire. I would start with the inevitability that Istanbul's historical trajectory calls for a kind of globalization. but this does not have to be the way it is charted out now, and this is what the Biennial articulated in hindsight, to hint at the possibility that another world is still and always possible.

(f) Dealing with the reception of contemporary art and culture at large, which is the role of the magazines and newspaper in Turkey and in Istanbul in particular? Are there any magazines involved in the Documenta 12 magazine project?

D12 magazines are Siyahi, Birikim, and Art-Ist. Of these Art-Ist is the one that deals with contemporary art and although it has a narrow reader base, it has been the most significant magazine of the last decade. The magazines and newspapers are in general not places where I follow things here. Turkey is particularly week in art journalism. They mostly write on what they know, on things already-confirmed somewhere else.

(g) You are in charge of the first Turkish Pavilion at the Biennial, where we will see works by Huseyin Bahri Alptekin. As far as I know, his research investigates in photos and video the relationships between political events and private everyday life, local conflict and the “invisible under-belly of globalization”... Could you tell me more in details about the artist and the Pavilion inside the show?

Huseyin will make an articulation of specific single-cell spaces that create their own unique mental setting with short "movies" inside of each. He calls these the "incidents" that are made from the nonessential moments of life. They are made from thousands of photographs some are in fact not even taken with the "eye." It has a lot to do with the artist's peripatetic lifestyle and ”escape” from home to find other local contexts . He has a deeply empathic assignation to the invisible under-belly of globalization, the cosmos of authorless, displaced presences.

(h) One of the pages I like most of Orhan Pamuk’ s Istanbul: Memories and the City is the chapter number 7 on Melling landscape of the Bosforo. He wrote, (I’m translating from Italian so please apologize me): “ he offers … a sense of reality, .. […] It seems that Melling landscapes have no center. Maybe this is the second reason (after the attention to the details) why I feel so close to his Istanbul. […] What makes Melling interesting is his skill to link this ingenuity, which seems to come out from the best Islamic miniatures and from Istanbul golden age innocence, to the architectonic, topographic and everyday details, mixer that no one other Orient painter has never been able to realized.“ It gives to me the idea of a city that keep together a sense of reality (conflict, everyday life and so on) and remote as well. How do you think contemporary art practices and sensibilities could avoid present the cultural and social struggles of your country as a scenario but represent them as images that produce reality ?

I should say that even if there has been quite a bit of work that narrativizes and rehashes and effectively illustrates the conflict, there is much more to it. The ripeness of the crisis in the social every single day is so prevalent that most artists have a hard time even in imagining transformative projects. The situation has become much more diversified lately.

Interview with David Elliott

2007-10-25T05:08:00.000-07:00

The city is lucky to have David Elliott as the director of the istanbulmodern. I feel happy to have a generous and critical colleague around. I did a short interview with David in the spring only a few months after he had arrived.

The turkish version has been published by art-ist magazine.

V: How are you doing at the museum?

D: When you move to a new place, it is always complicated and there are always a lot of things you have to learn. Of course you have some ideas before you walk in, but then also you have to sit around and observe, see what is going on and reflect on this. Now, I am almost three months here, a lot of things have happened. I am beginning to get an idea of what can happen over the next three years.

V: What have you been up to?

D: To start off with it is all rather straightforward unglamorous work. I am looking at staff diagrams, job descriptions, getting to know the staff and building, analyzing the finances, thinking about a new structure for fund raising and of course the artistic programs – what paths we should take in the future. Essentially this has meant evaluating what has happened over the past two years and trying to find the right ways to move forward. Although we had a good, strong start at Istanbul Modern we now have to move onto the next stage of consolidation and development and of course it will be a big job. The reason I wanted to come here is because of the achievement, the ambition and the potential of Istanbul Modern – and because of Istanbul as a place – but there seem not to be so many curators here as there are in Britain or the USA.

V: I think there are, Istanbul is chocfull of curators. Their doors are just not knocked on. Maybe they are too young, that is why.

D: If so that is very exciting. Turkey is an incredibly young country with 60% of its population under 28. That is also a huge attraction for me to be here. You could say that the future is here.

V: When you first came here, the museum looked like a ship without a captain. It did not have any program or a vision. Your arrival signifies a certain precision of mission.

D: I think there was a clear vision from the beginning but that it now needs a more intense and consistent input at an artistic and administrative level for it to achieve its potential. Bringing the administrative and the artistic together in the same field is very important for any art museum anywhere – not just for Istanbul Modern. I am often amazed that a lot of curators cannot add up or run a budget as if what they do is completely divorced from everything – even their own daily existence. This seems naïve and devoid of a sense of reality. Making exhibitions is rather like being a film director, you have to be part of a big team in which the members are dependent on each other but you also have to be able to take responsibility for your own work as well as the overall view of the whole operation.

V: I was not thinking of exhibitions but of whole totality of the institution.

D: It is the same and I have been doing this kind of work since I was 27, firstly in Oxford where I really got myself a education in the 20 years I spent there. I was lucky because I could run the museum there as a kind of laboratory, asking questions about the nature of contemporary art, about the real development of modern art history rather than the platitudes that one read in most of the textbooks. In this case Oxford was a unique place to get new knowledge.

V: Can you say more about this?

D: When the avant-garde “died” in 1975-78, the rush to the comfortable conservative position of painting was almost obscene. The eco-system of the art world completely changed overnight. I was just starting then so was very curious about what value systems other people applied to art and I was trying to establish my own. Many curators who previously has been evaluating art through the minimalist canons of non-hierarchality, non-specificity and non-referentiality, all of a sudden completely went into reverse, rejected their past and started to show the new expressionist painting. This really made me think about what we were doing as curators and the ways in which we made value judgments. How could one kind of art be “right” one year and “wrong” the other if we were being serious about our work rather than just following the dictates of fashion? This made me ask a lot of questions both about contemporaneity and the set of historical circumstances that had led to it and these questions all fed into the exhibition program at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford.

V: Do you think UK benefited from not being on the ball early on?

D: That is not true. The British establishment picked up the ball very quickly. You could say that “A New Spirit in Painting” held at the Royal Academy in London in 1981, was one of the milestones in establishing this new art fashion, although many of the leading artists within this grouping – like Georg Baselitz for example – had been working with paint since the early 1960s. My question then was “if Baselitz is good now why did we not realize it much earlier?” I could see that this question had little to do with art and everything to do with the mechanisms of the art world. I had been moving in this direction before but this was pretty decisive for me in deciding to open up my eyes to other kinds of art.

V: But how was the artistic scene in Britain then as opposed to those in Germany, Italy, Los Angeles or NY?

D: I think that Britain in the early 1980s had to deal with a harsh neo-liberalism. And it was harsh. This subsequently created the generation of British artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s that we call the YBA who strongly reacted against this in different ways. But something seriously had to happen to the left consensus, or lack of it, in the late 1970s. To me it seemed intellectually bankrupt and uncreative.

V: What prompted you to go this way at Oxford? Your years at Oxford were amazingly revisionist and geographically open.

D: The situation I have described led me to look outside the Euramerican axis to find out what had been going on outside the history books and also to start to make links between modernity and colonialism that were not recognized at that time outside a small band of writers and academics and certainly not in contemporary art museums. But if you wanted to do things there was a lot of freedom. In 1979 we made the first proper retrospective of the work of Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko to be held anywhere and that was because I was able to negotiate loans from the family archive in Russia that had never been made before. This was immediately followed by a show on Jackson Pollock and his relation to drawing that we did jointly with MoMA, and in no time at all we rustled up a little show of 30 works by Kurt Schwitters that we put in the small downstairs space It was kind of wild that we could do such things

V: Were you under the limelight?

D: We were not under the kind of limelight that one would experience today. The art world became super-fashionable in Britain only relatively late on. There were other institutions like Tate and Whitechapel. But our approach was different…we wanted to do other things.

V: After Oxford, you were a journeyman, let’s say. Now you are back in Europe.

D: Really? The thing about the Turkey for me is that it is at the edge of Europe and part of it looks that way but its great bulk looks towards Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean which is really where I think the future lies for this region.

V: Will this affect your idea for developing the museum?

D: Yes, absolutely

V: And this is what you are interested in?

D: Yes. If one is looking to the future, does it make sense for Istanbul Modern to try to be a pale reflection of a European or North American modern art museum? Absolutely not. We can learn from them but we have to find our own path. Also we have at the moment a small collection and a limited income. There is no question of buying early modern masters, we need to be building up the collection of artists from this region.

V: Obviously there is lack of literature and historical research on the Eastern Mediterranean and in Turkey as well. Will you try to build up the collection historically or will it be more contemporary?

D: There are a number of issues relating to Turkish art history which in terms of collecting and exhibiting are a real challenge for us. Some works that it would be nice to collect are just not available because they are in public collections; maybe we can find alternatives from other sources but in the short term at least we will have to borrow them. It is very necessary that we start to make historical exhibitions on the development of art in Turkey from the late Ottoman time until now – focusing on different aspects of this development. No one here can see there own art history shown in a coherent way and people from outside would also be fascinated. There are a few books, mainly on artists but the big narratives are not there. Some younger researchers are doing some interesting work but this is in the universities, the research for the most part is not published. The museum can express this history concretely by showing the art works in dialogue with each other and this has not been done before. We have potentially the resources and knowledge to start on this. Of course it will not be the final word but a real improvement on what is available at present and a solid platform to build on in the future. Also we have to build up the contemporary collection of Turkish art, particularly post-1990.

V: So, the history seriously needs to be revised? Even the narrative that this institution has?

D: I think we started with a revisionist view of how to present art history in Turkey without there being a basic story - which everyone is aware of - which this could be seen against. And this means that the subtlety of the revisionist argument is in a sense diminished because there is nothing to compare it with.

V: But there is a kind of basic story which is fallacious.

D: I don’t think that this has been the problem. As an art museum we do not follow any particular line, but show how many often conflicting or even incompatible lines came together from the late Ottoman period until now. This includes conservative attitudes, foreign influences, flirtations with modernism. Some of the high points are the military painting in the First World War and the heroic works of the early Republic. If they are shown in the right way, I am sure that we can make a fascinating display that will surprise many and that will give space for the very best art to be seen to good advantage.

V: I was about to finish my dissertation thesis in Ottoman in late 19th century in modernization. After two chapters I could not tolerate it anymore. The shift was so bad. And this is the stuff still nobody writes on. The period between 1867-1909 is now a construction from point of inscribing a "turkishness." It obliterates the real story. That period was a kind of western Armenian renaissance.

But how about the building? It seems to have two entrances, photography gallery seems a bit narrow.

D: Yes it is rather corridor like. There is a lot we are looking at the moment alongside a time schedule for making improvements. We will concentrate on one entrance and improve it. We are checking how art can be moved about the building including how we get it in from the loading bays and most importantly we are working on a master plan for the development of the building for the next five years – and we are doing the same kind of exercise for programming, finance and administration.

V: What do you think of the divisions exist in the institution, like the photography, gallery, media space, a temporary gallery space and a collection space?

D: And the cinema. It’s a shame that it has only 120 seats although the projection facilities are excellent. The logic of separating photography from the general collection? Well, there is a certain logic behind that. We have reasonable collection of photography and we want to develop it, perhaps also historically. We need here a good collection going back to the beginning - the 1840s.

V: II. Abdulhamit had 1.9 million photographs in his collection. Now they are in Topkapi, they were originally in Yildiz Palace. So you would retain a kind of a department of media based?

D: We need people with different specialisms and areas of knowledge. History of photography is important as are film and new media and of course art – Turkish, international, regional. They don’t have to be separate departments and the most important thing is that they connect with their different audiences to create one big general audience for the museum. This will depend on good marketing.

V: But over the years this kind of mental division between departments leads to a kind of territorial approach and this creates difficulties.

D: Yes, it can do that, the MoMA model based on a Bauhaus kind of creativity, is not at all bad, when Alfred Barr was the director, an academic in the center of everything, it worked well but with the structure that came after him, with a non-specialist director, the departments became much stronger and territorialism and hierarchies occured.

V: About departmentalization, could there be another model for an institution in Istanbul where another kind of compartmentalization would be possible?

D: There are two things. One it is essential to run a museum that can research what is actually going on. Research into contemporary art and into its history. And out of this the different programs should develop. Obviously there has to be some idea of where funding will come from and what the audience will respond to, but I would say that judicious research is very necessary. Because that is what museums do best and in the case of art audiences do not necessarily know what they want to see until they actually see it. Museums provide information and they make this available in a form that people should find stimulating and attractive. The reason to come to a museum is that you cannot see or experience that which it displays anywhere else. So the most important considerations are: what are the best things to present and how to show them?

V: Then does education come in nowadays into the picture?

D: At the moment we are doing very well with young children, but I have not yet had enough time to sit and listen to the sessions in detail.

V: No, in terms of total programming, where do you think the education’s place will be? Do they sit with your curatorial team and start going around exhibition ideas?

D: Not at the moment, but I think this should happen. We are looking for someone at the moment who can lead up our education team and provide a good interface between the rest of the museum and the public.

V: Istanbul Modern’s architecture was ready before it’s programming. But this is very typical in Turkey. First you build and then you start thinking about what to put in it.

D: Being able to plan before you start programming has the luxury that you are not yet open to the public. People here did not have much time to plan at all because there was only four months before the museum had to be opened. I think it was a miracle that they managed to open and run the museum in such a short space of time. But now it is a different time and we have to consolidate. How long this will it take will depend on resources, and we are just calculating what we will need, step by step. It is also important that the staff at the museum feel that they are part of this planning process, that they are able into buy into it and develop with it.

V: How about the your relations with the local artistic community?

D: I am trying to meet as many artists as possible and make studio visits. I already have a shortlist of those I would like to meet. We need to concentrate on the younger generation to build up the current collection.

V: It seems to me that there is a competition between private collectors and institutions. The symbolic institutions of the city are still lacking. There should be one for the 20th century. The museum of painting and sculpture with its limited collection, compromised spaces and zero public programs may just as well shut down. For contemporary Istanbul Modern holds a great promise. More institutions and collectors are coming in and we may just lose the possibility of a defining collection if people do not come together.

D: In Tokyo, the Mori Art Museum definitely needed to move on, after a couple of years I persuaded them to start a collection of contemporary East Asian art. On of the things to say there was: “Look: it is important to do it for its own sake, to put something back into the art economy on which we all depend and, also, you cannot hang around too long. Look what is happening to the prices. They are going sky high.” There we were working with the very best artists in the region and commissioning works from them. Not making a purchase almost meant that we were throwing something away. We wanted to build up the base for a collection of Asian Art that could become really important - the other two main ones are in Fukuoka in Southern Japan and Brisbane. If we started one in Tokyo in 10-15 years it will be an important collection.

In Istanbul the same kind of thing is true. The nearest museum of modern art with a strong collection is in Vienna, Budapest or Ljubliana. If you go east and south from here, and you rule out the two big museums in Israel and the one in Tehran which at the moment because of political reasons are rather isolated, you would have to travel as far as Tokyo in the east and Johannesburg in the South before you find anything approaching a serious institution. This opens up a big opportunity that we need to grasp.

Interview with Wim Delvoye

2007-04-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

Gulf Art Fair, 2007

Wim Delvoye, Artist, Brussels, BL.
with Vasif Kortun, Curator, Director, Platform Garanti, Istanbul, TR.

Maria Finders
Thanks very much, girls. Up next we have another artist. Is it Belgium day today? We have another Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye. Unfortunately, we couldn't see one of Wim's pieces here in Dubai. We wanted to bring one of Wim's important works, which is a very big industrial truck that we wanted to put in front of this building on the beach. It would have been very fitting to have in Dubai, a construction site as it is. With Wim today is Vasif Kortun, who is from Istanbul. He is a curator. By the way, is it true you are actually the curator of the Venice Biennale Pavilion for Turkey because it's been on E-Flux? (laughter) Vasif has been working for many, many years at this fantastic venue in Istanbul called Platform Garanti, which he will present tomorrow afternoon. It's very important that you come and learn more about that project. Let's start.

Vasif Kortun
Good afternoon. Thank you Maria and thank you Wim. This is such a privilege. Basically Wim, as we know, has quite a lot of energy and is a driven person so I won't interfere too much in this conversation. My place will be a little bit out of it. I've known his work for a while, for a long time, and I've always wanted to work with him. This was a kind of dream, always in the back of my mind. When you are running a smaller institution, it does not always allow you to realise some things to their fullest potential, especially if it's a very complicated work, which means many times work that needs absolute attention to detail. Wim's work is very much about that; paying attention to details from the beginning of the work until it is finished. It's extremely specific, even if it may have been originally an impossible proposal to start with. I'm really interested in this work because Wim is not a local artist. He is not a global artist. He's not really versed in the kind of global discourse of the professional language of art; he moves with it, he moves in and outside of it as well. His local realities are very specific and are also linked to a sort of historical vein, historical 'organism'; he cuts through Flemish paintings, through European history. Inadvertently you can reach him perhaps from that position in the sense that he's also a male person, a classical white male artist at that. I do specify that he is a classical white male artist because there is a sense in which, in our present time where we expiate ourselves, we limit ourselves. There is a bit of self-censorship going on. It's not about self-censorship here or there. It's really about a burden of extreme political correctness. We are very careful not to go wrong, not to dwell on the imagination, not to make too many mistakes, not to hurt too many people and so on and so forth. It's in that way Wim positions his work outside the political establishment of political correctness. He also has a very interesting relationship with money; at times separating art and money and devaluing it and returning to it and devaluing it again and again. It is very interesting.

What we are going to look at today is not some of the work that has been recently extremely well mediatised, such as the Cloaca machine or Links project. I think we are going to self-censor a little bit ourselves and talk about recent projects, in particular in this fantastic chapel he finished last year in Luxemburg and other projects in progress. Okay Wim, thank you.

Wim Delvoye
(Slide) This is where you will find us.

Vasif Kortun
Did you choose this set of specific works for here?

Wim Delvoye
I actually let someone else choose my work; an assistant. He was reasoning that people would be too sensitive to see some of my work. We were planning to do this culture truck in front of the fair, so half of the slides were already inspired by the fact that we were going to do this truck, and we hope to do this next year. There was not enough time to bring it here.

Vasif Kortun
Okay.

Wim Delvoye
Oh look, I thought there weren't any slides of Cloaca. This is my first machine in 2000 in the museum of Antwerp. It's 11 meters long and it simulates the eating and excreting of the human being. It contains real human bacteria, colon bacteria, stomach bacteria and enzymes, acids, a lot of chemical products, bio chemical products and everything is automated. It follows the complete journey that a potato or a cookie makes from mouth right through the digestive process.

This is another machine, but with stained glass windows in Dusseldorf, which makes it look more like a religious situation wherein the machine looks like an altar or something you pray for.

These are the pigs in China. This is the logo of the machine, so each machine has a logo or a mascot.

(Slide) Here you see me tattooing on my farm in China. In China, we have twelve or thirteen people who are doing this during all the different seasons, the springtime; winter, summer, so it's like life and death, winter and summer. We live on this farm and the pigs grow, we breed them, we tattoo them. Being tattooed gives them a lot of extra time because we don't care about their nutritional value; we only care about their artistic value.

(Slide) This is the new generation of Louis Vuitton bags. The artist who was asked by Louis Vuitton to do these cherry designs was very happy that we dealt with them in China, but Louis Vuitton wasn't very happy. We actually think we could win any legal battle against Louis Vuitton, and it's also part of the art piece when we get litigations with companies.

Vasif Kortun
I want to ask one or two questions. One is about the pigs. Do you get also offers to transport live work to institutions? This is probably one of your premises, how you complicate the process of circulation of art.

Wim Delvoye
Yes. We cannot cross borders with the live pigs because of complicated vaccination programs. It would be very difficult to do the paperwork, but we gladly give the live pigs to any offers from China. For us, this confusion between art and life is important. For example, this machine really does work and if you look at the tattooed pigs, even when you tattoo them for two seasons, it refuses to be an art piece.it's It's a pig as long as the pig is alive.
(Slide) So these are our bronzes, much more classical sculptures where I scan famous iconographic sculptures and with a computer recalculate the forms. And this is a double helix crucifix, so it's the DNA helix. There are lots of crucifixes together, which for me, related to what life is about or big questions about how life can be explained from different perspectives. (Slide) Okay, these are sculptures that are not finished yet but are about to be finished. We will be showing this at Art Basel. It's a gothic style truck. This is Central Park; a
bulldozer in Central Park and different circumstances around the same piece.
(Slide) This is a big commission we did for Belgium, in Antwerp. It's a church about twenty meters high and the church contains twelve stained glass windows. The stained glass windows are made from MRI pictures and x-rays, medical transparencies, and this is going on for three and a half years. It's like a real classical commission, like you would get a commission in the Renaissance or in the 16th century. You would just do that for somebody; I like that. Most of the pieces we do are for me a truth or a proof. By choice, most artists go to an art school because they're not good at anything else, And I wasn't good at anything, but still I wanted to make pieces that would somehow convince me that I could have actually done something else, that I could have been an architect or a doctor or a tattoo artist or something serious.
(Slide) This is an interior of a chapel that is already executed in Luxemburg in the museum; you could imagine how the drawings of the church will look like once it's executed. It's a modern building. People walk into this modern building and all of a sudden they come into this space, in this medieval style. The material is steel. Here you see x-rays of different things but never medical, like people kissing, machines, mobile phones, the stomach, different stomachs, and collages we make from different things. This is something that I will open next week in Paris. It's the scale-model of this church you saw in the drawings. It's four metres high.
I am also trying to make works, which might be appreciated by the connoisseur. But they can also live without connoisseurs; they can be just there. People just pass with their dog or have to be there and say 'Oh, I like it, it's beautiful'. I think it is very important for me --that people who don?t really care about art are seduced. It's about street credibility.

Vasif Kortun
Why are you particularly interested in chapels and medieval buildings and such? Why this architecture as opposed to other forms and why from this particular moment in history?

Wim Delvoye
It has to do with putting art into society, on the streets, just to have it there. It's also difficult to make. It's a work that goes on for many years before it's finished; it involves a lot of people. It's a bit like every cathedral, bringing all the artisans together, all the best people to do one thing and that's exciting. But it's also just a frame for these stained glass windows. I first did these twelve stained glass windows and only later I thought of this chapel to give them a context. I was not worried if it was an art piece or the frame of some other art pieces.

Vasif Kortun
What role does visuality play in the work? Because, as you explain, the chapel is a communal project of different disciplines in which you change the shape of what we expect in a chapel. Or with the pigs. Even though they are tattooed, the tattoos themselves change shape as the animals develop, grow, fade. You have to rework it so the visuality is actually part of the process. With the Cloaca machine, the visuality is not so primary. I'm thinking of this as kind of anthropomorphic in which the visible is not evident, or has re-ordered itself. I know that you also make drawings, but what is their role? How much preference do you give to visuality or where does it stand?

Wim Delvoye
The visual for me is a way of reaching as many people as possible on many different levels. I look for a globalism not only in a geographic way. I look for a geographic globalism, but I also look for a vertical globalism, a class globalism, like intellectuals. But they can be just normal people. All these different hierarchies and classes and the dichotomy between high art and low art are non-existent for me; for me, it's all about trying to make things as visible and visual as possible. And of course the Cloaca machine was not that visual, and I also felt it was a problem. That is why I shape each machine like a visual image, like Mr Clean, because I felt the problem was that these machines were not interesting enough to just look, but at the same time they also reach a lot of people. Pigs, shovels and other plebeian objects --they're all the same. Some will refuse to be part of an intellectual discourse. We are having an intellectual discourse, but somehow we cannot do it for more than five minutes and we have to drop in faeces and pigs. It's wonderful to have these proletarian notions that give this art an enormous amount of street credibility. It's globalist in a sense that everybody eats and everybody knows what the machine is like, we all eat and digest together, and in every country they eat and digest. There is something extremely globalist about Cloaca machine. And with the pigs it is the same. Whether you eat them or you cannot eat them, you know them. They are like parables. They are like parables when people want to explain high concepts and they talk about poor fishermen. They talk about peasants and sheep. To make people understand that, they make analogies with simple stuff. I talk about bacon and pigs and shovels and concrete mixers as a way to like find a common denominator for everybody and then talk about something higher than that.

Vasif Kortun
So if you were to turn that to the street, you've done work in societies that are over-regulated, especially in the street space. In New York, in the park, I'm sure there were millions of rules that you had to abide by. Some art forms that are acceptable in Europe might be shocking elsewhere. If you close your eyes and think of Dubai, obviously they might not want a church, but can you just speculate on that because building permits are easier in certain places. And thank God they're easier because it allows the imagination to take hold as opposed to being limited by other things and here is that a thing that you wanted to do.

Wim Delvoye
What's so interesting about Dubai, it must be a little bit like China. You come there and you have to start again. If a young artist, or a Gerhard Richter, exhibited in Beijing, it doesn't mean much for the Chinese people. It's the same, 'Who are you?' they would say to Gerhard Richter. So it's like everybody gets a fresh chance in a country that is not necessarily going to take it all for granted. This might not apply for Chinese artists as their time will come of course, but several years down the line, there will probably be a higher regard for Western taste. It might also be the same here in Dubai. You know Dubai is sourcing, a lot from the West but in such an enormous way that it's not up to us to say how they should do it. In twenty years, they will have done it so well that we cannot advise them really. I find it really exciting to be in a place that is able to encourage big projects, and although we haven't yet built any Gothic churches, the mere rumour of this happening made some people come up to me and say, 'Oh, I want one too', and I'd say, 'Yes, of course'. In the Middle East some people might want a mosque. As I'm interested in ornaments and in making it difficult for myself, doing large things, things that will go on for years, I'm extremely excited about the idea that there is only an oral history and not a material history; that there was just desert here twenty or thirty years ago. There is this enormous energy to build and build and build and that attracted me a lot in China as well. Secretly I hope there will be interest and I can do big plans here.

On Platform Garanti

2007-04-06T03:31:00.000-07:00

Vasif Kortun, Director. Platform Garanti, TR.

Because of problems with the tapes, we must apologise to Vasif Kortun for not being able to provide the full transcript of the presentation of his impressive project in Istanbul, Platform Garanti.

As a presentation to this space, we would like to offer our readers the following introduction:
Located in the most vibrant area of Istanbul, Platform acts as a dynamic catalyst for the dissemination, research and practice of contemporary art in the city, and also provides a meeting point for exchange between contemporary artists, curators and critics. In addition, the centre has become a cultural portal for the region; through our residency programme and other initiatives, we work with countries where the structure for a contemporary art scene is forming, but where there are few arts institutions or funding structures to provide further support at this time.

Platform contains an archive of work by more than 140 artists from Turkey, the most comprehensive library of art publications in the city, the Istanbul Residency Program, and an exhibition space committed to exhibiting contemporary art from Turkey and abroad. Since the centre's inauguration in late 2001, over 600,000 visitors have passed through our doors and we have organised 43 exhibitions, over 120 lectures, 4 major international conferences, and co-published 3 internationally distributed publications.

Our residency programme is currently supported by Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Basque, Norwegian, Swiss, Greek, French, British and Finnish national and regional funding bodies. With the support of a special three-year grant donated by the American Center Foundation, we were able to invite three artists from South East Europe, the South East Mediterranean and West Asia between 2004-2006. A grant from the Open Society Institute now offers artists from the Caucasus region the opportunity to spend two months in Istanbul. Also, through the Backyard Residency programme, a project under the SEE Mobility Project (Artists' Residences in South East Europe), supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers we invited four artists from the countries of South East Europe between September 2006 and June 2007.
In December 2003, Platform was selected as one of the ten most interesting not-for-profit institutions to participate in Institution2, curated by Jens Hoffmann for KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, and in 2004 Platform was awarded the 50th Year Grant by the European Cultural Foundation for its contribution to local and regional culture. In 2004 and 2005, Platform acted as the key base for the development of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial and hosted six artists on its residency programme who went on to participate in the Biennial exhibition. In October 2006 Platform participated as one of two invited not-for-profit organizations with 'collecting point' in Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair. Platform is one of the 15 international partners for the Seventh International Biennial exhibition of SITE Santa Fe, NM scheduled to run from June 22 through October 26, 2008.

The institution will enter a new relationship with its constituencies in late 2008 after expansion and renovation is completed. Platform will operate from temporary spaces from October 2007 on and phase out its local activities during this time.

Vasif Kortun
It is important for Platform to have our residents act as ambassadors, memory units around the world after the thing happens -the word gets around. People stay for 6 months, then if they stay long enough there is the possibility of them to produce work that is much more substantial than a hit and run kind of situation that happens in many projects today.
When the residency started the first year, it went very well. You know we were handsomely and genuinely supported by Western and Northern European institutions. But it immediately ran into a problem one year, which we were expecting but which had to be corrected immediately. If you have a residency program and the artists are only from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Flemish community and the countries that have a long history and culture of institutional support, then you're effectively producing a kind of situation that's not hybrid and it creates the wrong picture.

So immediately in 2004 we received a grant from an American foundation to actually work with artists from Southeast Mediterranean and Southeast Europe; that is what we call the Middle East and the Balkans in a roundabout way. This was a three year support grant where we were able to invite artists from Egypt and Bosnia, Slovenia and other nations from those regions, and then once we had that program in place, we added another thing to it, which was a major conference about the Middle East with the Balkans, or if you like, the Balkans as an extension of the Middle East and the premise of that was of course the war in Bosnia in the early '90s. Now we have another grant where we can actually invite artists from three institutions in the Southeast Europe : one in Romania, one in Turkey and the other one is in Serbia, Montenegro. So these three institutions are selecting and circulating art throughout the whole twelve Balkan countries.

I also have another grant to invite other artists from West Asia. I have artists working in the institution from Armenia, from Kazakhstan? actually we have at the moment an Armenian, a Kazakh, a Serbian and a Dutch artist working in the institution, so in a way the residency got better now in terms of how it should address its locality. Istanbul is the head of a former empire, and that empire is the Ottoman Empire and is the place that held the whole Mediterranean basin and part of Europe all the way to Vienna under control. Istanbul has a responsibility to pay back in humility and that's what the institution is trying to exercise, in its own limited way, and now we are hoping to put another program in action, which we will I believe in Cairo and one in Beirut. These three institutions will also circulate artists between themselves. The nice thing is, and we were speaking about this with William yesterday, because it's the same thing in Cairo, you can ask an artist from Istanbul, "Where would you like to go for a residency?" and say, "We have this fantastic program in Zurich", and they say "No, no". And I say, "Well, where do you want to go?" And they say, "Well, I want to go to Lebanon, I want to go to Cairo, I want to go to Alexandria". So artists, for some reason, are not any longer so fixated on the fiction that there is some West out there where everything is always rosy. Today, circulation and dissemination and education go through another operation. It's a decentralization process.

Of course, when we started we were pretty much alone in this kind of thinking, but now we are not alone. We have collaborative institutions and we have competitive institutions, and there are institutions that are following our programming or are doing it much better, because they have much more money among other things. So we feel at the moment the need to shift again. Part of the shift is in expansion, we hold three floors of this building that you saw at the beginning but now we have the whole building and we have a service building in the back, so the institution will, in about a year, triple in size and it will add an educational component. That had always been my dream, kind of a postdoctoral program. Then the exhibition, the residency, the public programs and the education will form, I believe, will a coherent program of sorts. Another thing we did throughout these years was over ninety or so lectures, conferences and public programs. That was really essential at that time because discussions were not so normalized and this kind of pedestrian discussion is critical because you know someone comes to give a conference to five hundred people and the curator starts to come in. You are only five or ten meters away from them and you have a discussion and then you go out and you drink and then there is a much more informal context to share your work. This brought people closer together and smoothed the edges a bit, and as a result we realized after a while that we had been working almost like an academic institution without making any demands whatsoever. So we are going to turn this experience now into a more formal educational program that will not give a degree but will operate on those grounds. And another thing we do is a lot of hosting. Some of the things you will see here are not things that we did directly, although we did the conferences of course, but we like to call ourselves a "yes" institution. People come in and they say: "Oh we have a problem, we need the space, we have to do this or that." And we say; "Okay, go ahead and do it." But this kind of "yes process" is sometimes too much because it makes everything grey and bland. So we are moving slightly away from the "yes" institution and closer to education and joint projects.

We don't publish much. We've done a few publications but always with international partners. This is going to be one of our next phases; we are going to start publishing and documenting what we do. Most of the stuff just stays on the web and it is doomed to a sort of invisibility.
The archive has always been our strongest point in a way, because we carry about one hundred and forty artist files and most of them are fairly complete and coherent and we are going on with that and there is no stopping us. Of course you get tired of spaces and spaces get tired of you, and the public gets tired of the space, the space gets tired of the public after a while. So after five years you realize that things get worn down quite a bit. A space becomes a shell in which things are happening so there is some soul searching, in a way, as to what we should be doing in the new arena. One of the things we are doing this year, actually, we open in ten days, hopefully, is we are turning the public exhibition space into a public library and this is actually to test the notion of a public library on a pedestrian street, and to see what kind of filtering process will occur when we have the library and to lead by example on a street in a city in which public libraries are not very visible. We would like to position the public library as a truly public thing, where people come, dream, sit, doze off, sleep, look for friends, look for lovers as well as read and do research and all of these things. All these things make up the beauty of public libraries and should be part of their every-day use.

We have other plans related to the notion of time and the space. Normally we close at eight o'clock and on weekends at ten o'clock, and I realized from the first moment that people actually come to our institution after five o'clock in fact. This means people come to us after work. I never understood the logic of institutions that close at five or six o'clock. I mean there are always weekends, of course, but this always seemed strange to me. So the library closes at six and from six thirty on, just about every day there will be public programs, reading, screenings, discussions, curated books-of-the-week, curated publications-of-the-week and so on for two and a half months. This will be a test and but it will also really show the strength of the project: it's not exhibition, it's not residency, but it's really a resource.

Thanks.

The next ten years of contemporary art in the middle east

2007-04-06T03:18:00.000-07:00

Middle East Focus
The next ten years of contemporary art in the middle east
Gulf Art Fair 2007

Moderator Vasif Kortun, Curator, Director, Platform Garanti, Istanbul
Saleh Barakat, Art Expert, Beirut, LB. Camilla Cañellas, International Arts Consultant, Writer and Critic Barcelona, ES. Bassam El-Baroni, Art Critic, Curator, EG. Hassan Khan, Editor, Bidoun Cairo, EG. Jack Persekian, Director Sharjah Biennial, Curator, Founder and Director of Anadiel Gallery and Al-Mamal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem. Tirdad Zolghadr, Curator, Zurich, CH.

Vasif Kortun
Hope you are all feeling fine this morning as we all are. This is going to be mostly extempore, without very long presentations. One thing I'd like to start with is the question of public space. Let me rephrase this: What are the sine qua non conditions of contemporary art?
From the production and to the consumption and the sharing and the discourse, but what is the minimum we need? How are these minimum conditions met in various places of the region? First of all the term, “Middle East” of course is an oxymoron;the Gulf is verydifferent from let's say the South East Mediterranean, which is very different from South of Spain and there is nothing that really ties it all together in a coherent form. Some places are extremely urbanized and some are not; some places are being engineered to be urbanized, now and in the future and some places are not. What we traditionally seem to call public space and how it exists in various parts of the region is really up for negotiation because public space is also the space of the anonyma and we can actually debate if such an anonyma exists. If the streets are dirty this is not because people are dirty but because the street is the “other” space and urban space is a space that you do not actually appropriate as part of your regular life.
I was talking to an architect about where public space begins and he took a paper tissue from his pocket and threw it on the ground in front of him and said that's where public space begins. How does the notion of public space affect the discourse and production of contemporary art? Tirdad, I know that you have issues with what I say about what public space is and how it could be utilised at this moment. So would you speak about that and the region?

Tirdad Zolghadr
Yes, we briefly spoke about the issue of public space just recently, and I do have a slightly different take on it. But just quickly, I appreciated what you said about the Middle East being an oxymoron, and as Hassan sitting to the right of me said in his statement, it's become very tedious to hear people complaining about the terminology of Middle East and so forth. But nonetheless, the Middle East has a certain history. It's a bit like the term, Habitus, and the whole idea of the Habitus doesn't really have a proper referent. One can use the term Habitus to impose a certain kind of disposition on people to the point that when they use the term Habitus, they adopt a certain kind of mentality, which is then fostered in the room, creating a certain kind of intellectual atmosphere. The use of the term “Middle East” is a bit like this. There's something a little eerie when it is used with such ease, when it goes down like potato chips because it does have a history that's fraught with all sorts of problems.
The danger of using public space as a sine qua non sort of something that art would hinge on to is that traditionally Europe likes to think of itself as a continent which has fostered public spaces and that's where -the Agora -all these free subjects gather to speak their opinions freely. I think you don't have to be Foucault to realize that this kind of public space never really existed. So when you combine this ideal notion of public space with the term ''Middle East,' it becomes quite a cocktail because then you have the Middle East as the space in which it is inherently impossible for art, because it supposedly has a different attitude to public space. I mean, I think I will just start by saying that and I can add other stuff later.

Vasif Kortun
Hassan, if you can follow up from there, particularly because you are coming from Cairo, the most dense city, most urbanized context of the region and from Egypt which is a deep country, with a deep tradition, with a deep contextualized situation. So what is your Habitus?

Hassan Khan
Well, I'd like to take what Tirdad said and develop it and give it a slightly different spin. I think the problem with using, as you said, a term that is charged like "the Middle East" is indeed a way to construct a potentially stifling situation.
I have been thinking a lot about all this lately; however, I've been revising some of my earlier thoughts regarding this. I've been considering that it's actually possible to start thinking about local specificities in a different way especially in Cairo, which is the city that I know best, and because it is somehow a model. I think I suddenly learned something from the city. What I want to say basically is that we can look at things which we usually see as problems, for example, the idea of public intellectuals in a city like Cairo that are closely intertwined with a nationalist agenda and with the state. In one way or another they might be considered as morally corrupt. However, it's also possible to look at that tradition of these kinds of intellectuals and find a specificity that would counter the idea of just some kind of slick smooth constructed art event like a fair, like the Gulf Art Fair, for example.
I am trying to say that some of these ideas are contradictory. In one way, by saying I will focus on my specificity and on my city I am going down the path of what is essential, yet at the same time it seems to be that at least in that specific context it's possible to counter certain trends and certain directions, and even a certain syntax. For example, the idea that we will speak about the next ten years in terms that implicitly demand some kind of positive future prognosis and it's possible to counter this with your problems. Your problems can be what build a relationship with this outside. These are just a few thoughts so I'll just throw them in?

Vasif Kortun
Thank you, Hassan. So it's obvious the next ten years of contemporary art in the Middle East, as Hassan says, produces optimism already, as it is stated. It is like saying, "Son, where are you going to be in ten years?" "I want to be an engineer, I want to be a doctor, I want to be this, and I want to do that". But these are all open agendas. If you look back over the last five years, since 2001, and kind of project moving forward, the question is, are you hopeful? If you were at the helm of the ship, because the ship is being engineered you know, there is a moment in the construction of the next ten years where it will certainly important to be the engineer. Maybe it's not coming from the biblical sense, but it's a different kind of future that we're looking at. So how do you feel about your role in all this, and do you agree that you are part of the building process, the engineering?

Saleh Barakat
Well exactly. I feel we are today at the threshold because part of the Middle East is quite fashionable, and what I'm concerned about mainly is that we should try not to focus only on the commercial aspect of art, although it's true that as an art dealer I'm very happy that art is becoming fashionable. I make more money. But at the same time as a curator and writer and collector and as a person I totally believe that art and culture are major components in the progress of any society and this is where we are engineering this today. We should keep in mind and this is capital, that art cannot bring a short-term return. Art is about a long-term commitment. This said, this is also where you can go back to debate concepts about philanthropy or patronage or public space because it is very difficult to have changes in politics or in religion. It is mainly in the world of art and culture that you can trespass the norms and make the change. And this is where we have to somehow make-believe that we need to create the incubator and to believe in art, to nurture it for the long run because eventually this is where art as an agent of change in the society can give us a return. This is where we can come back to what we have discussed yesterday about the importance of education. Education, production and mobility within the region are all important so that the art can achieve what it does best, which is surpassing the norm and creating the change.

Vasif Kortun
But if you would just get down to more of the specifics of the situation, I'm thinking there is amazing liquidity in the art market so there is all this cash flowing around all over the place. But how is it different from China? How is it different from India? How is it different from the emerging markets? I mean what makes Dubai different? In fact is it interesting for a society to have contemporary art and why? Is it necessary? Certainly not. But is it inevitable? No, it's not. Why is this happening now? I'm not looking at it from the side of the artist. I'm not talking about double exile, double the extreme positions. I'm not talking about where is imagination or where is this distributed, but you are also in part of that?

Saleh Barakat
For society to evolve it needs to be creative and for the time being creativity is more highly valued. I totally believe that in the past ten years there was somehow a fusion between the economic imaginary and the fact that the entrepreneur needed to be creative to rise above the crowd. Today, somehow the artists are becoming champions of innovation because I believe that they can be a model for everybody. But then again I am no referring here to the speculative part of the art market, and this is where I believe the threshold is. We should be concerned about where all this will be in the next ten years because this liquidity and buying and selling, creating a fashion is not being invested in long term incubators, schools, publications, art critics, people who can read, write, and all the instruments for making art.

Vasif Kortun
Thank you, Saleh. Bassam, what do you think about this? Is the "institutionalization" of contemporary art, for example having the schools, setting up structures and so on and so forth, part of what you see as a process? Because you come from a town, from a city that has seen a massive change with new institutions popping up etc.

Bassam El-Baroni
Well, I think actually speaking today, we can't be that optimistic but in the long-term I think it's a very promising case. When we talk about contemporary art we really have to get back to art as having its origins within a larger ideology, which is culture, and culture is institutions, and people. Future artists in the region really need to understand this idea that culture is fabricated in general and that its fabrication and implementation throughout the so-called Middle East has taken different shapes and different forms. Contemporary art in each specific locality at this point in the Middle East is a product of the fabricated culture that took part in each locality. So I think, right now in the Middle East, in general there are various forms of not wanting to be very theoretical or exhaustive in terms of "politics" for lack of a better word. But I think they have reached a point where in some areas the post modernist trend is being exhausted and people need to go beyond this, while other areas opposing colonialist attitude is being exhausted and people also need to go beyond this. What's particularly interesting about the buying of art in the post-modern cities in the Arab region is that it's not particularly based in the idea of culture itself. What's also interesting is that people can actually start from very different starting points and they don't have to work "asymmetrically" against different nationalisms, different, already constructed, institutional practices throughout the region.

Vasif Kortun
We will come back to that, but I'm still stuck on this idea of something that's been crafted with a birth date which is worth talking about I think. Camilla, you've done a lot of work in the region before a lot of people were coming in to work, so can you just reflect back a little to the beginnings for you and also tell us a bit about how you see the future?

Camilla Cañellas
My reflections obviously have a UK perspective but I think a number of the issues that need to be addressed are not necessarily related to the art market, but related to how artists in the region exist within the market and what the future holds for them. In many ways it goes back to this notion of more grass roots, infrastructure and more organic ways of working. I think we need to be wary of the big kind of bricks and mortar capital projects, the Bilbao effect. And while all this is great and very successful, and you know they certainly created a cultural identity and a magnet for tourists, but beyond this, inside the walls, what is there for the local art scene or for developing contemporary art practice? In reality one has to think about this. And I think certainly in the UK we?ve learned a lot of lessons from the (National) lottery and the opportunities it brought to build a huge numbers of projects and fantastic facilities. But in many cases this was really just about creating wallpaper; art as a background for a great caf? or a nice place to have a meeting and a number of them have failed. I mean millions of pounds have been spent but there is just no audience. I think the public in the end is the issue we need to look at, art and its intrinsic value and the fact that artists and art have a role within a civil society and how that sort of need and development can be further nurtured. I think also, one of the things I?m kind of interested in is the fickleness of the art world. When one looks at the last ten years in the region, there's been a lot of very interesting work happening and this is not just in the last couple of years, but for quite some time. it's only now that shows are being curated and the big institutions are coming. In fact on a trip I organised to Lebanon and Egypt a couple of years ago, of all the UK curators only one had ever been to the Arab Middle East and that was on holiday to Sharm El Sheikh. These were international curators. Part of what's going on is that this is a fashion, and that's something that we must also be aware along with the fact that the art market has a very promiscuous way of working. You only have to think of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s after the fall of the Iron Curtain. There was this great interest, a lot of work was done, a lot stayed in the region and then suddenly a lot of things were happening elsewhere, a bit more exciting, so the artists were left a bit high and dry there, and some of them are only now receiving recognition, which they have long deserved. These are some of the issues I feel we need to remember now. There is a huge amount of potential here, in Dubai, and its sort of role of platform is very interesting, and I feel it needs to be taken responsibly when considering how it develops in the market and as a market, and within a wider context in contemporary art practice.

Vasif Kortun
Thank you Camilla. Jack, have you been involved in two projects over the years, one being Executive Director of the Sharjah Biennial which opens next month, and the other one is creation of CAMP, the Contemporary Arts in Palestine which has a nonresident collection in an institution without a building for the moment. You went at it in a different way, working in Jerusalem and actually also in inviting many fantastic artists, mostly from Europe and the States over the last twelve years or more, and establishing an interesting where nothing of the sort was being thought of. Can you speak about that and I really would like to know where CAMP stands at this moment and where will CAMP go?

Jack Persekian
Thank you. Yes, I think the experience of working in Jerusalem is a context for growth of course. Maybe one of the points I wanted to bring to the table here, to this discussion about the future of contemporary art, is the importance of the political context of the region and the places we work with. Of course I'm thinking that sometimes it's not one sided; it's very disparate, so working in that particular place under those particular circumstances, Palestine has somehow taught me and taught the people in general in the art world how to go about it. The whole tendency of working with artists mainly from Europe or from America, from the West, if I may say, was somehow to bring recognition of our activities. But it always has been for me a very humbling experience in a sense that we've often worked with artists with very little means, where conditions for production are difficult. Visiting artists had to give up all the privileges that they see here in this part and other parts of the world and so that in a sense this has somehow been reflected on the Sharjah experience.
CAMP came as a very natural development of projects that I worked on in Jerusalem, stemming from the fact that all this work that has been done over the years. It was also important to see how these projects have documented history and the situation we live in from an artist's perspective. For me there was a pressing need to bring the work together and that the work be preserved and be documented.
The fact that I proposed the idea of CAMP as a collection without a building and without a museum also comes from the fact that we can't afford it. We don't have the land; we don't have control over the land. We don't have a country yet and we don't have the money. The whole idea was that there is this collection, and then we thought: why don't we start by lending it? So, for the time being we are waiting for one museum maybe or an institution or any of the other institutions I've been talking to say, "Yes, we will house the collection, we will put it in our storage facility", until the day we will get the means to create the building.

Vasif Kortun
Thank you. Bassam just a question, Camilla mentioned promiscuity but placed with curators on the market side. Is promiscuity limited in the region at the moment in terms of where we stand or is there larger promiscuity going on?

Bassam El-Baroni
Actually I wanted to make a point rather than answer that question. I mean after listening to everyone making their statements, I think that maybe what is important is that one positive thing can come out of a context like that. Although it can be quite critical, it might be important to focus on how we are actually discussing these things.
What Tirdad said about power words like "Middle East" and earlier what you said about "charged words" are important because words frame things in a specific way.
Maybe it's important to be very sensitive to that in our interaction. Maybe it is true that curators are coming and it is true that they are making regional shows -I mean I would propose a ban on regional shows personally-but if you want to engage with people working in a specific location that happen to be geographically sensitive, if we want to have some say in that relationship then it becomes necessary to infiltrate that discourse through different methods. Whether it's how you conduct a meeting or whether it's the way you shake someone's hand, whatever way you do it, it's necessary to build that relationship and in my opinion, rejecting what's happening locally and globally is being, as was discussed before, "engineered". This is also reflected in the art industry.
I think it's important to reject that in a specific fashion, not in terms of absolute rejection but rather in the sense of allowing for an infiltration or subversion or taking back. I would like to point out that a term like "threshold" is used as were words like "civil society" and "development" and I think that it's important to ask what these words actually say about what we're doing. These words are used all the time and they imply something specific about this location. My argument is that these implications play consciously or unconsciously into the broader picture and the bigger story.

Vasif Kortun
Just to follow up with that, maybe we could discuss the notion of rejection as it implies a kind of binary relationship? As you are still one part of this transaction can we undo that altogether?

Bassam El-Baroni
Yes, that's why I said I'm using the word "rejection" but it's not an absolute rejection. it's a necessity; it's a strategic rejection, and it's a necessary moment which is how I see it.

Tirdad Zolghadr
I wanted to quickly respond to what Saleh was saying about the inability of art. I would agree that it is inevitable that in a sense every society has something that you can potentially pick out and call art and that way it is inevitable whether it's an installation or a mast that you can pose this sort of discourse. But if you look at it closely, if you look at the different practitioners sitting here, you will see that even within the term "arts" there are huge differences. The only common denominator is really the actual public space that we are creating here with this panel and this is something becomes quite fundamental. So, you were talking about how art from the Middle East has become fashionable. Art from other places has become fashionable too and what always happens is that you have the boom and then you have certain gatekeepers that move into place.
I think it's hard enough to talk about the Middle East. Just yesterday we were having a round-table discussion where we felt like Le Corbusier; we were asked to design the future of Dubai as a cultural hub and we felt like we were in some kind of computer game like Sim City where you just get down and construct things. I thought the responsibility was terrifying enough so I don't know. I'm not going to talk about other regions but I do have the feeling that in the Middle East, when I use the term Middle East I do feel the Middle East exists just like Europe exists or democracy exists or public space exists, and these are all concepts with a lot of force. The problem is that there are certain gatekeepers and curators in Europe who are expected to come to terms with art coming from weird "twilight zones" and they have to make sense of it and they have to make it consumable to their public and so they rely on intermediaries. When it comes to places like the Middle East, there are very few credible intermediaries, so power is disproportionately concentrated within the hands of very few people who have this kind of claim to act as representatives, and so obviously it's not necessarily the most intellectually daring or audacious or let's just say non-Machiavellian who get their foot in the door.
Maybe one way of dealing with this is to use places like Dubai since we were brain storming about this yesterday, and I was mentioning this to Hassan, that Dubai very pragmatically can work as a hub that is a gateway not between East and West but as a pragmatic space where all these debates to occur. Although apparently one of the theorists couldn't come because of his passport, I assume that it's easier to travel here for many people in the region than it is to travel to Paris or to London. So maybe on a very pragmatic level, Dubai can become a space, a hub where a certain critical mass can develop of transactions happening between these countries.

Vasif Kortun
This notion of gate keeping does come up, because in the old days it used to be the ministerial that nobody referred to because they could not be trusted to begin with, so that was always a closed gate that you just did not refer to and other than that difference you could not actually pinpoint the people on the ground in the places to actually speak to them. I remember in 1989 Jean Hubert Martin was trying to do this, and his whole idea was to bypass the traditional, the classical gatekeeper, the ministries of culture or the provincial modernist elite that you know, and he just went through them and tried to reach the "real" which was a kind of silly idea. But he promise of bypassing institutions, classic institutional gatekeepers, was actually an interesting and good idea. Now it seems like we have these gatekeepers who are actually speaking pretty much the same language as those who are coming to knock on the doors. Could you comment on that, because I rely on your experience a lot.

Camilla Cañellas
Yes I think it's interesting because it was only ten years ago that a lot of countries were dealing with cultural agreements which meant signing neutral things basically saying, "we will take a show of art to our major national gallery, and you take a show of British art to yours". That's how crude it was, but things have moved a huge amount in those years and I mean certainly cultural institutions like the British Council have woken up finally to the fact that they can't sit in their offices in London and decide that Peru gets Damien Hirst and Iran gets Henry Moore and so on.
The local knowledge on the ground has been recognized as being key to these organizations? futures and legitimacy in what they do and thank goodness we are now seeing arts officers engaged locally in countries to actually decide and develop exhibition programmes and policies. So, hopefully we're moving away from the sort of colonialist notion of where art should go and what artists should be showing.
But in terms of gatekeepers, I think it's an interesting area because on the one hand people want to know more about what's going on in the region and about contemporary art practice, coming from often zero knowledge, but there is still sometimes a defensiveness about the fact that they are asking at all, because maybe they have taken too long to be interested or suddenly there is this sense that they are coming with a very crude perspective. But in the end it's always better to ask. Of course there is the danger that they then are made to feel ignorant and this often makes people step back and away from any possible projects that they might develop.
One of the things that really frustrates me as a non-curator, but as someone who has worked within the arts sector for many years and worked as a funder and policy developer, is the fact that cocuratorial collaborations, the genuine collaborations between a curator in a major institution and a freelance curator, working in a particular locality or context, are really quite few and far between and it's something which seems so obvious. I can remember there was a show in London. The Arab Image Gallery did a show with Akram as co-curator, and with a curator there at the gallery and it seemed so obvious and it made so much sense, but I also remember the way artists were because the artist arrived in London like a celebrity artist and didn't speak a word of English. He had to be navigated through this rather strange situation he found himself in. Without someone who actually came from that sort of context and that particular background, the situation would have actually been far worse. I think it's something for the western institutions to recognize, that they can still have control over what they are doing and how they program work and still work more collaboratively. I think collaboration helps get away from this notion of the gatekeepers because there are many people out there that are working and could be possible partners.

Jack Persekian
Yes, I think there is also a polarizing notion in this whole idea of gatekeeping, but I also see that at the other end of it is also a certain kind of facilitation. I would perhaps compare it to when you are doing a book or a magazine and you have the editors, and there is always some sort of filtering process involved. This also happens when you are creating products or presentations that will go into the public domain and the filtering process that they go through. So in this sense you need to think about that and these two functions, gatekeeping and facilitation, and of course always be aware of that role or that person. I wouldn't see it from a European or a western perspective; I think that notion applies to everyone even people working from here or who live here.

Saleh Barakat
Well also about the gatekeeping: this is why it is very important for the next year to talk about and involve people in this concept of what the French would call mecenas or patronage because it is only by introducing corporations and individuals who have the assets and are willing to invest it in artistic ventures to better understand what needs to be done. It is important to inspire investors to give to some people whose work is about thinking, the people who work on the writing of the conceptual framework of understanding because otherwise the societies will not evolve.
I mean, to give a metaphor, Europe somehow was built on this idea on the respect and support of knowledge, where you had monks in a monastery writing and studying, but in order for those few people to be able to produce knowledge based work, there were 200 or 300 people working the land and money from that production went back to the monastery. There is a lot of excess cash in the Middle East but which can somehow be invested in the "production" of knowledge which will keep society evolving. This is where all this can become very interesting.

Vasif Kortun
A few months ago there was an article in the New York Times and it was about a press conference that took place in Abu Dhabi. The scene is like this: Dennis Hopper gets off from his motorcycle and he's followed by Laurence Fishbourne and a bunch of other important characters, all getting off their motorcycles after a tour and Hopper says; "You know, Abu Dhabi is the Florence of the 21st Century". Now that's a bold statement to make and Hassan could you address this? Let's think about this, because if it is so, we are still going back to this notion of engineering. How would you compare Abu Dhabi of the 21st Century to the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance? Would this be in terms of using patronage today to induce a new culture for contemporary art? It can induce collecting but collecting and building and making institutions has very little to do with contemporary art in fact. You can have one without the other, and they don't come together in a package, but maybe we assume that they should come together in a package. Not that it isn't interesting, because we are looking at something which is almost unknowable at the same time and so what do you think of this notion of patronage today and can we compare of course?

Hassan Khan
Important? Yes. I think it's important to be really clear: there is a difference between buying things and producing things. This may simply be an impression and I can only speak about my personal impressions, but I suspect that this place is about buying things rather than producing them. That's why in the very beginning of this panel discussion I threw up the idea that maybe our problems can also be our solutions. I specifically referred to morally corrupt intellectuals in Cairo who for example work with the state. Traditions may be problematic in some ways, but at the same time traditions ensure that things have a certain depth, that there is a density -this is an important word, density. There is a certain density and a certain tension and friction which can be productive. I mean I think that saying that a place is the "Florence of the 21st century" is a bit of a superficial statement, so I'd like to maybe suggest referring to what we were speaking about earlier. When you take a closer look at the term "contemporary art" and treat it as an absolute term, it's a term that immediately implies some kind of absolute that functions everywhere. So, if we take that one step further and say, okay, if that term is absolute, if we accept that friction, why not build the relationship on such terms, which would be an argument that goes against specificity and locality? At the same time I think it would be an argument that would ensure that we have equal access to the field of knowledge. What's important is not just the object or the credit, but also the access to an actual field of knowledge and that I think is only possible if the relationship is actually conceptually thought through.Maybe one way of dealing with this is to use places like Dubai since we were brain storming about this yesterday, and I was mentioning this to Hassan, that Dubai very pragmatically can work as a hub that is a gateway not between East and West but as a pragmatic space where all these debates to occur. Although apparently one of the theorists couldn't come because of his passport, I assume that it's easier to travel here for many people in the region than it is to travel to Paris or to London. So maybe on a very pragmatic level, Dubai can become a space, a hub where a certain critical mass can develop of transactions happening between these countries.

Saleh Barakat
Yes, but this access to a field of knowledge, who is it dictated by? And I think that this is really the question and what will this dictation imply and what ideologies and what needs and what demands are being proposed by the person or the whole
framework dictating these issues. I think this is something that is very important. You were also talking about the corrupt Egyptian situation, and I totally agree with you but this is a very specific situation and it also does have a link between socialism and I think at this point, in advanced capitalism. Sometimes we do get a bit romantic about socialism and perhaps this is all part of our identity. I think, however, the whole notion of how these identity politics were formed and how they can be formed in places like Dubai and Kuwait is what we should be questioning.

Hassan Khan
I will just say very quickly, that I understand all this, but what I was trying to say was that in the present state of things; even morally corrupt intellectuals can be our salvation. I'm not exactly trying to say that per se, I'm trying to say that as much as surface and glitz and shine play a certain role in all this, so does history, including corruption, including a socialism that never was, of course. I'm not romantic about this at all but the density of a crowd walking in the street, and how that kind of density plays itself in relation to the surface produces a kind of symbiotic and organic relationship.

Tirdad Zolghadr
About this question of who is going to decide how knowledge is produced and distributes, and who has access to which kind of archives, it goes back to what I was saying before. I'm based in Berlin right now and every other dinner table conversation leads into someone explaining the Middle East to me. Explaining what the problems are and what the solutions are and it actually sounds very easy: there's a, b and then there's c. So these problems that are incredibly convoluted to people in situ become these extremely candy-coated and sexy things to bring up and then to unravel and we all know that the Middle East offers this kind of oratory surplus.
You know this would be a very cynical response to what you were saying about turning our problems into our solutions, but also part of the veneer of the Middle East is this political attraction. But I wanted to say something completely different about the corrupt Egyptian institution. I don't know much about Egypt let alone their corrupt institutions, but having studied at the University of Geneva, I know that the most reactionary backwater can still offer a very interesting place to produce work and very often this kind of contrast is actually necessary. I know that's a very dangerous thing to say and I know it can be very romantic. You can romanticize the struggling dissident, you know the creative potential of censorship and all that, that's the danger but on the other hand, if you think of it that way it helps to demythologize the fact that a lot of artists are working under difficult circumstances.

Hassan Khan
But my point is that it channels creativity into binary relationships as opposed to what I was saying earlier here. I mean this could never ever have happened because policies like we were talking about a little bit earlier really depend on whose going to make the decisions. In the end there are going to be mistakes and culture is culture and this is how history is formed. I think part of the situation of the Middle East is based on the fact that creativity is being channeled into opposing this kind of opposition. For me, we should be able to go beyond this point and then it becomes interesting and then the opposition or the imagined opposition can really feel genuine empathy not just based on a fixed terminology.

Tirdad Zolghadr
But hasn't it reached that point. Wouldn't it be more productive to to actually point out the brutality of the still-existing hierarchy, that also exists in the West rather than assuming that there is a level playing field ?

Saleh Barakat
I'm sorry I didn't really get it.

Tirdad Zolghadr
I wanted to shift the conversation a bit --where the idea that if in the coming ten years the money that is being invested here in the Gulf to build the biggest building and the biggest hotel, and with that of course the biggest museums, as part of the general decor,
this will definitely lead to a crash. But my point is, how can we convince of a society here that transforming Dubai into a platform that can produce a culture for an emerging world that goes from maybe the sub-continent, from India and East Africa to the Middle East, leading to a production that comes as a major component in building a society ? This would be a real challenge.

Vasif Kortun
We'll assume in a way that every place needs everything, I'm just looking at the examples of Southeast Europe and Eastern Europe. For the time being, there are no symbolic institutions that carry the history of, for example, Southeast Europe, so there is no singular place where it is crystallized. In Kosovo the art scene is amazingly active, completely crazy, and it's a fantastic situation. Tirana was also like this a few years ago before it kind of collapsed? or not really collapsed but it subsided. While our focus today is not there, if ever you wanted to see an interesting collection of the history of Southeast Europe at the moment you have to go to the Erste Bank collection, which is based in Vienna. You can also discover more about the Viennese art scene, although I'd rather look at Zagreb, which for me is much more interesting than the Vienna scene or Kosovo or Pristina or wherever. But in Vienna it all comes together because Vienna, Austria has a political stake in Southeast Europe, it always has. Also, because there's no more Yugoslavia, there are no symbolic institutions that would carry the former Yugoslav art. What I'm just coming about in a roundabout way is that I guess we would not have such a discussion in Cairo for example, about what we would be doing in the next ten years.

Hassan Khan
That is a discussion that I don't think I'm interested in having as such.

Vasif Kortun
But we will assume the best of all worlds would be that you would not regard this site as a production site but as a site where things could be stored and preserved and collected and sold.

Hassan Khan
That's a possibility but what I'm trying to say if this space situates itself like that, that's fine and it will serve a function in terms of market and circulation etc. But it's just important not to keep some level in other spaces. I mean if we are now speaking about the economic model in which a place like Dubai needs to be a place that situates itself outside a specific history and density; it needs to be surface, to be able to function as a hub of commerce in a sense, that's all fine, that's part of circle. But it is then important for other centres which are centres of production and that the relationship with that hub has to be thought out.

Vasif Kortun
In terms of a leveling field?

Tirdad Zolghadr
Can I ask the moderator a question?

Vasif Kortun
Yes.

Tirdad Zolghadr
You were telling us in your moderator statement that you were describing, if I understood you correctly, that in Istanbul - speaking about other spaces of production -you were caught between the nostalgia for a bygone Istanbul and the new Istanbul, which is turning into something which is heavily commercialized, and you used various adjectives. I was wondering if you could give us that perspective, which might be helpful.

Vasif Kortun
First of all, there was a moment about five or six years ago when we were able to operate in the city without a regularising art market and large institutions etc. We were not a "main stream institution", we were not an "alternative institution", we were not an "initiative" and we were "not a museum". We were not about being, we were about doing. So, we were able to find a particular position in the city and energise a certain context which turned out well and set the pace. Now my institution is being forced to be categorized within a set of another institution. There are artists initiatives now; there are museums -the filtering place. I mean that's one aspect, but there are other changes. Suddenly just in the last few years, these people who I've known for years, young and old with absolutely no interest in art, suddenly are becoming collectors, going to Basel for a special dinner given by an investment bank and rubbing shoulders with hedge-fund managers and getting into this other kind of scheme. I mean, where did that come from? And where were they a few years ago? What happened? Were they struck by lightening?
One positive aspect of this is that there is a growing interest in art, so things do go right sometimes. And maybe sometimes things go right, but I doubt it. Putting that aside, I think it's also a conceptual "blatantness" you know. The anxiety of feeling like you are extremely late produces this speed of action, and maybe that's what's going on at the moment. I'm shocked. I mean last year there was Picasso and this year it's Rodin then it's this and it's that; it's publicity banners and the whole city is literally transformed?we got it too! I think it's a kind of pathetic feeling actually to think that the kitschified concept of Picasso can make a city a city today. Frankly who needs that? So people get tickets to see a Picasso road-show rather than going for the art, and this has nothing to do with the value of the artists or of the work, it has to do with the kitschified universalizing cognition of "good taste" and "value". In the end, we will all become part of this kind of boring universalistic discourse.
There was a moment a few years ago where things were a bit different and there was a kind of hope, because the market had not yet materialized in such a swift way? I don't think we can hold the market accountable for all the ills of today's art world, but it demands so much attention. And I feel we need all the other factors in place for it to kick off and all the other factors were obviously ready to go.

Hassan Khan
I think this might just have something to do with an oppositional thing; coming from this notion that in the so-called Middle East, we inherited this kind of model to look up to, model of cosmopolitanism. I think it's very important that this model be dissected and discussed here in Dubai. Is this the same "cosmopolitan" model that this nation wants to adopt? Or is it going to be a fight against this model? How can we formulate some ideas about this? I'd like Tirdad to give me his opinion about this.

Tirdad Zolghadr
Do you mean how we re-formulate it?
Yes. maybe, that's the same sort of Masonic situation that you are throwing me into and that I was thrust into yesterday morning. I don't, as this one arts journalist said, wear a hat and I'm not Joseph Beuys, I don't have manifestos, I don't have solutions that would point to?

Hassan Khan
I don't mean necessarily re-formulating the model, but I just wanted your remarks on this notion.

Tirdad Zolghadr
Well, what I think might be very useful is on the one hand we try to find a positive attitude towards quantity, as Rem Koolhaas was saying at one point. I know it's very cheesy when curators quote Rem Koolhaas but it's very useful just now. Because otherwise there's this constant trap of reducing or reprimanding various sites for not having the same approach to density or to memory or to art or history as we know it from the old Florence, for example. So right now what is pretty difficult and dicey is the fact that you would have to come up with aesthetic categories which do not have that prescriptive force, which is one extremely abstract suggestion that might hold value. But don't think it's so abstract. In fact, I seriously think it has to do with language. it's a matter of how you consciously frame what you're saying and I don't think that this is abstract.

Hassan Khan
I don't think it is abstract. It has to do with language.

Vasif Kortun
May I just open to the floor. Do you have any questions?

Audience
This is a city that is monumental, and I would hope that this would be channeled in the right way, and not only in the commercial way. This is a big burden and a big challenge for the people here, and beyond enthusiasm, a lot of reflection and thought will be required to establish structures in an appropriate way.

Hassan Khan
I think Dubai will most likely become the commercial art centre of the Middle East, with artists coming from around the larger or wider region. I mean it's the only logical role that it could play but the hope is that in the long term, this will be the instigator of more friction that will actually create something here and spur on creativity, and I think this is possible.

Bassam El-Baroni
I think that while at the moment it's quite clear that the commercial aspect will be the dominant one, but I don't know whether it will be the only thing happening here. I hope Dubai will welcome the plurality of the region and that the infrastructures here will not just look at galleries or studios and fellowships, but also to encourage art colleges to open up and have exchanges with art colleges elsewhere. Also that greater encouragement needs to be given to young emerging curators here; I mean the idea of curatorial training is something that's new and that needs to be developed. It's also very important to establish a voice for the people here. Young critics are also a vital group worth investing in. Magazines and other publications will also be playing an important role in the dissemination of information and as platforms for intellectual debate.

Vasif Kortun
Yes, I think that in Dubai there is a political will, as is the case in Turkey to move things forward. Culture does have implications in the political world. There are political reasons for doing something about opening up towards the West and finding alternative ways of communicating and of course alternative markets. Also, this means finding new ways for business and commerce to move forward, and many people out there want to be part of this. For example, if I had not been able to join this panel, it is sure someone else would have jumped at the chance to take my place. So yes, there is this drive by the top decision makers to begin navigating through important and complicated issues related to development, because there are many proposals to begin dealing with, ranging from establishing these big museums to art fairs, to small galleries which are now popping up here and there and everybody is trying. This brings up the question of who will be the pubic that all this development is being designed for, and how committed they will be to the process? Also, Dubai has a very mobile population thus there can be big fluctuations in the audience.

Tirdad Zolghadr
The idea of audiences as mobile and the audiences that stay also includes a large immigrant population of a different kind of economic access point. In the next ten years, will important changes occur in terms of production and dissemination as new audiences are given access? How can this "show window" reach out more and make a bigger impact on the region in terms of creating new audiences.

Vasif Kortun
Serious questions; that also doubles up with the question of the transition of this place from "a zero friction zone" to a "public space".

Tirdad Zolghadr
I would say there must be a vision of being able to produce an art from here, nurture it here and watch it grow here. Artists can come and spend some time here in residencies and work with artists who were born here. Some clear thinking needs to be done about providing the right education, and speaking up about this multi-cultural cosmopolitan place. Maybe we can then see an art that can really be more global growing here, and that can reach more people in the region.

Vasif Kortun
Would anybody like to make any closing remarks?

Jack Persekian
I just wanted to reflect on the last question from the Sharjah Biennial perspective. Thinking about what's happening and for example reading the papers today in the morning, I didn't see the English papers, but I did see all the Arabic papers, and there was nothing about the art fair. And by nothing I mean, not a single thing. It reminds me how difficult it was with the Sharjah Biennial for us to figure out how we could create this public space and how we could attract people and we tried through different ways to achieve this. One successful thing I would say we did was working with the Minister of Education and through that collaboration the Ministry is bringing students of all ages to the Biennial. So if you think about it, it's more like a supply that is creating a demand. So the Gulf Art Fair and the Sharjah Biennial and all the other activities that are taking place are basically offering new formats for people to interact and for people to get closer to art and find this moment of "friction". I think that with time there is enough knowledge and education being built into the system and people are starting to see the benefits and slowly the press is also picking up on it. For example, last year before the Biennial we had to literally write the articles for the papers, they didn't even have the energy or the enthusiasm?

Vasif Kortun
...but that's everywhere... (laughter)

Jack Persekian
...So we are dealing with this kind of situation...

Vasif Kortun
Jack to end on a positive note, I see a lot of optimism in that because most of the city here has been built for people who are coming in and who are not necessarily here yet. So eventually one day all these museums and all these activities will be creating the supply that will create the demand. I mean, this worked in real-
estate, so why not in the art world?

Jack Persekian
Just as we close I think basically we can't quite over-prophesize nor should we, and since we are not decision makers either we can still set the measure of success and remain very ambiguous. Things should go the "normal" way; yes there will be the museum and yes there will be a very strong art market, there will be a burgeoning arts scene, there will be good education and institutions and all of that. But perhaps what is really interesting still lies in what cannot be imagined, so when you think about the next ten years, for example, Dubai might actually become extremely interesting not because of the institutions, not because of the museums but because of this kind of weird experiment, this strange laboratory because it has the means of engage with what is unimagined. That's all I want to say.

Bassam El Baroni
Yes, I just want to say it's a very good attitude but also it's very problematic because we really have to ask a lot of questions and culture is not some PR dinosaur running ahead. It really has to be analyzed and dissected in every which way for it to take on a good shape, so while I think that all this is very promising, I also think that more critical viewpoints need to be taken, deeper consideration, under the microscope, because culture can be very dangerous really. It can be very dangerous.

Tirdad Zolghadr
I wanted to second what you were saying. it's really true because otherwise what you see is development as an arts industry which functions like an Italian opera, a sort of spectacle that never offers you a glimpse behind the scenes and that never questions its own paradigms of performance. I think that this is the flipside of course, trying to maximize the numbers of retinas which see the art is one thing but the other thing is the ethics of professionalism which dominate our work. That's another thing where honestly, as I said earlier, the highest potential lies in the fact that Dubai can become a potential hub for a panel like this. Everyone knows it's a kind of watering hole, of people who never get to see each other, otherwise get to see each other on a panel such as this maybe that's a good point to end on.

Audience
Just a somewhat belated question and it will sound very old fashioned, but I guess what I find would also be important in terms of this kind of discussion is actually the contribution that the artists make themselves in terms of their work. It's not to say anything against what the panelists have said, and they've experienced but it's really to find a way in which to make a kind of sensitive counterpoint. For me the negative potential of market and the negative potential of the glib governing initiatives of big scale institutions and museums affect art. If one is to talk about the construction of certain imaginaries which are produced by the government or produced by the market or produced by the media, it seems to me also that the artists are producing and making a significant contribution to that kind of imaginary. If I think about Hassan's work, his extraordinary four channel video hidden location seemed to me precisely the contribution as to how to understand this idea of density and the idea of intersection of voices and points of view from within Cairo. I think it would be a shame if the art fair wasn't able in the future to develop a form of dialogue which really was about the work itself, not at some separate session but actually very much a part of these sorts of discussions as well.

Bassam El Baroni
I don't think that the arts scene or the art market can exist in a vacuum space. I really think that it should be an exchange between existing, bringing and carrying out and Dubai is still a vacuum in terms of this. Dubai does not yet have contemporary cultural roots, this takes time. I mean look at the world, how long it took for it to bring up the cultural identity. I don't think that we can talk about an art market and an arts scene if art is not being created in the place and without artists producing in a place where pioneers or an art fair exists; forget it.
In the long term you need the art to be there and you need the controversy between the scene, the social, the political structure, freedom and the humans, the people who are here. This goes back to what Jack was saying that the papers were not reporting. We are all foreigners; most of us are. How many in the city know that there is an art fair taking place here? This is now a hub, it's houses of culture and of finance and everyone in between new, and it's interesting, but carrying it on means rooting it in a upstairs on that sofa. Thank you very much. scene. How long will that take? I assume longer than we think. The city of Beirut has that process happening now, and if they did not have war, Beirut would be moving quicker because there is art being created, and because we have the freedom, and we have controversial situations and always have, and there are local, important, internationally relevant, initiatives that have been taking place since the early nineties. I am talking about the Ashkal Alwan project from Christine Tohme who really is working with the city with Beirut. I am also talking about another in the city like the Arab Image Foundation, that Beirut created and that we're carrying out, so I really think that there is a chance in fact in the region. The chance of this region is getting all together the Egyptians, the Palestinians who are creating art, the Lebanese and the rest of the Arab World, and using the potentiality of petroleum wealth so that we can all unite our forces to carry culture in and out and to display it all over the Arab countries. I think this is the chance and we should all take it. Real art comes from this region and it is important to be carrying it out, but also to work with each other.

Tirdad Zolghadr
I just quickly wanted to point out that saying that a place like Dubai doesn't have the kind of cultural traditions which go well with an art fair,which does not mean that this country does not have any cultural roots; I think those are two very different things.

Audience
I'm an eternal optimist, and I've been living in Dubai now for about a year and a half, before that I was in Beirut and Cairo and you do the rounds around the region. Before I came here I was told by many informed people within the arts across the region "Forget about Dubai, there's no culture in Dubai; there's no arts in Dubai." Up here on the stage today we have got an extremely impressive panel of people, but noone who was born and bred in the United Arab Emirates. Why is there noone from Abu Dhabi sitting with you today ? So I am looking forward to see that the next Global Art Forum, next year, brings the regional power houses of culture and of finance and everyone in between upstairs on that sofa. Thank you very much.

Interview between Vasıf Kortun and Ahmet Ögüt

2007-01-25T04:55:00.000-08:00

Catalog:
“Softly But Firmly” Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic, Zagreb, HR

Vasıf Kortun [vk] :
Ahmet, "Devrim [Revolution]" reminds me of Vahit Tuna's work titled “Başkanın Arabası [The President`s Car]”.
“The President’s Car” reflects not only the relationship of Vahit to his own childhood but also reflects the transformation of the luxurious American cars imported to Istanbul. Beginning from the late 40s until the end of the 70s in Istanbul, which was a working class city, those American cars were first owned by the wealthy families, and then were used as taxis and finally were extended as much as possible like stretched limos so that they could be used as a kind of minibus with eight seats in them. In the meantime they were "reproduced" in the small workshops of the city except for their exterior framework, in other words they were “hybridized”. I am not talking about a city which creates a sort of industry or which manufactures its own vehicles. The part of the city I am referring to is Dolapdere Istanbul. In your work there is also a president, this time it is not Truman but Cemal Gürsel, President of Turkey at that time. Turkey undergoes another revolution after the “Devrim [Revolution]” in 1960 and comes to manufacture an automobile. However this car remains to be a prototype, a single example only. In that sense it is handmade like a “sculpture.” Look at the style of that car, Devrim, and you could see that it is an American car outside although it is “produced in Turkey”. Well I mean, after all, once roads have already become dominant, does it mean anything where that car is produced? Especially if an imports based industry, with various elements such as the cars, spare parts and tires are imported, is already established in such a country?

Is there a relation between the car being handmade and your widening the scope of the work you have found and produced it using your hands even to the details in the writing? I mean both of the two gestures imply a sort of “futility”. A car which fails to go and the failure of a drawing, originally published in the “Today in the history” column of the 2005 Biennial Newspaper, undergoing any significant changes while it is turned into a wall painting. Futility, failure, the fact that nothing changes at the end of this action, performance, as a matter of fact being unnecessary. I am not using such terms in a critical sense by the way.

Again at this point I remember Hakan Topal’s criticism of “Devrim [Revolution]” at the end of your conversation at Platform. There Hakan said that the work could not go any further, that it did not “work” while you replied that it was sufficient indeed. There seems to be a serious difference regarding the status of art as far as those two positions are concerned. What do you say?

Ahmet Öğüt [aö]:
I must say that “Devrim [Revolution]” is sort of my byproducts. I came to produce it as an extension of my drawings published in the Biennial daily under the title “This week in history”. As a matter of fact the car, Devrim, is also a work of a supplier industry. Needless to say, we are from a country characterized by the supplier industry. The mentality that “That will do and will be sufficient”, “We do not need more”, “We will manage with that” is still dominant. We see that a great deal of events happened in the history of the country when we look at the period while the car “Devrim” was manufactured in Turkey. In the aftermath of the military coup on 27 May 1960, a new constitution was adopted on 27 May 1961. Adnan Menderes, the former PM, was executed while only one and a half month was left for the completion of the manufacture of the Devrim car. Then there is of course Cemal Gürsel, who was elected as the president after the intervention of the military. For me it is not surprising that a President who had a military background gave the order for the production of a local car in a time of four months. We should not overlook the power of imagination of former generals, who are a legacy of the military junta, like Gürsel. For instance I hear that one of those generals has such a vast scope of creativity that he has recently flown all the way from Hakkari to Ankara on a jet fighter in order to beat up a soldier and then has flown back to Hakkari again on the very same day. Needless to say, I am aware of the existence of a xgovernment pressing the button for the production of a local car, the disturbance of the State Planning Institute of the decision since the decision clashed with the firm belief of the institute in saving funds, the attitude of the opposition parties in the country regarding the decision and finally, of course, the conspiracy theories related to the giant automobile brands such as Ford and Chrysler which had a dominating position in the market for automobiles in the country and the foreign exchange funds flowing out of the country for the imports of spare parts. I mean these are all about the manufacture of this car. However what actually drew my attention at that point was the science-fiction like structure of the production of the car and its story. It reminds me of an amulet; a charm prepared successfully but does not work or of a spacecraft failing to take off as it lacks engine boosters. In that sense Devrim is very much different from the “Anadol car” which was to be mass manufactured later on. Anadol is a real car which was designed and then later manufactured. But “Devrim” is a car in the general sense of the meaning. As you have pointed out, it resembles an American car. Still what makes “Devrim” stand out is the fact that it was completely handmade. It is produced while it is being imagined, produced by the rule of thumb, by working directly on the prototype and hammered into shape. This self-styled production is, in a sense, the definition of the style of production I have always dreamed of.

Just like “Devrim”, I have only seen the pictures of Vahit Tuna’s “The President’s Car”. The love for automobiles, as you have put it, became traditional in Turkey as a practice of appropriation rather than as a practice of creating an industry in Turkey. The “hybridization” you have referred to is still valid in Turkey. I mean “Şahin” type/model cars are modified today to look like “Doğan” type/model cars. This is the current version of this hybridization.

I increased the size of the “Devrim” car by drawing it from a small picture of 4cmx6cm in size so that my drawing then could cover the surface of the wall. This means that I partly used my imagination and drew the wall painting without fully seeing the original car- just like the workers at the wagon factory manufacturing the parts of the “Devrim” car in line with the directions of the engineers. I did not have the intention of getting a new story out of it. That was what Hakan Topal implied that he was expecting from an artist: More of it. However I was only trying to iconize an “absurd object” once again, and by using my hands, as it was about to be lost in time and history. (Compare with the example of Nuri Alço). The story we are talking about is a story of failure, and it seems only natural to me to display it in a “futile” fashion. In my opinion one needs to take on the attitude required by the work. I remember Farhad Kalantary once saying that “The butter on the bread” should be spread in the right “thickness”.

vk:
I suppose Hakan Topal read the relation between the work and the subject differently. I mean, he sees the theme of the work as a transporter. However you are pointing out that the attitude is the transporter itself. This is a different kind of politics, a more crooked point of view.

Now the “Death Kit Train” video. A car failing to work, another “futility”. But it is not one or two people pushing the car, there are many people pushing it. Those in the front push the car while those in the back push those pushing the car. They give support to each other, and do the job together. You know about the Francis Alyss’s work titled “Faith Can Move Mountains”. The title is quoted from the Gospel. In Alyss’s work 500 volunteers moved a giant sand hill about 10 centimeters ahead. Cuauhtémoc Medina touches on this work and says that “A desperate situation calls for an absurd solution.” I know that I have little wandered off the subject. I am now referring to the feelings of desperateness and absurdity instead of the work itself.

aö:
”The Death Kit Train” is more than a story of “desperateness” or “futility”. The ones at the back of the line push each other in spite of the fact that the number of the ones pushing the car at the front of the line will be sufficient to move the car. Now going back to the bleak title of the video; those are freight trains carrying apocalyptic giant industrial or military vehicles. Those trains could be resembled to a porter but one with more power than usual. The number of people carrying a coffin is also more than the number of people actually required to carry it. The reason for this increase in the number of people is the fact that what is carried is no longer a worldly object- it has been transformed into something different. The number of people pushing the car is also greater than needed. What I mean is that while watching the video, one first supposes that the car is moving on its own. But once we have realized that there are people pushing the car and then later come to see the ones pushing the people pushing the car, both those people pushing the car and the people pushing each other or pushed, are transformed into something much more different. As a result the action misses its goal and creates its own meaning. I mean it begins to seek a meaning (belief) of its own which is beyond its apparent goal. Just like the absurd theatre, I am trying to talk about a new opening of “hope” by being inspired from a situation which might at first seem pessimistic. I am looking for this opening of “hope” by being inspired from what is dejected, crestfallen, hopeless, futile or grotesque. The faith that keeps the ones pushing the car together stems from that point- seeing a collective dream in spite of everything.

vk:
I see, but there is a problem here. In Turkish we might call it “Ölü Teçhizat Treni” but the English translation of the work, Death Kit Train, has two positions. It is also the title of a song and there is no way we could know that.

I also would like to talk to you about your photographs. In the photographs you have made with Osman Doğu Bingöl, there is a similar situation, but in those photographs, unlike the videos or the wall paintings, there is no a pre-determined situation. A fickler kind of absurdity is staged. In “What A Lovely Day,” it is imagined. I am not posing this question in order to systemize and apply it to your every work but I must say that there is a multi-layered humour, an absurdity which does not despise itself is cuts through every single work. Could you please expand on that? And I also would like to touch on this asphalt project which we are yet to materialize. Paving asphalt in the gallery, exhibiting a commuter bus fully packed with people inside in the gallery, the photographs of people sleeping in the luggage compartment of the intercity busses,and so on and so forth. What is it about this passion for the road? I would like to learn what is there aside than the immigration, the intercity and innercity travel.

aö:
Well, yes “Death Kit Train” is also the name of a song by Cul De Sac. I sensed a coincidental relationship between the song itself and my video. Who knows, maybe someday one might come across the song and think about a similar analogy. But it is not essential.

The passion for the land roads? Not too far in the past, only three yeas ago, I was traveling to Ankara on the Southern Express train and the train came to a sudden halt two hours after we had left from Istanbul. It was night time and outside it was snowing heavily. We had to wait there on that spot for fifteen hours. That was the longest 15 hours of my life. In Istanbul I am a commuter and travel from the Asian side of the city to the European side everyday and as I look at the traffic I think to myself “How come we manage to make the world such a miserable place for ourselves?”. I keep asking this question to myself and now I have realized that the formula is more complicated than a simple equation of road=speed/time. What keeps my curiosity alive is the fact that I am obsessed with the answer to this question; what does distance and “zeitgeist” mean to me?

As for the asphalt, it has an institutional meaning related to the public and state. It is separated from the provincial in a definite way. It is also ideological. I mean Saudi Arabia, the country producing the greatest amount of oil in the world alone as a country, does not have asphalt paved roads at all. In my opinion the meaning of the asphalt is: “Safe and secure ground, place defined by the state”. The reason why I want to pave asphalt on the ground of the art gallery is also about this kind of assurance apart from making it public. A kind of assurance (work) which people will not be afraid of stepping on, or maybe as a matter of fact, the existence of which might even be overlooked.

Now the photographs we make with Osman Doğu Bingöl. I must say that everything developed spontaneously. We had tried to create an absurd web of dialogues with our environment and each other in a manner of show of vandalism. Just like the momentary reflexes. “What A Beautiful Day” is a telepathic work. What I am referring to is not empathy. Its argument points out to a geographical mood: Potential guilt feeling. The student questioned in the video also witnesses this feeling of his. As for my other works such as the fully packed commuter bus or the students taking an exam during the opening of the exhibition at the K2 Arts Centre, they lead to an unexpected encounter.

Interview with Dobrilla Denegri

2006-10-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

Interview for art-spaces, 2006
Dobrila Denegri

Could you tell me more in detail how is functioning system of contemporary art in Turkey today. Is there a chain of inter-relationships between all those elements that constitutes a system of art: museums and state institutions for the contemporary art – private galleries – curators / art critics – artists – media – public – collectors? Also I’d like to ask if and how they are interacting one to another?

V.K.
It is a unique system! A totally atomized, easily manipulated situation due to years of damage neo-liberal economy, a number of privately supported institutions in competition with each other without even sharing the same field. There is a Ministry of and Tourism, which is a most unfortunate coupling of two different business. So, the priority is conservation of antiquities and historical heritage similar to Italy, and a whole lot of budget is spent on a so-called administration. So, the state is out of the picture except that, in the last years the government increasingly hands out public responsibilities to NGOs and semi-private institutions which in itself is a topic worth discussing. There aren’t many galleries of mention in Istanbul. There is a deficit in galleries that go beyond rehashing insular and local modernities ad infinitum. Only one gallery, “Galerist” has been quite efficient and pioneering. Main support for contemporary art comes from private sources, individuals and certain banks. There is also public funding from West European institutions, which has been on the rise. This produces a more institutionalized context. However, since main support is from private sources lack of collaboration is rampant even on the most basic matters such as coordinating event planning. The situation is getting worse because each private is now busy with its own large institution, like Istanbul Modern, Pera Museum, and SSM. Hence, the scene is more of a spectacle in Istanbul with inextricable connections to tourism, globalised reordering of the city and the entertainment sector. None of these are interested in supporting the new and the emerging but only in those cultural products that can be marketed and labeled easily. Such products could be nothing other than spectacularized representations of a modernity that this place has missed and neglected, or ready-made patrimony. Simply put, creative communities have less space to share their ideas and works than they did a few years ago. Culture of life is very sheltered and conservative here, and artists rarely start initiatives and artist-organized institutions. There is a resurgence in the last year, but we have to see if these are a consequence or an alternative to massification of the cultural sector or an inevitable diversification from within the contemporary art world structures themselves. We also have to see if that they do not produce institutionalization. Even if it has been existing for 30 years strong, private support is still quite timid and self-censoring when it comes to work that carries any political weight. There is also the increasing problem of intimidation by the police, court cases brought against artists and censorship.

Is this lack of state support characteristic only for arts or it tackle also other creative communities?

V.K.: All those creative forces that contribute to the development of dynamic cultural environment are neglected by the state in terms of systematic support but not as much as contemporary art.

Could you tell me more in detail how is functioning Platform – is it a private institution? What is it’s programmatic coordinates and its means of financial sustain?

V.K.: Platform Garanti operates with the responsibility and accountability of a public institution with core private support. We also receive public monies. When the institution was founded in 2001, the mission was to produce a new context, and not follow the pack of existing models. It has an exhibition space, a library and documentation centre, and a residency program. We also collaborate with other institutions and host projects. The 3 parts of the institution are distinct but under the same policy. Exhibition space has a very diverse public, since it is situated in right in the centre of the city. In a way, we neither suffer from a lack of finance nor audience. In 5 years we had more than 500.000 visitors. So, our problem with the audience is one of excess. For this reason it is hard to connect exhibition to our other activities. The documentation centre and the library, we feel, are some of our most important and significant contribution to the city, because we retain a memory that is in effect a comprehensive data-base for students, curators and scholars. We also keep updated archives of artists from Turkey and the diaspora, but also from Greece and other countries of the region. We want to remain a regional institution with strong connects to south-east Mediterranean and south-east Europe. The residency program is increasing more oriented towards these regions and the Caucasus, even though we retain strong links to West-European countries.

Platform’s only mission is deal with the new proposals. As per the exhibitions, every year we changed the program: in the first year we curated most of the shows, while a year after we had a project of “institutional hospitality” which meant that we would invite an institutions to take over our programs. In 2005, it was “Normalisation.”

What is the reception of the contemporary art in Turkey? How do you see that public respond to the activity of Platform? Also how venues like Istanbul biennial communicate to the local public and how do foreign artists establish communication with city and it’s public?

V.K.: For Platform it is hard to say, since public is so excessive, hard to judge the “sustainability” of the reception. What I can perceive is that on the institutional level our model had success, since some more classical institutions have been adopting similar ways to ours. For the other programs, the public is a core group of artists, young curators and the contemporary art community. But let me say that Turkey like many other places is extremely xenophobic. When we have a local issue, the audience will pack it in, if not, the audience drops radically.

Regarding biennial and it’s reception, it depends on the curator. Last biennial went very well in terms of the response of local public, the exhibition created its own discussion spaces. We were very happy with how public acquired the exhibition and “worked” with it as a tool. Of course, the large response of the public corresponds to the significance of the event: The Biennial is really the one and only cultural event of historic importance.

For the foreign artists, it is one the easiest cities to interact with and merge into if you are open and have an approach that is not prejudgemental.

What are objective conditions of work for the emerging artists in Turkey and what are the ways for them to gain visibility? Also, are they interested in living and working within local cultural milieu or it’s more important for them to leave Turkey and integrate to the international art scene?

V.K.:
Increasing number of artists from West Europe come to live in Istanbul, and at the same time there is an exodus out for which the artists here cannot be blamed. The background is increasing populism, everyday violence, the decline in the EU process, and the violent resurgence of the Kurdish separatist movement after years of zero progress offered by the state. Then, there is a lack of critical discourse, horrific quality of newspaper reviews, indifferent institutions of art, and the domestication of artists by private galleries and institutions. Places like Platform seem to be rarities. The artists-of-interest from here show mostly abroad anyhow. I think that many artists have resigned themselves or fully recognized that the conditions that they have waited for so long may never arrive even if their practice may be so specifically rooted here. On the other hand, Istanbul is a still comfortable city so as an artist you can always get by. Most artists don’t live just from their work, but with something else on the side. It is of note that younger artists are more interested in going to Cairo, Beirut or Belgrade than Basel or Amsterdam.

Oda Projesi is example of the artist’s interest in dealing with local context – are there similar initiatives and what could you tell me about them. This kind of work with local community was quite appreciated within the last Istanbul Biennial that you and Charles Esche curated.

V.K.: Oda Projesi received a lot of attention because it created a non-representational model and broke down the duality of community and audience. Whatever we expect an artist group or an initiative to be was not satisfied. We were not interested in them making an exhibition or documentation for us. We invited them to the Biennial in the form of a publication they had in planning. The other initiatives, and there are quite a few now in Istanbul, are like alternative artist-initiatives that we know from many different places which is fine, but you need contexts like Oda that throws open unpredictable questions. Last year, Oda lost its space and neighborhood due to gentrification and they have been quite dormant, and I very much doubt that they can pursue a similar course in the future.

How do you see relationship of Turkey and Mediterranean area in general in relation to Europe or West in general in the terms of contemporary art and culture of course? You were talking about “irreconcilabilities” – could you tell me more on what you mean with that?

V.K.:
This is an Italian question, I watch with great bemusement how Italy and France and to much lesser degree Spain lay a claim to leadership of the Mediterranean in culture. But, anyway, the South-East Mediterranean region has recently evoked a lot of interest from West European institutions. But this interest is framed within “geographical” exhibitions or "exhibitions of belief." We seem to be obfuscating the serious issues here. This is such a provisional moment that I do not feel strong enough to comment about it. We met in June to start this interview. By the time I came back to tidy it up, the situation in Iraq got much worse, Israel invaded Lebanon and destroyed the whole infrastructure in the West Bank, and the Pope mouthed off hatred of Islam. How would I answer you know and how I would have answered you three months ago could not be the same.

Frieze Projects: Artists Commissions and Talks 2003-05

2005-10-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

‘New Internationalism’ / Frieze Projects: Artists Commissions and Talks 2003-05
A book that records the curatorial programme produced at the fair over the past three years.

‘New Internationalism’, 1pm, Saturday 16 October 2004
Alex Farquharson, Chair
Chus Martinez
Vasif Kortun
Neil Mulholland
Adam Szymczyk

ALEX FARQUHARSON Welcome, everyone, to this afternoon’s discussion on ‘New Internationalism’. My name is Alex Farquharson. I’m a critic and curator based in London and I teach curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Arts. We have with us Neil Mulholland, from Edinburgh, a curator, critic and teacher. He lectures in contemporary art and theory at the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Arts. In 2003 Ashgate published his book, The Cultural Devolution in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century. Neil also made a documentary that year on David Shrigley with Channel Four. He’s currently working on a book on, in his words, viral developments in art design, advertising, culture jamming, music, computing, architecture and urbanism. We also have Chus Martinez, who is the curator at the contemporary art space sala rekalde in Bilbao, and Adam Szymczyk, who was appointed director of Kunsthalle Basel in 2002. Prior to that Adam was a critic and curator and one of the founding directors of the influential Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw. Lastly we have Vasif Kortun, the director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, which he established in 2001 in Istanbul. Vasif is the co-curator of the 1992 Istanbul Biennial and forthcoming biennial in 2005. He also founded the museum in the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in upstate New York, and the Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art.

Today we will be discussing such questions as: does the rapid development of new international art centres encourage greater cultural diversity, or has it resulted in a new international orthodoxy? Who aspires to participate in this situation and who benefits from the attention received? How can discourse keep up with information? We’re going to speak about local versus global perspectives, the economy of art fairs and the biennial effect. We’re also going to consider one of the talk’s proposed titles, which was ‘New Art Centres, Emerging Markets’, as a subtitle. The growth of global markets and communication networks has resulted in a rapid rise of hot new international centres of art production. What does it mean to experience this attention? How does this affect the production of art? Is it divisive or inclusive?

I first came across the term ‘New Internationalism’ in 1994, though I imagine it has a longer history than that. It was in a publication of a conference that the London visual arts agency inIVA had organized, called ‘Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts’. The term seems quite prophetic, especially if we consider the biennial phenomenon. Until the late 1990s – Catherine David’s Documenta X [1997] could serve as a watershed – biennials were a ‘best-of’ affair. Artists were overwhelmingly drawn from Western Europe and North America. Now the grand old dames of the biennial world have turned their focus to new centres of production, and, at the same time, we’ve witnessed exponential growth in smaller biennials outside Western Europe and America, from Dakar to Havana to Shanghai. In this context, the biennial is the point at which the art world is most connected to globalism. Actual cities haven’t changed nearly as much as the exhibition sector has.

New internationalism immediately brings up the question of what old internationalism might be. I associate the term with the International Style in architecture, which is in a sense a notorious interpretation, since the International Style originated principally in North America and Western Europe. However if we see old internationalism as meaning North America and Western Europe, new internationalism is clearly global in reach. A lot of problems emerge from this. Only a small class of people have the time and resources to travel and research to the extent necessary to put together a globally representative exhibition. James Meyer argued in Artforum that criticism has been one of the losers in new internationalism – curators are shaping discourse and critics haven’t got access to the same amount of knowledge. You also have single individuals who have become associated with whole metropolises or, indeed, entire continents: Okwui Enwezor’s Africa, Hou Hanru’s East Asia, even Carlos Basualdo’s Latin America. Magazines respond to the dilemma by either breathlessly trying to keep up – and becoming short on interpretation – or retreating to pre-globalized circumstances, concentrating on their immediate artistic environment. In terms of the powerful magazines this means the traditional bases of the art world: New York, for example, or London.

These observations are more questions than statements, and perhaps we’ll pick up on them later. We’ll start the discussion with Chus Martinez.

CHUS MARTINEZ First of all, I would like to thank Frieze for the opportunity to be here today. Coming from Bilbao, new internationalism is especially relevant to me. As Alex mentioned, I’m the curator of sala rekalde, a public contemporary-art space which was in Bilbao before the Guggenheim Museum arrived. We work in the shadows of an international enterprise, and so it’s important to us to understand what internationalism means. Everyone talks about globalism and internationalism as communication – how we can communicate with other communities, and what we communicate to other communities. For the city of Bilbao the Guggenheim embodies a total internationalism, the totally safe internationalism. It was a very important project in that it put Bilbao on the map and brought tourism in, but also in what it meant for the city’s security. There are certain political issues in the Basque country, as across in Spain, where different regions have different ideas about identity. Since the Guggenheim is not at all talking about Bilbao, it embodies the abstract, fantastic and very standard idea of an internationalism that is safe to the political project. You would think it would be nice to be put on the map, but the funny thing about the internationalism that the Guggenheim embodies is that it is a global product that can be sold to anyone, regardless of where they are.

In an interview with a Spanish newspaper I once mentioned that the city maps should show all three of Bilbao’s art institutions – the museum for fine arts, the contemporary art centre and the Guggenheim museum. The government immediately called and told me my comment was too political. How I could I claim to compare myself with the Guggenheim? They were afraid that sala rekalde’s ideas of contemporary art were different from the internationalism of the Guggenheim. It’s true, sala rekalde doesn’t address the same international audience that the Guggenheim does, and we cannot be international in the same way that the Guggenheim is. Our internationalism means establishing trans-national communication with communities that share the same problems of cultural production, cultural agency, cultural research and cultural communication. Many of the institutions in Spain that have been created over the past 20 years do not address the need of a community to articulate its internal questions, such as memory or history. The Spanish identity is highly problematic, and institutions seem to think it’s better not to touch on that.

Sala rekalde was created in 1992 in the basement of a government building, below the offices of the Minister of Culture of the region, in order to prepare the city for the Guggenheim. The government were playing with the idea of having a big museum for contemporary art, and they wanted to complete the programme by having a Basque space of their own. During the eight years before the Guggenheim opened sala rekalde mostly hosted exhibitions that were produced elsewhere. They were essentially updating the audience, which is very common, at least in my country. It was like buying Vogue – you learn what the others are doing. When the Guggenheim opened, the city wanted to close sala rekalde – why do you need two institutions updating the audience, especially when one is better? There was a big public discussion, and in the end they decided to keep it. But they also decided that it would be politically awkward to launch a programme contextualizing Basque art production, showing the links between, for example, the underground art and punk movements of the 1980s and 1990s and the political discourse of separatism. That’s why we are now trying to link ourselves with other communities. Internationalism is what prevents us from being closed down. The institution space is a completely common white cube – it looks like a bank, but that’s not important. It only exists to show exhibitions.

I want to end on the question of how we can attempt international or trans-national work. Our priority is to look to ourselves first. We had an exhibition in 2004 by a Basque artist called Sergio Prego, which addressed the relationship of Spain to contemporary art history. It posed the question of where we had been – we were only connected to this history through books and documentation. Spain has never been an active part of the discourse. Prego proposed a lateral entry, so to speak, into the canon. For the first time in Spain, he performed the Trisha Brown piece Walking on the Walls, which Brown did at the Whitney in 1970. By bringing the piece to Spain he reinserted himself into the art-historical tradition and the international art world, and forced sala rekalde to examine its place in the larger community of the art world.

ALEX FARQUHARSON Thank you. And now we’ll move on to Neil, who’s going to show a video.

[Video presentation]
‘Culture aids, aesthetic consultants, Kunst commanders, visual literacy instructors, women, collective culture workers, brother and sister guerrillas rustling large bank notes at the rear of the auditorium, on behalf of Tato and Tato, I greet you and congratulate you. I’m president of Kiam Kunst Contracts, a cultural contracting conglomerate commissioned by typographies to undertake a $5 million audit on the availability of opportunities for the continual continuing professional development of those working for nothing in the global cultural sector. We identify areas which require further expensive consultation exercises. The result of my consultation proves, as it always does, that the ultimate aim of all creative activity is to build a global economy. In the future functional art must be used to explain change by providing focus for debates about space, time and power and that sort of stuff. Any time of day, any day of the week the global community should be able to enjoy exciting biennials, structured multi-dimensionally from a broad range of no less than six culturally invested portfolios – the economy, the environment, utopia, gender, technology, urbanism, the city. Enabled audiences will check off each cultural portfolio that they want from this pre-check menu. If they don’t see everything that they want this is simply because they are looking through the brown tinted glasses of the past. The new internationalism will make its tricks more palatable by wrapping them in rhetoric about the need to protect the new interests of the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. The new internationalism and its prolix lieutenants will one day laugh about this in private, knowing that our hour has come.
Only the rapid development of new art centres and the growth of biennials will ensure that our societies are pushed and pulled in many different directions at the same time. New art centres are the only viable response to globalization and the multi-layered structuring of social reality. The world will only keep up with the world by improving the availability of the labour market’s intelligence and projecting future cultural needs by embracing the just-in-time delivery system. We must accelerate the re-skilling of cultural works and speed up new processes by emphasizing the values of instant pleasure, disposability and speed. Discourse can only keep up with information using the latest technologies such as frozen food, laser beams, telepathy, picnics, tables and chairs, bookshelves. Let us crush ethno-history and vernacular mobilization, and the global desire to create convincing differentiated cultural basis. Let us desire, conceive and create the new art centre of the future together, a brave new world of cultural and spatial recursive serial monotony. Let us create a new guild of international cultural workers with the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between art and audiences. Let domination of capital reinforce again theoretical forms, interaction once and for all time, providing architecture, art and money in a single form. Like terrorism, drug smuggling, global warming and nuclear weapons, arts internationalism will help us to beautifully homogenize our business. Refurbished mock docks will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million cultural workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith, improving access to advice, relevant business skills and training.’

ALEX FARQUHARSON Thank you for that. Vasif?

VASIF KORTUN I’d like to address a few things, Alex, you introduced the frame, but first I would like to go back about 15 years, to the end of the 1980s. If you remember, there was a feeling of insecurity and helplessness then, in particular an isolation on the part of the USA and a certain internationalism - the limits of which were drawn by Venice, Sydney and the Sao Paulo Biennials. The globalization of the field is in large part due to a metaphoric homelessness of workers in the cultural field. Cultural workers – curators, artists, writers – are never quite at home as the field of contemporary is always yet to be seen, experienced, and tested. They have a second home, thanks to the internet and such, within an international community, an umbrella that provides an intellectual, collaborative support base, this is the only way one can withstand conservative forces and reduce vulnerability. In the 1980s we were also immersed in post-Structuralist and post-colonial thought. The negative situation here, is that the outcome of this situation somewhat obfuscated class difference and social change that should have been invariably tied to an egalitarian economic system. Furthermore, the 1980s saw the end of the dictatorships in Latin America and later burea-style socialism. In a way, these inefficient models of control were simply replaced by a more efficient model of control – within which the neo-liberal economy should have been suspect of being one of its privileged subjects.

I went to a conference in 1990 in Venice called ‘Expanding Internationalism’, which was the first of its kind, an eye-opener for me, at least. About 50 people from 30 different countries came – all the main practitioners of the field, from Catherine David to Paolo Herkenhoff. The issues that we discussed then were wish lists, which have still not been fulfilled. The opening speech was by the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha – whom I had invited to Istanbul in 1989, alas unsuccessfully, as the British Council of the time turned down our funding request on the basis that they did not think Bhabha qualified to give a talk in Turkey – just imagine that kind of world. Anyway, Bhabha spoke about the need to end binary internationalism and its implications of a social destiny of difference. He advocated hybridisation, cultural simultaneity and, eventually, the idea of third space that would be neither ‘centre’ nor ‘periphery’. Another issue at stake was multiculturalism. We tried to determine whether the aesthetic criteria for judging work that represents a multicultural perspective were different from those used to assess mainstream art. Is multicultural work ghettoized, both because of its geography and because it is charged with agendas that are unfamiliar to the mainstream? There was also a schism between the ideas of cultural diversity and cultural difference. A final issue was the question of audience and host geographies. Who gets to see these shows in different places, and how is the show made ready for a local audience? Paolo Herkenhoff, particularly in his 1998 Sao Paulo biennial, addressed this beautifully. He rethought the history of the place, rethought the history of the exhibition and based the biennial on the idea of anthropophagi, which means feeding on flesh — of oneself or that of another. It had to do with the histories of Brazil, also colonialisms. That’s all I’m going to say right now, and then I’ll come back to your topics.

ALEX FARQUHARSON GREAT, THANK YOU. ADAM?

ADAM SZYMCZYK I was trying to find something in this notion of new internationalism that could be productive. I thought of the year 1871 and the socialist anthem, The Internationale. The Internationale, which was written during the Paris commune, was supposed to unite the human race. But this version of new internationalism, as announced by the organizers of this panel and of the Frieze Art Fair, is about something else. Why bring up the subject of internationalism within the context of an international art fair? Would the discussion be about the market, or would the border-free international state of mind find its metaphor in the Internet and networking? Would this art fair aim to represent the world in all its diversity? This was the goal of world exhibitions in the past, which were modelled after the modern city with avenues and attractions. The Frieze advertising leaflet tells us, significantly, that the galleries present in the fair come from places as far apart as Warsaw, where I’ve come from, and Mexico, where some of my friends are from. These two cities, Warsaw and Mexico, are perhaps faraway outposts of the international art world but there are just two of them here, and they are called upon to legitimize the aspiration to represent the diversity that any art fair has. The majority of the galleries, which make the market what it is, come from the Western Europe and the US. The modern art market is a Western European invention and it remains one at the moment. I think it will remain so no matter how many galleries from these other countries one would include.

In my view the subject of new internationalism appears here for several different reasons. One is that in this year, 2004, a number of post-communist countries entered the European Union, and the mainstream media and politicians of Western Europe have suddenly turned their focus to them. That translates into a general interest in the various fields of economic activity that flourish in those Eastern countries, and one field in particular that appears like a promised land is contemporary art. However, the new Eastern countries are not integrated culturally into Europe, and I personally hope they will never be. Historically, politically and culturally, the two parts of Europe work from within different frames of references. The language of the East doesn’t translate easily, and sometimes I doubt if it translates at all. You can see it in the artworks produced in Warsaw. They are difficult to represent within the machine of international biennials, where they are levelled down or reduced to statements illustrating topics such as inclusion and exclusion, narratives of border, economic and social change, immigration or, more recently, the rediscovery of Modernism. Quite recently an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal Europe – which is a fairly non-international title for a magazine dealing with global money – in which the author described new art from Poland, primarily painting, as fresh, promising and still affordable investments.

So instead of speaking about the common ideals of the human race we talk about global markets and Internet networks. What does it mean to experience this attention? How does it affect the production of art? Is it divisive or inclusive? These are the questions that you raised. I think that that internationalism is both divisive and inclusive. Inclusive in a sense of the artists’ becoming one-year superstars in the international market and subsequently getting shows all around the world. Exclusive in the sense of eliminating the possibility of inventing specific and particular discourses or languages of description. I was invited to this panel as a representative from one of the new art centres. I do not represent any centre. I’ve been living in Basel, Switzerland, for a year now, which is only a centre in the sense that various currents of international money intersect there.

The situation in Warsaw is different. Warsaw, where I lived and worked for ten years, is definitely not the centre and doesn’t see itself as a centre, contrary to the recent hype. It’s a peripheral, slightly parochial and remote place between what used to be the German Democratic Republic and the USSR, and which now is in the most troubled part of Germany and the East. One could also say, in a more optimistic manner, that Warsaw is just six hours on the train from Berlin. But Poland is a vast and unknown territory where even the locals do not feel at home. Nor do the visitors who’d like to get to know it in a short period of time, preferably on a weekend trip. It’s a city which was shattered during the Second World War. Its intellectuals were killed or deported by Nazis. The Jewish population was exterminated and the monuments to its past were reduced to smouldering piles of rubble. In these circumstances a new master plan was introduced immediately after the war and completed around the year 1950, which opened the way to an incurable historicism in Warsaw’s attitude towards its past.

The old Warsaw was almost fully reconstructed within a few years after the war and this moment has become an ever-present representation. In Warsaw we inhabit an image, a spectacle of sorts, and not a real place that testifies to its history. We are confronted daily with new old buildings. Recently the 18th-century classicist town hall was rebuilt, quite exactly, to host the headquarters of Warsaw branch of Citibank and other financial institutions. The buildings do not serve their original functions and Warsaw is suspended in schizophrenia. There are several other languages at work in the city but they are constantly under attack. Conservative critics want to replace the late-modernist architecture of the sixties and early seventies – examples of the city’s recent and real history – with reconstructions of historical buildings or, worse, pseudo-Postmodern architecture of low quality. Immediately after the transition from communism to democracy, art in countries like Poland was seen as conveying these new values, as an avant-garde of change. After two years of market economy this changed completely. Art was no longer an important medium which confronted people with new values of freedom and so on, but was again a commodity.

Between 1929 and 1931, a group of artists and writers put together the International Collection of Modern Art in Lodz, supported, at the time, by the social democratic city government. They managed to gain the support of such artists as Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Theo van Doesburg, Fernand Léger and Kurt Schwitters and Polish artists of equal stature, like Leon Chwistek and Karol Hiller. The collection, which was shown for the first time in 1931, included 111 works and became the core of what is now the Museum of Modern or Contemporary Art in Lodz. It was built on gifts, if we may use an expression which is less official than donations, but perhaps more adequate for describing the donors’ intentions. It is noteworthy to see that this collection was not called the Collection of International Contemporary Art but the International Contemporary Art Collection. Art wasn’t seen as an international phenomenon. Instead, the collection aimed to represent different avant-garde movements without denying the specificity of its origins, whether in France, Germany, Hungary, Poland or Russia. Based on this story, I still see museums as having potential to be positive international phenomena.

ALEX FARQUHARSON One point that comes through in these presentations is the risk that the particularity of an artist’s work will get lost when it appears in a conventional centre of art, or that artists and art scenes are overburdened by having to represent something broader than their own practice. Adam mentioned how the subtleties of certain works are lost if they do not make a statement that is immediately translatable to an international discourse. I wonder whether, as curators and writers, you could offer ideas on how your role is different in Basel as compared to London.

VASIF KORTUN Since I run an institution, I could address this. The idea that there are conventional centres of art and non-mainstream centres of art could be misleading. In your introduction you mentioned magazines in New York and London, and when I think of magazines, I think of Idea from Romania, Sarai Reader from India, or I think of artist from Istanbul. There’s a lot of interesting literature coming from diverse publications. It may not be Flash Art. Similarly, the inability of criticism to come to terms with large international exhibitions is because, classically, journalistic criticism is based on connoisseurship, on individual works. With biennials, because of the sheer numbers and the complexity of proposals, no one can know all the artists around the world any longer. The world has expanded, it has literally become unknowable, and there are several leagues – not leagues divided not through quality, but of focus and interest. The league of the biennials and itinerant curators, and institutions like mine, may be at one place. There is another league of galleries, dealers and institutional curators. This is by no means a neat division. There are perforations and transfers.

There is no doubt that we have gone through amazing changes in the last 15 years, which were completely unforeseen and unforeseeable at the beginning of 1990. However, this has not taken full effect in museum collections, which are supposed to store, archive and preserve the common culture of history. Museums only pay lip service to contemporary art, with limited forays into collecting. You have a piece by an artist from China because there’s somebody on your board from China. Brazil, Mexico and Japan are hot points as well because of the density of funds from there. Of course you have to take this into account if you’re running a collection. The problem is that there are no historical collecting policies expanding into the modern times for our common cultural histories. How can one claim to have a modern collection without having major pieces from Japan or Poland or Russia? How can an institution claim that they have an international collection without having a major Brazilian modern component in it? We may not be exercising a wrong narrative, but we keep on seeing the writing of wrong narratives.

ALEX FARQUHARSON Neil, your presentation blurred the distinction between a critical engagement with globalization and the workings of globalization itself, and seemed to suggest that new internationalism, particularly as borne out in large-scale international exhibitions, reflects the economic process of globalization. Could you elaborate on that?

NEIL MULHOLLAND To me, new internationalism tries to act as a police force. When globalization manifests itself in major exhibitions, it is always based on the notion that art ought to be responsible – that it should take on issues like the peace movement, trade unionism or arguments about the movement of capital. That doesn’t allow room for any other idea or any kind of irresponsible notion or practice to emerge. I’m not interested in the idea that I should have a responsible role in relation to Scotland or Manchester. I’m not interested in new internationalism as a priest figure.

ALEX FARQUHARSON I’d like to open up questions from the floor now.

QUESTION Right now the European Social Forum is taking place not far from here in Regent’s Park. At the forum the issue of internationalism and the anti-global or counter-global alternative is essential. Here, we are holding a similar intellectual discussion about very political and very hot topics, but no one’s political position seems clear. Is it important for the art establishment to follow specifically communist internationalist roads? It’s a subject Derrida treats in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994).

ADAM SZYMCZYK I don’t think I can easily clarify my political position. I’m not so interested in theoretical revitalisation of communism. The socialist International is appealing, but I don’t think we should import the notion wholesale into practice.

VASIF KORTUN Your reference assumes that society is organized along labour lines. Labour is being decimated. The union has disappeared and the systems of checks and balances have disappeared. Hence, the classic social organizations, which claim to extend their needs to the public space are left on the edge. As much as we can lament over this, we now talk about con-stellar systems, micro-societies, small urban communities, networks and temporary alliances. In that regard we’ve still got to take political positions but the enemy is too abstract to identify anymore.

NEIL MULHOLLAND You can’t say that trade unionism has completely vanished. You can attain some of its aims within a smaller political region. For example, in Scotland it’s possible to achieve progressive policies because there’s a different will and there’s a different assembly. There are some aspects of politics that are dictated by global trends but that doesn’t mean that there’s no alternative.

VASIF KORTUN But the whole notion of the international union of unions, international alliances, that’s gone.

QUESTION When we look at internationalism, there are things that we know about and things that we don’t know about yet, and usually the things that we know about make us cynical. We know that the art world inadvertently provides the detonation for a global market, for instance. Bu the things we don’t know about yet might be worth speaking about, because there is good reason for hope. At the moment we don’t know what Europe is or what Europe might be. In these communities that we can’t yet conceive of, art could open up the horizon. Maybe I’m being too optimistic but it could be worthwhile talking about.

CHUS MARTINEZ It’s true, we’re talking about internationalism as a given or as something with a fixed meaning. We need to create a network of projects that ask similar questions in order to really talk about culture. Culture can’t survive in regional closed systems. Therefore, we do need an international project but I don’t think that we are yet sophisticated enough to speak about that. That’s what the future would be: new ways to address internationalism without talking about exportation, issues of representation or the responsibility of the local curator to voice the so-called problems. That, for me, is not important anymore. It’s a way of talking of working together, in my opinion, but we need to find new ways. Any time you talk about anybody in Spain, they ask whether you can you sell it in Paris, London or New York. In their minds internationalism is a very restricted area of the world. How do we rescue these ideas from them? I think somebody kidnapped internationalism from us in Bilbao.

NEIL MULHOLLAND Isn’t it a case of working on a smaller scale, rather than on massive projects where there is no connection between the community and the space? Is it not simply that we need a lot of smaller spaces in the world that are connected to each other?

CHUS MARTINEZ Every time we name internationalism we are kind of naming a strange brief interface. You come to a weekend at an art fair, and you meet international people and we call it an encounter. Somehow that seems sufficient. The question is that that internationalism we are naming is a strange non-communication. It’s just acknowledging the others, seeing them and then putting them on the map.

QUESTION Maybe Vasif or Adam could respond to these points in light of Platform Garanti or Foksal Gallery.

ADAM SZYMCZYK We set up the Foksal Gallery Foundation because we felt that there was a deficit of information. We also wanted to work closely with local artists, to help them create work but also to follow the development of one idea by different artists. We began collaborating with other institutions and curating shows outside of our project space. Having physical space became less significant throughout the ’90s. If you look at the acquisitions of Polish art by a major museum, we have been very successful. For example, the Tate Collection has works of Nils Forsberg that were acquired in the mid-’90s, and they’ve recently acquired a work by Pawel Althamer. We managed to improve the way artwork is communicated. We made it possible to praise the work of artists like Pawel Althamer or other artists in a more layered and shaded context, so that they are no longer understood as simply sentimental or nostalgic work coming from the East.

VASIF KORTUN In Istanbul in 1989, after the fall of communism and the changes in the Balkans, we thought we could open communication with Europe, and establish a programme with Bulgaria, with Romania and suyh, but it’s only now, ten or 12 years later, that the idea of a network of regional collaboration has been re-imagined at a concrete level. For us, that means the south east Mediterranean and south-east Europe. We have a major archive at Platform in Istanbul, which is open to visiting curators for research for any exhibition, be it Documenta or the Venice Biennale. We want to expand the archive so that we also have a mirror in Istanbul of Amman, for example, or Cairo, and eventually Beirut. We aren’t producing local exhibitions – everyone else is doing it in Istanbul anyhow. Our idea as an open institution based on hospitality.

ALEX FARQUHARSON We’ve come to the end of our timeframe so it just remains for me to say thank you to the panel for exploring these highly ambiguous issues. Thank you very much

Introductory Text for the Reader

2005-10-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

with Charles Esche
Introductory Text for the Reader
9th Istanbul Biennial

The 9th Istanbul Biennial is not a survey. It is not an attempt to sum up the state of art today or to represent certain tendencies in contemporary practice. It is a series of artistic projects made for and selected with the city of Istanbul constantly in mind. This city, which has formed the backdrop to every Istanbul biennial since 1987, becomes the actual environment within which this biennial is constructed and to which viewers will return during and after their visit.

The best art makes us think something we could not have thought without it. In the tradition of both modernist and avant-garde practices, art serves as a tool to challenge existing models and propose alternatives. While modernism was arguably more concerned with aesthetics, it is the avant-garde tradition, with its hermeneutic role of questioning meaning, out of which much of the work in this biennial emerges more directly. The 9th biennial understands itself as a forum for proposing meaning out of the signs of a particular place and time. Those propositions are made in the personal and intimate terms that define the relationship between individual artist and city, as well as the proposed relationship between artwork and viewer.

Amongst the projects, there is a necessary variety of topics and responses. Around half of the artists live in or were invited to Istanbul for a longer period of work and study. Some came with existing ideas and proposals; others let the city brush against them before deciding on the general direction of their work. The artists were selected in large measure because, as curators, we knew and trusted them and their ways of working. We had no idea what would result from the invitations and will not really know before the opening day. Alongside these new commissions, we took it on ourselves to select largely existing work from artists working in related ways in other places in the world. We did this in order to broaden the variety of ways in which visitors could read the biennial and avoid a kind of dumb Istanbul essentialism. Yet our hope is that the works will also reflect on Istanbul, through visualising what it is not, or offering a confirmation of the similarity between different geographic, cultural and social locations.

It is important in this process to understand that an Istanbulism without humility becomes very problematic not only given the city’s own past as the centre of a conquering empire but also because the transformation of the city produces a range of new inequalities that are often hidden in a process of celebrating dynamic change. To counter this tendency, the biennial positions Istanbul as a real, lived place and not a label in the race of competing marketable cities. This biennial is not a tool for selling the city to global capitalism but an agency for presenting it to its citizens and others with eyes awry.

From passing remarks and chance encounters to intimate portraits of individuals, the biennial unfolds as a series of encounters with the real and imagined city. As the most populous city in Europe, and as one of the pivotal urban conurbations in history, there is far more to Istanbul than this biennial can capture. It is in their specific and precise address to certain subjects that the artists working in Istanbul stake a claim to say something about this place and its people. Whether the biennial succeeds or fails will be marked by the degree to which the works allow others familiar with the city to see new visions and ideas of what it is and what it could be.

THE BIENNIAL AS A TOOL
All major biennials are important interfaces between art and a larger public. We are conscious of the fact that they have become privileged agents in the planetary redistribution of art and that they have also served to launder cities in preparation for the new economy of the 1990s. They are created in large part by international freelancers in the knowledge industry - in this case, independent curators. The latter are thrown into a so-called free-market competition with each other seeking similar funding sources, artists and critical spaces. Hence, they are by definition do-or-die post-dictatorial events, and often substitute the conscience of an urgent present for a painful past. They divulge and obscure at the same time, but hardly reveal their own machinations at all.

They also exist out of a demand from cities to be part of contemporary culture and share its fruits with their populations and tourists. This is an aspect to be emphasised because it contains within it the seeds of an educational and informative possibility. Biennials can also demand more attention and press response simply by virtue of their name, and this can also be used to encourage a wide spectrum interface with its potential local audience, perhaps introducing the idea of critical art practices to people for the first time.

However the interface role of the biennial is a less interesting description for this event. Instead, its description as a tool through which art can shape the world and have purchase on its viewers has had much more influence on our use of the structure. While 365 day a year institutions have a more vital role in local situations, the biennial can identify and define a position for art in public consciousness and create the conditions from which it can be further explored. In shaping this curatorial vision, it is this analogy with the tool that provides the most useful comparison – a tool to energise vision and discipline the imagination. In this sense, Istanbul is not only the subject of this biennial but also its operational field. Istanbul as a city in radical flux has become a rectified bride on a course for a ruthless marriage with privatisation. In the process, it has been attracting exhibitions of scale, new museums and media-savvy sport events. Therefore, to locate the promise of the biennial outside event culture has been a daunting task. To resist it in part, the biennial and through it the city, has to provide the artists with a set of conditions to which they could respond personally. This leaves open the possibility that artists can create new visibility for marginalised or hidden elements that are not usually considered suitable subjects for cosmopolitan celebration and the resulting artworks are then placed the back into the city to incite further reaction.

The tradition of the Biennial in Istanbul was also a formative influence that we sought to divert a little. Previous iterations engaged the use of either former national industrial sites waiting to be opened to experience economy, or opted for the Byzantine past in the historical peninsula. If the first took its cues from global economy and signified a transition from hard production to the soft sectors of service and tourism, the latter banked on enveloping the artists’ production in physical matter of history as a way to heighten the works connection to its locality, exhibition after exhibition. From another perspective, it became very evident that within the new master plan of the city, the tip of the historical peninsula had developed from being the press and media centre of Istanbul to a zone dedicated only to tourists. Hence, to repropose this zone for the exhibition would be tantamount to regarding each viewer as a potential tourist, constructing a relationship between viewer and artwork that relied on passive observation of an already sanctioned contemporary culture. Perhaps more importantly, it also led to the wresting away of the project from the urgency of the everyday city by locating the artists on alien turf.

Our efforts to find vacant sites —often former factories that reflected upon the development of the city in the 1950s— were luckily met with frustration. We lost the spaces sooner than we found them. At some point along the way, we realized that the city was privatising faster than the process of our exhibition, and this was not a development to which we wanted to give succour. Instead, we decided to disappear the exhibition into the city, choosing relatively anonymous and workaday buildings that would give the artists an unflamboyant ground for their work
One of the crucial tasks we have as curators is to shape all the encounters that are involved between artists, city, architecture and viewer, and to leave their potential responses as open as possible. The title of ‘Istanbul’ should therefore not be understood as a theme, but rather as a platform from which all parties can launch themselves into the exhibition and its relation to the city surrounding them. Particularly where the delicate process of commissioning and presenting a new work is concerned, it is important that the artists have free space to negotiate their own position. Ambiguity is, after all, an essential characteristic of an art that makes new thoughts possible and it is always through contact with something unknown or uncertain that fresh possibility materialises - a statement that applies to artist, curator and viewer alike. For viewers unused to such uncertainty, the challenge is to open themselves willingly, hopefully driven by a desire to see what these artists have made of their city. We must all be aware that the security of fixed meanings and established quality only emerge over time, something that contemporary art by its nature excludes.

Aside from creating this platform for the protagonists, we also felt compelled to take a position in regards to the context of the biennial as a global exhibition model itself. This event seeks to contribute to a greater variety of ways of dealing with the structure of these two yearly exhibitions. The burgeoning phenomenon of the biennial since 1989 has driven much of the art world’s global expansion. In the wake of socialism’s collapse and global economic growth, artists could suddenly reach out to the free market in order to sustain themselves and their practice. Biennials became the central vehicles through which such work was validated in the art circuit and began to acquire value. In itself, there is not anything categorically wrong with this. The circulation of art has always been quite a pragmatic affair and opportunities were offered and taken by artists in the process.

The danger is more long term. Firstly, there is a homogenising effect on the events themselves through their reproduction. It leads them to tend towards cultural versions of collective, global product launches, sending out new ideas into the art field in the hope that some will survive market testing. It could be argued that to see biennials turned into similar events from Venice to Sharjah or Sao Paolo to Gwangju interestingly undermines the old idea of distinction that marked classical art out as different from other human activities, thus fulfilling certain avant-garde ambitions. But it does so, not with the avant-garde’s wish to integrate art and life but rather in the name of the total consumption of art by the global free market. Art as a product, even a pure intellectual one, cannot be sustained as art in any of the senses that we understand it from modernist and avant-garde tradition. Instead, it would become a conformist decoration, subject to political goals and little more than propaganda. Indeed, art in its mode would bear close comparison to the forms of approved social realism under real existing socialism in Europe. As a footnote, it might help to appreciate the significance of art to alternative ways of thinking by remembering how most dictatorial societies find a need to control its creators strictly, for fear of small, contrary ideas ‘infecting’ society at large. It must be true then that only an art that is pluralist and heterogeneous in its modes of conception and reception contributes to an emancipatory dialogue with the world. We therefore need difference in our celebrations of visual culture in over to feed difference more generally – and to be able to imagine what kind of creativity might challenge the free market conservatism that dominates our present economic and political imagination.

There is a second danger that biennials might represent to the idea of art as a forum for alternative thinking. This is that, through their apparent complicity with the dominant doctrine of the market, they could lose the trust of the public. Biennales, like many other art institutions, are part of what remains of the fragmented public sphere today. While privatisation is apparently successful in economic terms, its application to urban space and cultural activities threatens the vital notion of the public interest, as a countervailing force to the private forces of capital. If art as a field becomes overly connected in the public imagination to issues of ownership and market value or overtly attached to the identity of wealthy individuals, then it loses its possibility to effect the public sphere discourse and weakens its trust in the eyes of its potential public. This might ultimately threaten the kind of undisciplined knowledge that art can claim to produce or at least its credibility would be sorely tested by its attachment to vested interests.

RELOCATING THE BIENNIAL
The 9th Istanbul Biennial attempts to tackle these issues in its structure and presentation. Deciding that the biennial would be made for and about Istanbul was an important gesture in locating the projects within a public discourse, or simply pointing out some imaginative possibilities to which the public discourse in the city could respond. Inviting the artists early, providing residencies and organising talks throughout the year prior to the opening were further ways in which we believed that the final exhibitions would connect sufficiently with the city to be meaningful for its public. The venues themselves are distributed within the Beyoglu and Galata districts of Istanbul. These districts that greatly expanded in the late 19th century, became the most critical trade and commercial hub of the city, and were the first manifestations of public sphere with massive minority populations, consulates and places of worship. From 1950s on, the business in the Beyoglu district was violently Turkified and Galata became host to small sweatshops and a home to immigrant populations. Since the late 1980s, the district has been redesignated as a culture and entertainment zone, the results of which are evident everywhere. The municipal policy of the area is to remarket the aura of the late 19th century city through the promotion of the area name ‘Pera’ as a marketing tool. We approach this area from leftfield so to speak, eliminating any reference to this semi-colonial period by using smaller sites and spaces and literally allowing the exhibition to be swallowed by the fabric of the neighbourhood. We hope to demonstrate a modesty in scale by operating with the principle of ‘just enough’, eliminating white-cube solutions wherever possible and using the routes between sites for discreet projects.

Shifting from the historical city centre to the Beyoglu and Galata area also marked a change in the direction of the event’s address. Pointing it less towards the interests of sophisticated historical tourism and more towards the contemporary reality of the city. We again needed to locate the Biennial outside event culture. This is not only Istanbul’s problem but also the problem of tourism’s role in economy, and how the city is normalized, regulated, demarcated and its local undesirables made invisible. Since the cultural sector has been good bedfellows with tourism forever, the practice and distribution of contemporary art has always run the risk of instrumentalising itself as an affirmative force. To undermine this to some extent, we were quite aware of the location of the exhibition and sought to avoid investing in the zone of tourism as well as inverting the relationship of the individual visitor to the site.

Sidestepping the free market is, of course, a much less easy manoeuvre than reconstructing the conditions in which artists make and show their work. Besides, we do not seek to avoid the commercial art business that has an important place in the ecology of art production and distribution. It is rather the wider complicity with the free market that is more troublesome, though no less unavoidable. If we cannot avoid engagement however, we can suggest that art has more about it than that. What might emerge is a surplus, over and above the market value, in all senses, attributed to each piece. This surplus takes the form of public experience, discussion and memory, among other possibilities that will emerge as the biennial is visited. Fortunately perhaps, we do not have easily distributed systems to transmit such conditions internationally, so they resist consumerisation. The long translation and background knowledge required save it for the free public spheres of hearsay and rumour. To create the maximum surplus of this kind, we chose to concentrate on the city where the biennial is based. Hopefully this will lead to a recognition of the public value of art and the importance of having an audience that feels able to take a position in relation to the work – that position being as citizens of Istanbul.

IS THERE A TARGET?
The roles of art under current capitalism are variegated, but there is a real and present danger that art, in adopting an agenda for alternative thinking, actually fulfils an oppositional need within the system and becomes a harmless outlet for dissenting voices. After all, the current economic system is relatively good at maintaining the fiction of free speech without endangering efforts to impose a single version of globalisation that always mainly benefits the rich minority.

Avoiding the implications of this is a task beyond any single art event, but there are certain strategies within this biennial that optimistically suggest methodologies for turning harmless into harmful, or at least pointed, critique. The position of Istanbul itself is, of course, a huge benefit to any such strategy. Being placed on a perceived borderline in many senses (perceived at least from outside) gives the city a particular character and responsibility that charges the works in the biennial with stronger meaning than would be the case elsewhere. The control systemology of capitalism is less secure here, brand name products are copied relatively freely, the micro and macro-scales of the free market live uneasily side by side, and the conflicting interests of citizens and capital are generally more visually obvious than in western Europe. The art projects commissioned in Istanbul all include some of this reality within their boundaries, sometimes almost invisibly but never entirely absent. In bearing witness in this way, they make a demand on our critical resources in broad terms, asking us to relate what are inside the exhibitions to the conditions outside the door.

Provoking these critical resources is necessary because, although there is a single economic consensus on all sides, there is no obvious target to oppose or organised network of resistance to join. We have largely to work things out for ourselves. Global capitalism itself has developed a terrifying internal logic based on the mechanism of shareholder value and profit that excludes individual exploitation in favour of a kind of blind pseudo-religious faith in the inevitability of the market to be the ‘best’ system of distribution. Most operatives of the market system, and even at a very high level individual capitalists are merely operatives, are neither evil nor blind. They are simple pragmatists who have faith in their system as ‘better’ than any other in terms of economic growth, wealth creation and other targets that capitalism has made for itself and then successfully fulfilled. Its failures, and therefore the ways to address its inadequacies, lie at the level of personal disconnection and the lack of social solidarity and shared values that many of us feel. Any attempt to change that, or to start to suggest alternatives ‘targets’ for social and individual fulfilment, needs to address the qualities of intimacy, desire, aesthetic satisfaction and quixotic personal contentment that art speaks to and about – and that are emphasised in our selection for the biennial.

Probably the terms of the relationship between art and political change can never be causally linked, and even those affected at an intimate level to think differently will not be fully conscious of their origins. Yet, this moment in our history presents a particularly grim outlook for thoughtful human development and, in its face, we need the force of the intimate imagination of possibility more than ever. Art in general, and this biennial in particular, can zero in on this target, not through opposition but through the proposition of things otherwise than they are. The propositional strength of art freed, as it should be, from political responsibility or actual power, is one of its greatest assets. This biennial is full of proposals for different views of the surrounding city, and many other cities to which it is related. What they share, apart from desire to communicate in images, is a modest scale that relates not to the mass media but to specific situations and individuals that the artists have encountered along their ways.

SEARCHING FOR AN OUTSIDE
Throughout this book, art is seen to be one of the flawed mechanisms through which such possibilities could be developed and communicated. The essays in general provide some outlines of the political possibilities confronting us in cosmopolitan urban environments. While written from very individual standpoints, the texts do suggest a tenuous thread linking them, while also connecting the words here with elements of the works in the biennial.

That thread involves a common search for an effective space outside the current economic and political consensus. It has sometimes been suggested that there is no outside position from which to understand and analyse global capitalism but, if that were really so, art and all other critical faculties, would be reduced to mere window dressing. The space outside the current common discourse is certainly fugitive, uncertain and temporary but its existence is essential in order to allow for the dynamic continuity of human life. Making this slippery outside visible is, of course, a demanding and often impossible task. Nevertheless, we believe that at certain moments in the biennial, the outside should emerge into the light. This happens when the artists succeed in constructing a temporary community around their work, or reflect the existence of such communities through active participation in them.

The key text here is ‘The Coming Community’ of Giorgio Agamben, extracts of which are published here. Agamben’s proposal of a future community is hard one to comprehend fully but close reading of it offers much in the way of thinking about human life and aspiration. Its outline may also just be visible in this biennial and in all its contradictory, human potential through the projects of artists working in and out of Istanbul. If the ‘coming community’ is to be built, in will be from the singularity of each citizen confronting him or herself as simply human. This confrontation is what some of the best of the biennials offer sudden glimpses of. Their significance lies in what they suggest about how the cities of the future may be constructed. If the tool of the biennial performs well, it will allow us all to be aware of the world outside ourselves, and the ways we can renegotiate our relation to it, as well as point to the potential of a space outside the system that will one day lead to the emergence of a real and viable alternative.

Interview with Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche

2005-10-20T01:38:00.000-07:00

About the 9th Istanbul Biennial
Metropolis M, 2005

Question
Charles, you recently stated in Frieze that the most interesting thing about the present boost of new “non-western” biennials, is the fact that the latest ones (Kwangju, Havana, Tirana, Johannesburg) present a new tendency: a relative distance from a purely commercial system and an engagament with local political conditions. Is that what you both strive for in the Istanbul Biennial too? How is this put into practice?

Charles Esche
I was describing a condition that can be used by artists and curators to create a different space for the work to be seen. In general, I am not sure we want or can really imagine to have a full distance from a ‘purely commercial system’ in the sense that commerce makes things possible that would not be otherwise. Anyway, Istanbul is more integrated than Tirana. Our project is more to emphasise the specific and singular within a work of art by relating it to the time and place where the work is done. In that sense, some of the work in Istanbul will not be so portable and easily consumed because it emerges following a residency and therefore out of a specific set of conditions. Those conditions are not only geographic but also about personal identity and economic possibility. What we have tried to do is to frame these conditions in a certain way and then support the response of the artists in whichever direction they went. What comes out may well be sellable and we have nothing against that. It’s just not very interesting for us, except if it brings money into the biennial itself.

Q
What are the main characteristics of this biennial?

CE/VK
Modesty, access, difference and ingenuity. The aim is to form a relationship between the Biennial as a whole and as a composition of many works, people, events and perspectives with its lived context and audience of Istanbul. The city should itself be a part of the experience of the biennial in the sense that around half the works are made here and will reference the surrounding environment in different ways. The other half will reference other sites and places in the world, mostly from the regions around Istanbul, from the Balkans to Central Asia and the Middle East.

Q
Much emphasis is given to the fact that you don´t want to use monumental historical places as exhibion site, but sites that have a more common reference to the everyday and are linked more directly to the urban, economic reality of the city. Next to that you both stated explicitly that in this biennial you prefer to work with site-specific commisions, residencies and educational models, i.e. more intimate forms of exchange which react on the particularities of a place. Is this working model them only solution to meet the demands of being more concerned with a local historical and political context?

CE/VK
There is no solution in art, we are more interested in a proposal for the very specific situation of Istanbul at this time of the radical transformation of the city. In part the reason to disappear the exhibition into the city fabric came as a result of the transformation where spaces of scale that we first selected were absorbed into privatization and such. We realligned the exhibition to slow the speed of the exhibition in relation to the speed of the city, connecting the various sites with passages through the city itself. We also wanted to locate the project outside pure event culture, hoping that some of the initiatives will have longer term resonance. The exhibition presents a departure from its predecessors because it is not indexed to the previous models. For instance, it was important for us to avoid a touristic reading of the city and its relation to contemporary art by avoiding the old Byzantine and Ottoman sites. Istanbul is interesting in that it is both an extremely old European imperial capital and a city that has experienced growth rates in the last 50 years that are unimaginable in the rest of Europe.

Q
You started with selecting artist from the Istanbul area and then worked outwards to Asia, Europe and beyond. Could you explain the mutual relations between artists in your selection? Where there specific selection criteria involved?

CE/VK
The exhibition inevitably builds up along a process of research that shapes itself as scattered parts of a puzzle that comes together as a biennial. It is not only about geography but about building a specific and intimate relation to the city, for the residency artists at first and hopefully for viewers afterwards. The second element of the biennial, the ‘Not-Istanbul’ if you like, are artists whose work reflects a particular and different urban or even rural context, to show what is absent in Istanbul as well as reveal something of what is there by default. The relations between artists come together around these twin poles of Istanbul Not Istanbul, to misquote Rene Daniels but will remain individual resonses. Some simple criteria for us were not to have long videos to try and prevent exhibition fatigue, and largely working with artists with whom we had a relationship, rather than try to grab celebrities or create new stars.

Q
How do the artists that you both invited react to the local conditions of Istanbul with their projects? Can you tell allready something about some core projections which you regard as most important in the process of the exhibition taking its form?

CE/VK
A number of artists were invited following their own longstanding connections with the city through residency experiences, deep personal interest and research. For example Karl-Heinz Klopf has been visiting Istanbul on and off for years and his extremely site specific proposal reflects this extended period of observation. During the Biennial a number of spotlights will fall on specifically selected broken, uneven, misleading and adapted steps in the hilly area leading from the Bosphorus water-side to Istiklal Caddesi. Under the spots invited street musicians, shoe cleaning boys and street sellers will continue their daytime activities after dark.

Other artists that have spent time in Istanbul include Wael Shawky, Phil Collins, Solmaz Shahbazi and Erik Gongrich, all of whom are making new workbased on their individual experiences. Someone even more familiar with the city, Serkan Ozkaya will reflect on the lack of a continuous art structure in Istanbul that has left its artists and art lovers to rely on reproductions as their only source material. His work,a double height Statue of David painted in gold, will stand on a roundabout in Beyoglu a marker of his own desire to see this sculpture in the flesh and to make it available to others.

An equal proportion of artists have been invited to present work that deals with very different urban and rural situations. Together these two approaches will create a dialectic from which the reality of Istanbul as a lived experience will emerge.

Q
This is the first time the Istanbul Biennial is being organized under the direction of two artistic directors, which by accident corresponds with the dual direction of the Venice Biennial by Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez. They each made separate exhibitions, is this going to be the case too at the Istanbul Biennial? Or to put it in other words, how is your collaboration being put into practice? Do you have different responsibilities?

CE/VK
We worked with the assistant curators Esra Sarigedik and November Paynter, in an organic manner, and the hierarchies dissolved along the way. The two of us have known each other for longer than the biennial and we share certain interests and confidences that would probably be essential to working like this. It’s important to remember that the selection process is but only one of the many aspects of organising the exhibition. We test each other’s decisions, choices and preferences at all stages and seek to strengthen them through discussion. Any collective action of course implies degree of compromise but the project itself is not compromised because there are some fundamental agreements. Ours was not a conflictual or selfish process, or a territorial one. That one of us is positioned in Istanbul helps a lot.

“The World Can Be Transformed by Action”

2005-10-19T03:04:00.000-07:00

An e-mail interview with Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche

Framework
Issue 3/june 05 the Finnish art review

Minna Henriksson (MH): Vasif, you were in New York for many years as the director of the Museum of the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. What made you return to Istanbul- a city, which I have come across you referring to, on a couple of occasions, as the brutal megalopolis?

Vasif Kortun (VK): Work does not determine the course of my life although it pretty much looks like that. I had to make choice with my wife between the Bosphorus and the view of the backs of buildings in New York; there was also the need to have our daughter grow up in Istanbul with a notion of my family beyond the nuclear; to be closer to my parents in their mature age. As a “third world intellectual”, I maintain the belief that the world can be transformed by action. I had a dream of starting a contemporary art institution in 1994. It was 2001 when Platform opened. Istanbul is home, and I consider myself one of the luckiest people on earth the live happily in the city I was born in. What a luxury today not to be an exile, an immigrant, an extended guest. It is however a cruel city, the place is turning into a total market and losing its quality as a marketplace. The undesirables have no representation. I think art institutions are symbolic agencies of intimate confrontation, and I am interested in how this plays into the notion of a radical democracy towards a utopian ideal of its annihilation.

MH: A lot has surely changed in Istanbul in the few years- many new venues for art have emerged, both artist run and corporate funded, of which the most recent is probably the Istanbul Modern. In which direction do you see Istanbul developing in the future? What do you think Istanbul Modern? Do you think the previous biennials hosted there have contributed to it becoming a permanent venue? Are there similar plans for the space you intend to use? Does Istanbul still need still contemporary art museum?

VK: In 2001 I started two institutions, a museum without a collection and a centre for contemporary art. The museum, Proje4L, collapsed into a collection space because the funder did not have the vision and stamina it took. Platform, on the other hand, became one of the most significant institutions of its scale internationally. We are hoping the grow in a direction to address the sore needs of the city like education. There are hardly any artist-run institutions in the city. Oda Projesi, Apartman Projesi, GalataPerform are some of the very few example. Such spaces on the wane. Istanbul is being divided, with the corporate/tourist/media on the other side, and the transgressive/communitarian on the other. I am not happy with this equation. Excuse me, we built this situation and I have no intention of retreating and abandoning the narrative to such normalization. Istanbul Modern makes a marriage between the local artist, gallery, collector situation and contemporary visual culture. Contemporary visual culture has little to do with this provincial economy and circulation. I find this to be unlikely matrimony. The scenario is that the culture of contemporary art, which has not in the past been supported by the founders of the museum, is now ushered into the museum for international legitimization. It empowers a provincial scenography and seeks to be buttressed by contemporary art for international respectability. It is one thing to have a mission and shoe enough flexibility to adapt to changes, it is another not to have a mission while hoping for rectification along the way. I am afraid that the museum has chosen the latter perspective, but it is too early to tell as the work of the chief curator, Rosa Martinez, has not been manifest yet.

MH: You, Charles, have recently started as the director of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, after running two art centers, the Tramway in Glasgow, and the Rooseum Centre for Contemporary Art in Malmö. How does your new position in a museum differ from being the director of art centre, and what kind of new challenges are facing in running a museum?

Charles Esche (CE): The reason I went for a museum was that I am certain we have to conquer and change the existing contemporary art institutions rather than invent our own. I think the contemporary art institution in general has potential in that it gathers people together in one place at the same time and is in general part of the public sphere. The museum, however, has a particular substance that can be used in certain political ways.

All museums inherit the history of the general museum concept at their birth, and we are to reimagine what museums could offer society, it might e interesting to see why they came into existence in the first place. Public museums are largely an enlightenment project, beginning with the French Revolution and serving as a validation of the bourgeois public sphere, where people could demonstrate their taste and sophistication. It was about the cultural settlement of a new politically powerful class by demonstrating its cultural authority, as well as shaping that very taste and authority in the process. Secondly, museums were projects of instruction. They uphold art as a noble and uplifting thing that can somehow modify social behaviour and introduce civilisation to those who lack it. Thirdly, there is more than a tinge of authoritarianism to them. They select what is important and, by default, what is not of value, demonstrating their coherence as much through exclusion as inclusion. Fourthly; they contain within them a notion of the ideal and the universal. Ideal in the platonic sense of model objects, and universal in that the values expressed are common values from which all citizens should potentially benefit. The things that museum collected were no longer the preserve of the aristocracy, but available for all and suitable for all. Finally, museums are intriguingly anti-market institutions in that they remove a certain class of objects from circulation in the market and preserve them, in theory, for eternity.
Now, the description I have given clearly historical. There have been many critiques from the pressure chambers of revolutionary modernism, state socialism and post-modernist relativism that have all contributed to undermining such narrow enlightenment and bourgeois conceptions. But I am less certain that the museum today has articulated clearly a new mission in response not only to criticism, but also to its possibilities. I’m stuck by the critique from 37 years ago by Allan Kaprow, who basically distrusts museums but proposed that they might be “an educational institute, a computerized bank of cultural history and an agency for action”. Even after all this time, that still seems quite radical agenda for contemporary museums, so I don’t fell wrong in proclaiming their recent conservatism.

But I will not bemoan the conservatism institutions here. Rather, and perhaps perversely, I would like to look back at the already agreed foundation principles of the museum, to ask whether we can take them, embrace them and reinvent them for today in a way even Kaprow might recognize. Mostly I still have questions here, but I think part of our job is to articulate what we think a museum can be, and to do this clearly to as many people as possible…and then wait to see what happens. I have already spoken about the reinvention of the public sphere through Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘friendly enemies’ in an agonistic public sphere. Now, what would happen if we suggested that one key player in this common symbolic space is the museum, and that we view ourselves as friendly enemies, who have the chance to contest contest ideas publicly in the museum. My questions are: How would we build our museums with that as our organizing principle? How would we programme them? How would we invite our local citizens and our international audiences? I would like to try to start to articulate Van Abbemuseum as such institution and see what happens. Secondly, we inherit the project of instruction. What are the values, even the ideology, a museum should articulate? What effect do we want to have? I would suggest what we adopt a resolutely planetary outlook; that we seek to tackle the questions of the moment- related to our specific city and communities, that we believe art as a for of communication across cultural borders- and the museum as the place where it can happen; that the museum is a way of re-imagining some of our deepest (and darkest) preconceptions about people, ideas and cultures.

Thirdly, what do we do with the authority of the museum and the selective quality of a collection? I think we must start by looking again across the globe, but, paradoxically, with a local orientation, thinking specifically about were we are and what would be most appropriate, given that geography and history. We also need to think specifically about how we invite artists. How a museum, with its historical authority under threat from the general culture of biennials and events, can take a longer view, can work with artists over a span of years instead of months, and can adapt to artistic practices (because it has time) rather than force artist to adapt to the structures of the experience effects of capitalism. Finally, I think we can use the anti-market concept of the museum as a provocative challenge to the current economic system. As an institution dedicated to taking objects out of circulation, it gives us permission to take about alternative economic models in general – as they are proposed or developed by artists.

Indeed, this idea proposing and developing alternatives can be common thread. I would like to suggest that the museum of today declare itself through its difference from other institutions- the shopping mall as well as the circus. We should deliberately seek to be different from what exists in order to suggest what could be. As a storehouse of possibility, the museum could become essential to how we think about our future.

MH:You have both curated one biennial before - Charles the Gwangju Biennial in 2002 together with Hou Hanru and Song Wang Kyung, and Vasif the 3rd Istanbul Biennial. Biennial as an exhibition model has been widely criticized in the last years. After your experiences it looks like you still believe in the possibilities in it. But the Biennial you are putting together here states to be very different from the conventional model of a Biennial - how will you make a Biennial that still has impact in the 21st century?

CE: By not trying to make such an impact, I think. It is best to carry on with something you fell is important and than to work out what is necessary for the press and publicity circus. Moreover, impact can only be judged after the passage of time anyway, and this biennial will take its place as significant one (or not) depending on what happens afterwards. The international biennials general appears tired, because we still remember it as a relatively new phenomenon. It has come of age, I guess, and can now developed in mature ways, just like the museum that still radiates possibility, even if it is rather underused now.

VK: Biennial is not an exhibition model. It is a format linked both to the diversification and enrichment of the field on one hand and on the other the cultural empowerment and legitimation of the city it takes place in. It was the best tool of access in the 90s, and helped so many curators and artists from places one never heard of before. The question for me is about the role culture plays in the entertainment industry and its negotiation with globalization.

MH: Why the Istanbul Biennial ( I heard rumours that you, Charles, almost became the curator of the next Documenta, but pulled out at the end)? And why not do it alone, instead of as a team, and why with Vas›f (-another rumor I heard was that you called up Vas›f and said that you’d do it only if he does with you)?

CE: Aha, rumours are always true if people believe them, so who am I to deny them? But as I remember, first one is not true and the second was a necessary condition for doing the Biennial any case. Seriously, Istanbul as a city really important right now. In all sorts of ways, both historical and current, it reveals some of basic contradictions and possible solutions to our current dilemmas. I’ve called Istanbul predictive city to challenge the idea is that is some how following an already trodden path towards US style global modern capitalism. I would say, perhaps provocatively, that I believe (and hope) that Eindhoven (where I live) will look more like Istanbul in 25 years than Istanbul will look like Eindhoven. What you find in Istanbul is neither the fundamentalist conflict of Western fear, nor the exhausted notion of European social democracy concensus. Instead you have a form of agonistic living together in which people survive, continue, and prosper without a fundamental agreement on the pattern of society. It serves as a concrete form of what Chantal Mouffe has called an ‘agonistic public sphere’ though the publicness of that sphere is constantly under threat from rich families and from privatization. It’s a strange thing to say, but I actually like the people that I’ve met in the governing party there – maybe I’m foolish, but they do genuinely seem to be pursuing their own sense of what Turkey could be in relation to Europe and Asia in a very thoughtful way. Working in the city in inspiring because of opportunity it creates – in the terms I’ve defined above. You are allowed to think things differently in Istanbul more than in any other place I have been.

In terms of the biennial, that puts on quite a lot of pressure and we’ve tried to respond to it in a number of ways. Structurally, we decided to avoid the pitfalls of O ttaman nostalgia kitsch – or at best the notion of the historic city providing spurious legitimacy to contemporary work, a thing that has disfigured a number of previous biennials. So, we will use only relatively recent buildings and sites that either domestic or associated with contemporary trade and production. These feel to be a more appropriate venue for artists to show their explorations in the city today. Secondly, we decided to reduce the overall number of artists to about 50, to show more work by each individual, and ask around half of the selected artists to come for an extended residency in Istanbul (2-6 months) to produce new work or choose existing work that would address the sensibility of the city itself. As a countervailing force, and to avoid the dangers of a kind of Istanbul essentialism, the other half will be showing work that contrasts with the environment and the condition of Istanbul, telling other stories or experiences from other parts of the international imagination. A second, separate project will be called Istanbul Positionings and will trace existing activities in the cultural field throughout the city of 15 million people, marking them and providing opportunities for them to contract each other as well as the viewers and artists at the Biennial. The Positionings will also include independent international initiatives organized to coincide with the Biennial. We hope this structure will provide a channel through which the works by artists can be seen touch on the questions of the city and its significance today, but of course we have to understand that art is always an intimate experience that speaks to the individual and experiences. So, the question of Istanbul will always be dealt with tangentially, in passing or as a quixotic, personal account. I think that that quality of intimacy, or at least its absolute desirability as a characteristic of good art, is an antidote to the danger of art becoming a kinds of politics. Democratic politics must always be addressed to the group of masses, art doesn’t need to, and probably cannot effectively do that. So an art that is interested in politics has to realize those limitations very quickly, which is perhaps why some overtly political artists often give up some points.

As I said before, I made the reserve journey from politics to art, because its seems to me that this quality of intimacy is precisely what I want to find in the world as a way to start reimagining it.

MH:I have understood that the previous Biennials as well as other contemporary art events in Istanbul have had only little local impact with small numbers of visitors. What are your expectations with this Biennial regarding the local audience? And if reaching the local audience is one of your priorities, How will you go about doing it?

VK: Istanbul Biennial is the cheapest of all biennials of its scale. Traditionally, education and access has neither been of concern to the organization, nor are they prepared or equipped for it. It is however a crime to waste such a great tool at hand. We have several ways of approaching the issue. One will be a broad-sheet newspaper supplement of 8 pages to be published once a week for 10 issues starting in August. Written in a language that does not alarm the readers, the newspaper will be one of the venues of access. Second will be a proper guide-book. We have been organizing lectures since past October. Finally, there will be "floor days." Exhibition tours, including those with the curators, will be realized. A few more projects are also on the way.

MH: I have only seen the most recent Biennial Poetic Justice curated by Dan Cameron (2003). HE used the historical and tourist sites, as well as Antrepo, which is now the Istanbul Modern. But for me most impacting works in that show where those by Cildo Meireles and Mike Nelson, both of which were one-offs outside main venues as public space projects. Will you also use the city, or concentrate on the three venues you have selected* can you tell us something about the venues?

CE: We are still searching for sites and will probably keep doing so up to a month before the opening. We want a disperse4d biennial, one that almost disappear into the city, to emerge at unlikely locations and times. A kind of anti-biennial in a way – though there will be spectacular elements that will directly intrude into the public domain. The idea is to lay out a walking route in the city, with larger and smaller stations along the way. Visitors to the biennial could ideally have their ‘biennial’ head on all the time they are walking from venue to venue – they (and we) may e surprised at what they find or register as art.

VK: The venues are this time distributed within one district in the center of Istanbul. None are as large as the Antrepo. The sites are just big enough to absorb a modest scale exhibition, and there is space enough between them to take a breather. I very much like this modesty of scale. Also, the divergence of the sites we use are such that it will become apperant I hope that we are not simply going for a white-cube kind of operation. The routes between the sites will also be used for discreet projects. One ideas is to sink the biennial into city and make it continous with it.

MH: I was in Istanbul in 2003 for three months from the start of the previous Biennial onwards. I was really impressed how active the city was during the opening of the Biennial, but some weeks, or even some days after the opening, when the international crowd had left the town, hardly anything happened in the city in the field of contemporary art. It seemed like the Biennial had sucked out all the resources. Are you aware of this, and is this something you try to over-come?

VK: Am I aware? I have written extensively about the post-biennial syndrome in the past. One of the reasons Platform was founded was to establish a sustainable culture of contemporary art in Istanbul. But, don't forget that this is a conservative, traditionalist culture where instead of overcoming a deficiency, once expects "a father" to help the situation. Even if the state has evaporated the image of a "father" remains. The "father" is a mental construct that can be anything; an institution, a person, family, so on and so forth. If nothing much happens between the biennials it is not only because the biennial sucks out the resources but also because people are reticent and quiescent. The Biennial always and inadvertently creates a post-partum sydrome.

CE: Vasif is much more aware of than this I am, but in all the big projects I’ve been involved in, I have always wanted to think about a legacy. I feel in Korea we succeeded in creating a stimulus to artist group practice that as continued with Flying city and others. In Istanbul, I hope we will leave a sense that the city’s days of playing ‘catch up’ with Western European and US forms of modernism and post-modernism are over. This is one of the key place future will be created, though probably in the face of West’s resistance.

MH: As I have understood you want to invite local artists and artists from the region. Also you want to keep the number of participants small and invite artists, who work in relation to Istanbul. But much of the money is in the Western Europe, and surely each country is offering to fund artists from their country to participate the Biennial. How do you deal with that?

VK: Much of the money used to be in Western Europe. You would be shocked to hear the percentage cuts in funding. The rightward, neo-populist swing has been horrible for funding institutions. Also now there are too many biennials they have to consider supporting. The embarassing thing is how little we receive from City and State in Turkey.
MH: How is it possible to do another Istanbul Biennial, after your one, with the old formula - using the historical and tourist sites and gathering works under an abstract and universal theme, which is not directly related to the city - as it seems you attempt to dismantle and deconstruct the Biennial as an institution? Do you think that the old model is outdated and this is the direction the Biennials will go towards in the future - into site-specificity and commissioned works?

VK: I think the 10th Biennial should reinvent the exhibition including ours, and avoid the mistakes we will make as well. 10 is a good symbolic number to do this.

CE: Everything is possible after 9th biennial. You can go back, or forward – hopefully, the options going forward are greater than they were before and the retrospective panorama will look slightly less appealing. I to do the 10th Biennial as well, now that we kind of understand how to work the system.

a short e-mail interview with Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche,

2005-10-19T03:03:00.000-07:00

Flash Art, 2005

Katerina Gregos:
Can you describe the conceptual framework of the biennial and the changes you will instigate in its structure?

Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche
The Biennial is called simply ‘Istanbul’. We chose that to indicate that this biennial will reflect its location and the way in which art can respond to a specific geo-political reality. We’re not going for universalism for sure. As a consequence we are organising city residencies for 15-20 artists to produce new work and dividing the slection in two parts – 50% made in Istanbul; 50% selected from other cities as a deliberate contrast to Istanbul and a way to stimulate thoughts about one city through representations of another. We are also planning a new element called Istanbul Positionings that will put existing cultural and activist initiatives in the city in touch with each other and with the biennial visitors. Under the Positionings umbrella projects such as the Van Abbemuseum exhibition, the book to accompany the biennial and other international projects will be included. Finally, we have already instigated as series of 9B talks for the ninth biennial that are happening in different locations across Istanbul as I write.

KG
You both have been critical of previous editions of the biennial. How will this reflect in your own version?

CE&VK
I am not sure where you have read those criticisms. More it is that now, at the ninth iteration, there is an opportunity to do something different. If the Biennial was originally planned as a way for Istanbul to ‘catch up’ on the development of visual culture in the US, the original European Union and Japan then that has been accomplished. Now, Istanbul can stand in its own terms, as a crucial fulcrum of social and cultural change and a place that can inspire outsiders to new perspectives and (hopefully) extraordinary new work.

KG
If I am not mistaken, you plan to abandon the use of the old historically charged buildings such as the Yerebatan cistern. What's the reason for this, what new venues and buildings will you be using and why?

CE&VK
Because they have become a cliché, in many terms. The idea of the foreign curator being wowed by the monuments of antiquity is itself antiquated, globalization needs more subtle responses. Istanbul is also the largest city in Europe and constantly in the process of remaking itself – we want to reflect that through our choice of vernacular architecture that is itself subjected to such processes rather than buildings frozen by conservation. Finally, the sites we have chosen are in the working city centre on the Galata side of the Golden Horn, a place that is used by Istanbullus far more than the tourist haunts across the river.

KG
The exhibition will extend into the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven; how will this part of it relate to the very different context of the city of Istanbul? Doesn't this part of the exhibition run the risk of being forced into an academic, museological straightjacket?

CE&VK
I guess only if you think museums are by definition academic straightjackets. If that were the case they should be closed but I don’t think it’s their inevitable fate. Instead, The show in van Abbemuseum is called EindhovenIstanbul and attempts to reflect the two very different places through the way art has been commissioned, presented and collected there. Works from the van Abbemuseum collection will ‘represent’ the city of Eindhoven and works from the past 18 years of the Istanbul Biennial will ‘represent’ Istanbul. In this way two incompatible sites will be brought into dialogue through artworks – in ways that will prove awkward, tense and uncomfortable, just as globalisation demands of our societies. I think it is time that museums reflected on the status and possibility that biennials provide – to ignore that would be to condemn ourselves to your academic confinement.

KG
You are both socio-politically engaged in your curatorial practice; how will this translate into the context of the show?

CE&VK
I’m not sure what ‘socio-politically engaged’ really means here. We all live in this world after all and its difficult to hide from what’s going on - especially in a city as era defining as Istanbul. But the context of the show is the city – not only is ‘socio-political’ aspect but its people, their intimacy and emotion, the street life, the smell, the colours - amongst much else that the artists will reveal to us.

KG
Can you tell me about the selection of the artists. What are the criteria by which you have selected them?

CE&VK
Firstly, we believe in their work. Secondly, we want to concentrate on the greater region around Istanbul including Balkans, Middle East and Central Asia.

KG
How will you avoid the now tired, homogeneous and seemingly ubiquitous 'cosmopolitan', 'internationalist' biennial which dominates the art world and create something more meaningful for the local situation as well as the city's wider geopolitical context?

CE&VK
But I just relearnt the words to the Internationale! Anyway, I don’t believe artists are limited to their context, so let’s not oppose internationalism to localism and judge the latter as better per se. We should think more in terms of possibility and telepoeisis (imagining the imagination of the other). If your cosmopolitan biennial restricts that form of imagination and limits possibility subsequent to the event then its tired – if not then let it ride. What we hope for this 9th Istanbul Biennial is that possibility and telepoesis will be augmented and released, in Istanbul and elsewhere. Why else do it?

Discussion with Erden Kosova

2005-10-19T03:01:00.000-07:00

Romanian Pavillion Publication with Daniel Knorr and Marius Babias for the 51. Venice Biennale, 2005

Erden: Vasif, the expansion of the EU towards its
eastern margin had a visible effect on the agenda of
core European art institutions. The series of
exhibitions, held in late 2002 and 2003, that set out
to frame the art practice of the Balkan geography
added to a previous chain of events, which had related
to the eastern wing of the continent under geographic
titles that slowly shifted towards the right-hand side
of the map: Central East European, East European,
South East European, and so on. A lot of suspicion-
and arguments have been raised against the motivations
behind and the structures and contents of these
exhibitions. Yet, a viable critique in relation to
these XL exhibitions could not be elaborated. The year
2004 produced the new geographic hype of Istanbul,
following the attention directed at Turkey during the
critical decision phase concerning a possible
accession to the EU: first, the highly criticised
exhibition at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Call Me Istanbul
is My Name, curated by the trio Peter Weibel, Eda
Çufer, and Roger Conover, then your STADTanSICHTen:
Istanbul exhibitions in the IFA Galleries in
Stuttgart and Berlin, and finally a project in
preparation, Focus Istanbul, to be realised at the
Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin under the curatorial
guidance of Christoph Tannert and Peter Lang. Although
the latter project has caused some discomfort in
Istanbul, many artists from Turkey have taken part in
this series of exhibitions, and I am interested to
consider your past criticism of those who uncritically
accepted all invitations, regardless of the conceptual
and political investments of these exhibitions. In
your opinion, what could have been, or is now the
correct stance?

Vasif: My criticism stems in part from the
inevitability that these projects are not
self-reflexive. Firstly, a considerable number of the
artists participating in such exhibitions regard them
as a kind of podium or catwalk, with a bit of travel,
rest, relaxation and networking as perks. The
latecomers may of course ask for their share of the
limelight but the situation is somewhat clichéd. This
is what I have named before as the “Yes generation”
artists who cherish any opportunity that comes their
way. These “Yes generation” exhibitions fit artistic
practice all too well into competing political agendas
such as the EU expansion process. A transgressive
artistic practice that calls the whole enterprise into
doubt is still far away. Secondly, the bracketing of
artistic practice within the confines of a territory,
region, country, or geography of belief is already a
liability, unless it is articulated as a deficit
taking into account what it excludes rather than what
it purports to include. Regionality is a process about
which we cannot be arriviste. Moreover regionality, as
I understand it, is a discussion between equal
partners contesting and cooperating on the same turf
through various tools such as language, history,
possible futures and such. It is a mode of building
networks that are not city or border dependent; that
are not modelled by participants external to the
situation such as cultural managers; that are not
aligned with policies of governments and nations; and
that do not standardise and streamline the East of
Europe. The standardisation of artistic positions is a
problem, all the more so because this conglomerating
effect produces an artistic subject who then makes
work that appeals to this notion of categorisation -
generating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you frame
this problem within the context of the neo-exotic, the
situation gets more complicated. I have written in the
past of a contiguousness of imagining desire, the
periphery’s projection of what a centre may desire,
and the centre’s projection (or pre-projection) of
what the periphery should want to desire. If the
desires are somewhat commensurate, as evidence seems
to suggest, access to funds and circulation are
disproportionate. But keep in mind that the use of the
words “periphery” and “centre” here simply refer to
context.

E: Well, this is a rather bleak picture. Don’t you
find any constructive dimension within this series of
Balkan exhibitions? A rather automatic criticism
seemed to be shared by many intellectuals from various
cities of the Balkans, declaring the Western
perspective within these exhibitions as
pre-conditioned and guilty. I would say, it is hard to
ignore a positive consequence which is the
acceleration of transversal energies among the
participating geographies and the resulting
conversations between them. All this hype will soon be
over. What can now be constructed from this
experience? I have a certain faith in future
collaborations between geographies that have been
synthetically re-connected by these core European
initiatives.

V: I did not criticise the West of Europe. Of all
things, a regional discussion should not be predicated
on funding and should not have been post-bellum,
rather it should have taken place during the trauma
years. I feel that we have lost much valuable time
when the discussion could have been carried out in
tandem with the real political conflict of the 90s,
after the dismantling of Yugoslavia. Alas, the truth
of this situation had to be dictated from the great
beyond. Otherwise, I hold the view that there is a
positive dimension to these projects. My question is
what is emphasized here: Fragmentation as in the
horrific term of “Balkanization” or the togetherness
of sharing destinies?

E: I suppose you are bit too hard on the artists. On
the one hand, we know that such exhibitions are the
sole occasions when artists from the whole region are
given a support structure within which to produce new
work, especially young artists who suffer terribly
under the prevalent economic conditions. On the other
hand, we also know that not everyone is a yes-artist.
There are exemplary figures who insist on certain
criteria and test the motivations behind the
invitation. Do you see any recognisable examples of
self- exoticisation? How do these XL exhibitions
affect the content and form of the works?

V: Quite clearly, a main artery runs through the
region, referencing national anthems, folkloric songs,
flags, büreks, local musical instruments, the approach
to the English language, the use of family, etc. One
question is whether we overplay these issues in XL
projects, thus effectively suppressing other proposals
and contributing to a fetishisation by an excessive
foregrounding of the exotica of objects and attitudes.
We take if for granted that there is beautiful work
there and yet there is a kind of anxiety, or a burden
of anxiety, where visual production has a complex
dependence on nation, region, and colonisation. I
think that is why humour and masquerade have been used
so often, to liberate the anxiety and share it. This
is in some way related to Frederick Jameson’s proposal
- that all third world texts are read as allegories of
nation. We can substitute “nation” here with “place”.
I think the issues are very interesting, I am not
devaluing them in any way.

E: Is there no possibility for a correct stance for
the Western gaze? Do you feel uncomfortable when the
curatorial positions of this kind of events are being
held by European curators? I think what made Rene
Block’s exhibition most sympathetic among these
projects was his genuine willingness to leave the
platform to the interaction between related cities.

V: I never feel comfortable with making a totalizing
project about a place that I know so little about, but
I assume that is a personal position. However, the
truth is that there is a lot to learn from a vision
that comes from another place. Harald Szeemann’s
research was extraordinary, and he went on to work
with artists from here in different projects later on.
Rene Block’s project was not simply an exhibition, it
was not about diminishing returns for the invited. It
enhanced a peripery to periphery discussion in an
extremely positive way. It was more of an after-effect
than an event per se. However, the relation of power
and economy at the end of the game between the host
and the guest are incommensurate.

E: We are both implicated with the recent wave of
contemplating Istanbul. The two successive exhibitions
I co-curated, Daydreaming in Quarantine (>rotor<,
Graz, 2003) and Notes from the Quarantine (Israeli
Digital Art Lab, Holon, 2003) were attempts to reflect
on an urban and sub-cultural specificity that could
escape or interrupt representational determination
such as nation or religious topography. Identifying
with a city seemed to me, at that time, potentially
subversive with regard to nationalist and
fundamentalist agendas. Later, in the exhibition Along
the Gates of the Urban (Gallery K&S in Berlin and Oda
Projesi in Istanbul, 2003), I tried to shift to a more
generic sense of urban experience, to the issues
around new social hierarchies that have emerged as a
by-product of capital’s re-appropriation of the urban
centres. In 2004, you curated the show STADTanSICHTen:
Istanbul where you addressed issues of social space in
the specificity of Istanbul, which we elaborated
further in our book Szene Türkei, Abseits aber Tor!
(Jahresring & Walther König, Cologne, 2004). The main
argument of our text is that the classic definition of
public space and private space, and the division
between them, do not comfortably fit into the social
space in Istanbul. By applying to perspectives on
issues such as gender, domestic space and competing
control apparatus of the state, the media and moral
conservatism we tried to elaborate on the specificity
of the city and the artistic discourse shaped within
it. Did we succeed in our escape from self-exoticism –
what do you think?

V: Let others assess that. Istanbul, being my home,
is my favourite hobby-horse. These ideas have
developed into a series of exhibitions, discussions,
interviews, and texts. The project started with the
exhibition Becoming a Place, in 2001, at Proje4L in
Istanbul. That exhibition pivoted around issues of
trying to negotiate the meanings of public and private
space, the transformation of the city, and how the
artists extrapolated from this transformation. This
was extended with a different group of artists in the
STADTanSICHTen: Istanbul project. The series of
interviews I made with a group of artists and
yourself, in the Istanbul journal in 2004, focused on
possibilities beyond the current position of art
institutions in the city. One clear issue was the
impossibility of a sustainable cultural production, if
institutional and artistic practice and presentation
were limited to the entertainment zone of the city, an
area that spans a mere two miles.

E: Now, you are going ahead with a large event that is
again dedicated to the Istanbul experience: the 9th
Istanbul Biennial, which you are curating with Charles
Esche. What were your motivations for these
Istanbul-related practices? How would you
differentiate your stance from the hype?

V: You mean which side are we on? Am I putting my
“queer shoulder to the wheel”? Granted, the Istanbul
Biennial has taken its cue from globalisation by using
sites of privatisation, historical buildings, and
positioning itself for “European” reception. Granted,
that in the competition of mega-cities, the biennial
plays a role as well and serves cultural tourism. What
Charles Esche and I are attempting is to shift the
attention elsewhere, to posit another option for
Istanbul, a city that belies its imperial arrogance
and serves as a hub of diffusion for the larger
region, a place that does not invade or incorporate,
but embraces you. This is one of the proposals to be
rescued from the perils of globalisation, capital and
the EU. It is a proposal stemming largely from a
historical responsibility in bringing things together,
a space to share without bowing to market society. We
cannot ask if we are in a losing game if we have lost
already, it is about what we can rescue and how can
start anew.

E: Another project you have both been involved is
related to the process of “normalisation”. As far as
I can perceive, the term refers to the effort of
bringing some traumatised territories back to the
norms under EU supervision; but also to the claim of
the Central European art machine, which seems to
symbolically upgrade the status of contemporary art
contexts within these territories. Is there a possible
form of self-normalisation? Do you think that
normalisation is unavoidable and something that is
desired for? Or should we insist on crisis and
criticality?

V: I would like to return this question to you,
because as a person who runs an institution and
curates a biennial, as someone who has seen
real-politic in action, too many factors of the ‘real’
soften my stance. I feel this is a danger I carry, my
self-criticality is appealing to the like-minded. I am
radical, but not a revolutionary. But, to answer your
question, is art not the _expression of crisis, is it
not a field of no returns, is it not the exercise of
freedom and processes of truth? I suspect that what
you are implying here is a loss of these privileges.

E: I guess so. Personally, I entered the contemporary
art scene that was emerging in Istanbul at the end of
90s purely because of the promise of a radical stance.
The momentum picked up for a while, but then it
started to disperse. I feel like I’m in a phase of
mourning. In the context of Istanbul, what we are
witnessing now is a popularisation, an
institutionalisation, and finally a banalisation of
contemporary art practice; and this situation can
easily be linked to the recent flirt of the ruling
government (which is based on the conservative values
of the previously excluded provincial middle class and
the protest of the lower classes, but is now running
sterile neo-liberal policies under the supervision of
the IMF) with the traditional urban bourgeoisie and
the mass media attached to it. The pro-EU boost seems
to have brought about a neutralising and sterilising
effect on urban life. Accordingly, new art
institutions appear that prioritise the marketing of
Istanbul to the global perception. Is this the end of
the edgy, naughty art practice that managed to be a
discursive organism and get a certain global acclaim?

V: At the Istanbul Modern (museum), we have already
experienced the normalisation of artistic production
and the conditioning of audience reception. The public
response may be enthusiastic, but the museum is out to
make a marriage between the local artists, galleries,
collectors and the contemporary visual artists. In
Istanbul, contemporary visual culture does not share
much with the local economy and circulation of art. I
find this to be a very unholy matrimony. This is a new
scenario where the culture of contemporary art,
lacking any support, is ushered into the museum for
the sake of the museum’s international legitimisation.
The museum uses doublespeak. It empowers a highly
suspicious provincial scenography and misuses
contemporary art as a make-up for international
respectability. Everything, as you say, is directed
towards the centre. Reality check: the prime minister
who opened the new museum was the same person who, as
mayor, closed a similar project ten years ago. This
is normalisation alla turca. How can you ask for
compensation and not accept perdition? The main
question hovering above our heads is not specific to
Istanbul, it is about the new economy in which tourism
plays a critical part. Consequently, the city is
cleared out along class lines, new ghettos of
undesirables are made invisible because their means of
representation are thwarted. The cultural sector
services tourism, and the practice and distribution of
contemporary art is instrumentalised towards it. At
the same time, it is a sobering period for all of us,
and new positions are bound to emerge.

E: The spatial limitation of the local art scene to
the entertainment zone of the city centre is only one
syndrome among a multitude of failures: the failure of
delivering highly political content to the local
audience, the scarce number of artist-run spaces and
low-budget project spaces, the hesitation to intervene
within the public space, etc. What could be a way out
of this stiffening closure? Are you pessimistic about
it?

V: The limitation to the entertainment zones, at a
fundamental level, is about self-censure as much as it
is about a desire for visibility. So, what you have
now is a kind of institutional normalcy as in West
Europe and an abnormalcy because speech is always
already curtailed. We had a culture supported by
private business only. You cannot run on one leg.
Where do you see the stiffening primarily? In artistic
production, or the institutions? Novel changes in
artistic production would bring forth radical
transformation in institutional practise from
exhibition to architecture. Are we implying that in
Turkey in particular, or the region in general, the
artists and the curators, due to belatedness as well
as other reasons, desire largely to be part of the
already existing models? If so, what does that say
about artistic practice today?

Extrastruggle

2005-10-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

Vitamin D, 2005 of Phaidon Press.

Memed Erdener, an artist based in Istanbul, first began his multifaceted project, Extrastruggle, in 1997. As he writes in his manifesto, Extrastruggle is conceived of as a firm that “designs logos for all communities under social pressure.... The veiled girl not allowed into the university, the man who is frowned upon for speaking Kurdish in public, the Islamicist who is opposed to the movement of Europeanization, the army disturbed by the anti-revolutionary desire of the islamist and also the leftist intellectual...” These words conceal the complexity of Erdener’s visual procedures.

The artist uses the simplest and the most efficient of materials: paper, pen and ink. In addition, are the stencils and stamps, collages, assemblages and printed material. Erdener brings together visuals from two sources: materials that resemble how-to-become-a-citizen manuals from the formative days of the republic of Turkey in the 1920s and 30s, as well the domain of popular and populist imagery that appears in magazines, logos of public companies and political parties, and street signs. These two types of imagery are then reworked via the culture of political and editorial cartoon imagery, often chanelled into the language of graphic design.

Turkey experienced extreme tumult in the 1980s and the 1990s, during years of dictatorship and militarization. Cartoons and comics were a widespread vehicle of political critique. Satire was not immune from censorship, impeachments, sentences and, buy-outs by big media companies. Erdener and Extrastruggle’s transition into the field of contemporary art implies the artist’s entering a realm that is considerably more defenseless than the arena of popular printed matter. Whereas criticality is expected in popular printed matter, and such an expectation of criticality makes it a parti-pris, effectiveness is limited in contemporary art. This permits a visual complexity that is increasingly evident in Erdener’s Extrastruggle works. The borrowed visuals are reduced in favor of bold black figures drawn on white paper. This push and pull between the black and white suggests a sense of negotiation that is echoed throughout Erdener’s Extrastruggle work.

The images are a battle zone of the varied ideologies of an deranged and introverted society the development of which seems forever arrested at the nation-building stage. As Erdener, making a statement as Extrastruggle, says, the imagery represents “the never-ending struggle between photograph, form, sign and script.” As the Turkish critic Erden Kosova writes, “When brought together, these disparate and sometimes contradicting figures start to play against each other and produce a third semantic field that constitutes the ironic criticality in Extrastruggle's works - not unlike the Situationist technique of detournément. The irony in them aims to displace discourses of various political orthodoxies -mainly of numerous modes of nationalisms that were highly popularised throughout the nineties.”(1) Extrastruggle does not take sides, but puts the viewer in a position to make a decision by way of restless images that appear to flee from their support. The drawings present an urgency. Their strange elegance however resists the temptation to be comsumed immediately.

berlin.istanbul . vice versa

2004-10-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

berlin . istanbul . vice versa
28.08.04 - 12.09.04
Künstlerhaus Bethanien Catalog
Information about the exhibition is here.

The new Istanbul is already full of itself and drowning in arrogance. The city has unequivocally shed its status as secondary city – second to the capital of the country, second to the “first-world” cities, second in choice for those who live there and yearn to be elsewhere. It sees itself as a heavyweight global city, as all the indicators seem to point in that direction.

But the arrogance is myopic. After the earthquake of 1999, we started keeping emergency bags next to the doors of our apartments. The bags would contain some clothes, food and things such as battery lamps for shelter. Some went so far as tucking in a tent and a pair of walkie-talkies. Others stuffed the trunks of their cars. The earthquake is now history erased from the weak memory banks of the Turks. All the emergency items are back in the wardrobes. The thing is that both the pending disaster of the earthquake and the globalisation of Istanbul indicate the end of the national economy, and in fact, national sovereignty. This is a negotiation on which one should not take an absolute side.

I manage to spoil any party as an interminable depressive obsessed about the negative. I try to make a crack in the disguise to take a peek at the shit. So don’t expect me to write about an Istanbul of sweet fragrance. What is the reason for Istanbul’s arrogance anyhow, what are the reasons for celebration? That it is a Babylonian economic power that has usurped, appropriated and depleted all energy around it? That the city has crafted a hideous culture of tolerated and reciprocal illegality, which has enveloped even legality? That its millions of inhabitants live in subhuman conditions and think that this is normal, just as they think it is normal to attain a better life only by self-help or clan-based empowerment and winner-take-all mentality? That massive unemployment or lack of security is a destiny? Are we to celebrate that the city is finally totally divided along the brutal demarcations of economic and social class, and that the armies of private security firms formed by ex-cops, ex-cons and retired intelligence officers even monitor the public spaces? Sure, the city is gorgeous and the local government has done magic in the last decade, but is there no notion of belonging, no city pride? Hardly. Because Istanbul exists only in its arrogance.

Istanbul’s main pedestrianised zone of Istiklal Street, with most of the city’s cultural institutions lined along it, is being reorganised as part of an extension of the tourist zone as well as for the city’s economy of experience. The drive is towards marketing its colonial past, in effect, the days when Turkish Muslim business was met with hostility by the Levantine and the minorities. Having taken over the economy of the street by whatever means possible, the (Turkish Muslim) business is now recalling a perfumed version of the past of the street. The street is named Istiklal (independence), but the signs indicate something else today: Starbucks, Nike, Puma, Diesel, the French Quarter, as well as institutions remodelled to bring back the aura of the colonial past. All, of course, under the gaze of security cameras, metal detectors, guards, and more guards. Grande Rue de Pera (the Franco-Greek name of Istiklal Street) is a site that displays all the signs of difference while eradicating difference all together. Even the so-called Saturday mothers, women whose sons and daughters have disappeared or died in custody, do not visit there anymore. The visible borders of Pera are not too wide, it is a thin strip after all that separates the African, Moldavian, Romanian and other displaced communities. They are upheld for leisure and entertainment, but expected to be caged out of the zone.

So everything is about a yearning for something that is not endemic but received. Culture at large displays the same acquired deficiency. The cultural centres display – if they do at all – the nth version of derivative contemporary art because it should also exist here, be it video, sound art or performance. This is the new age of expanded provincialism. It indicates the notion of using Istanbul as a backdrop and a source of fascination, reportage, and mirroring it. Those institutions that step out of the system, Borusan Sanat Galerisi or Platform, are odd balls.

It is obvious that the raw energy of the city has become a haven for European expats, its undeniable magnetism and non-institutionality fosters creativity, but why this interest in Istanbul projects, why now? Why are the Germans – especially the Germans – digging through the art scene here, a situation that was built on delicate and tender grounds by a few dedicated individuals including René Block. The worst exhibition on the city was made in Karlsruhe, at a place called ZKM. The exhibition was so vulgar and embarrassing that most of the participants said they did not have the nerve to look each other in the face. They should not even have looked in the mirror, but that is another story for the “yes-generation-artists”, who could not resist the lure of showing at that place called ZKM.

This new situation invites a discussion about the utilisation of contemporary art for a political agenda, which I will discuss later. What changed really? Was there no contemporary art from Turkey four years ago, and will there not be one in three years? Of course, everybody likes to breathe different oxygen outside. As the cultural sector of Turkey has been totally dependent on private funding since the early 1980s, coinciding with the neo-liberal economy fostered by the coup d’état, cultural producers have divorced themselves from the state and relied increasingly on private funding. What developed in the two following decades was a visual art sector totally dependent on private sources. Hence, Ankara lost its status as the capital of the centralized state, suffering from a radical brain drain as well as an exodus of capital. The capital is no more the symbolic centre of the country, but a zone of the new economy, a place where one does business, a space of transience. There is almost a more coherent relationship between Berlin and Istanbul, or better put between Istanbul and one of our cities abroad like Berlin, than between Istanbul and Ankara.

For many years during the 1980s, the city had nothing but local artists and artist-organised exhibitions. Since the end of 1980s, and with the initiation of the Istanbul Biennial, a group of artists has integrated the international art community, with Europe being the most visited destination. The local situation, once dominated by art academies and provincial galleries, began to change, which saw a regularisation between here and away, and softened the local grip on visual culture. For many years, contemporary art was still hard to come by in the city. Not only were the institutions unprepared for it, there was also little common ground for negotiation between the artist, the institution and the audience. The artist was a self-styled irreverent orphan, placed outside the restraints of the local cultural establishment, its market base and suffocating arguments of right-to-representation. There were very few anchors other than the reticent support of the Istanbul Biennial. Home was a kind of Diaspora, because real possibilities would often come from an occasional project abroad. This led to the creation of micro-communities, where liberated conversation and occasional self-organised events took place.

There is a difference between what is shown in Istanbul and abroad. There are two related reasons to this. Both have to do with the lack of not only public funding but also of a particular kind of culture of public funding. Art from Turkey is not engaged in a criticality, except for a few instances that were quite intimate between 1997 and 2001. The loss of criticality was later absorbed by an over-engagement in the modes of narration, documentary and such. The more critical the work is, the more circulation it gets abroad, whereas the side work is reserved for Turkey. The lukewarm culture of reception is dominated by a middle-class machinery of received bourgeois norms, which fit their practitioners like a pathetic glove. This goes hand in hand with the centralisation of cultural insularity on a single street of Istanbul, to which the artists have contributed knowingly. The tacit marriage between the capital and the sector of visual culture was built upon aphasia and aphonia, and now discrimination.

However, in recent months and years, free expression is increasingly tolerated, condoned, and even supported. The days of a consulate general abroad, reporting the incriminatory content of exhibitions to the home office in Ankara, are over. So the soft détente implies a new situation today: in the new Turkey, criticality is approved and even cherished as a form of good advertising. This is parallel to the decline of the dirty populist tactics of the Turkish far right and the culture of fear it installed, the fury it unleashed. The positive changes are undoubtedly making our lives better, but freedom was donated to us in the EU process; similarly, though on a more modest scale, by taking part in these shows in Germany, we play a side role as agents in this process.

Where is the city going to? Hard to tell. As someone who is forever obliged to comment on the city’s direction, I find that I have made a million contrasting remarks, however, all equally pessimistic. If it all goes as planned, in a few years, the city will be totally privatised. I wrote about the negative aspects, but despite all, I feel safer for myself and my family every passing day.

Mediterraneans

2004-10-18T01:17:00.000-07:00

Catalog text for the Mediterraneans. Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome at Mattatoio, Rome. 4 June - 19 September 2004.
The artists I had invited were Slaven Tolj, Wael Schawky, Khalil Rabah, Hussein Chalayan, and Sener Özmen and Erkan Özgen.

Links are at the bottom of the text.

Journey of an Exhibition
Vasif Kortun

When I received the invitation with nine other curators to participate in the Mediterraneans, I looked for an anchor and a sense of place from which I could position a contribution. My colleagues, residents of countries along the Mediterranean basin, came from a belt spanning from Spain eastwards to Egypt. The fact that curators from Maghreb countries were missing was not so inconspicuous. There was neither a curator from Albania, a country with a very strong and developed artist core, nor from very weak and closed countries like Libya and Syria. It looked like the main concentration of the exhibition would be around the Euro- Mediterranean, and it was understandable because the project was being realized in Rome.

I cringe at the idea of taking part in an exhibition where I am asked to address a quota. Quotas that used to be nation-based are often regionally prescribed nowadays. They appear more benign this way. It became clear during the first meeting in Rome that our selections did not need to be territorial. Furthermore, I do not believe that Turkey and the Mediterranean make good partners, because the range of artistic production in this country precludes most things the word Mediterranean conjures up. So, I decided to make a self-reflexive contribution. It would not be axiomatic. I will try to articulate my intentions in the following lines, but let me first say that the outcome was intended to look like a selection that defies its complexity. The artists I invited to the exhibition were, Khalil Rabah from Ramallah; Sener Özmen and Erkan Özgen from Diyarbakir; Hussein Chalayan, a Cypriot from London; Slaven Tolj from Dubrovnik and Wael Shawky from Alexandria.

The Mediterranean is many things at once, and most of those are neither defined by its lucid and elegant beauty, nor by its heritage as the progenitor of European civilizations, but by its present-day reality. The Mediterranean is all about animosity, illegal human trafficking, pollution, hazardous waste dumping, US and British warships, and the great divide between its southern and northern costs. The perception of the Mediterranean for Turkey is in part a memory of the Cold War, the reduction of a country to a buffer-zone: its NATO dictated mission to limit the Soviets to the Black Sea. The southern basin of the Mediterranean too is also an invincible buffer between the Sub-Sahara and Europe, a sphere of contested influence between France and Italy, even if in the context of the Barcelona Process. But, the Mediterranean is too large to be something literal, it divides and unites Asia, Europe and Africa. It also provides passage to the Americas and the Gulf. It is the great divide between the powerful north and the needy south, the great divide that is always obfuscated by rhetoric of East and West.

Since, I could not resist the temptation of addressing a situation from another perspective than that of nation, my reflex was to articulate a different kind of geography, rather a collectivity of sorts. Of the many possible arguments, I chose to look at the region as a subject of an empire that dissolved a century ago. I am talking about the Ottoman Empire that once controlled the majority of the Mediterranean basin under occupation or tutelage all the way from the northern shores of Croatia to the western borders of Algeria. I wanted to look at artists from these complex zones. The Ottomans left without streamlining peoples into a singular identity, and in fact they had to leave because people had not been singularly identified. Perhaps, the whole trauma of South East Europe and the South Eastern Mediterranean is in part due to the Ottoman’s constiutionalinability to construct, let alone sustain a sense of belonging beyond and above local identities. These two zones of the Mediterranean are divided by a sense of civil war, fratricide, religious, rhetoric and nationalist conflict. Take for example the Cypriot artist and designer Husein Chalayan’s video installation and its accompanying photograph. The old, grounded Cyprus Airlines plane on an empty runway signifies a divided island, and although it is a ruin that may not fly any more, a symbol that offers no proposition of resolution, it can still provide shelter. A fair skinned man, probably a Turk, an outsider/insider, meets up with a darkly dressed woman whom looks like a Greek Cypriot, without communicating they sit down to perform a number of rituals shared in the area: a backgammon game is transformed to a circular baking tray which belies the territoriality of the game;a coffee reading; a children’s game with rubber bands of drawing territories... The man wishes to leave, but is unable to do so. She too wants him to go, but although the tradition calls that she throws water after him from a glass jar for good health, she circulates around him pouring the water, containing him. He checks his DNA at the empty airport, can he enter? Just like the abandoned planes and the airstrip of the airport, the Dubrovnik artist Slaven Tolj returns to a tennis-court. The court is abandoned, weeds have grown all over the red clay surface, tennis a game held so dear to the Croats, and the Dalmatian coast lays in ruin. In the photographs we see the court, but we also see a darkly dressed person from behind bouncing the ball with a racket, there is no contestant on the horizon, he is all alone and ready to play. The work dates from 1993, almost two years after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, and in the middle of the War. Khalil Rabah is from Ramallah, the present day capital of Palestine. For the exhibition Rabah produced the ‘Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind’, supposedly established in 1929. With artifacts, publications and a video of the specially commissioned “third wall zone auction”, the museum became a way of reading history backwards and forwards, moving from fiction to fact and from fact to fiction. The olive trees, a running metaphor in Rabah’s work and for many in Palestine who have lost their oil groves and their source of sustenance uprooted, exhibited and left to rot. Wael Shawky’s double screen video of a Dodge Ram four-wheeler and an Arab man in a strange mask, donning what looks like a thobe dress frantically tries to build a wall behind which he protects himself. The wall he is building seems to be from liquid tar, an oil by-product. Meanwhile, the Dodge four-wheeler unleashes its fury in all its machismo relentlessly like a stallion on a training ground. Finally, two works by the Kurdish artists Sener Özmen and Erkan Özgen, the only exhibiting artists who do not live close to the shores of the Mediterranean, complete the project. In the collaborative video “Road to Tate Modern” are two men travelling in the stark landscape of South East Turkey. One of them rides a horse, holding a long stick in his hand, and the second follows him on a donkey. They are the present day Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. They ask a herdsman how to get to Tate Modern. Both are in snazzy suits because when they get there they want to look good and acceptable. Not only do they not know where they are, but they are also lost as to whom they should fight against. The enemy, it seems does not care and its son is far away. The Mediterranean story of Don Quixote, coupled with Erkan Özgen’s “Adult Games” in which children dressed in terrorist ski-masks emulate military training in a gory colored playground, recalls the very violent national histories of the region. A destiny is written before it occurs.

Links:
review: dobrila denegri

Also see: Roma Italy July 10, David Byrne Journal

Discussion with Serkan Özkaya

2004-10-18T01:15:00.000-07:00

Lightly manipulated from an online conversation that took place between Serkan 'Ozkaya (artist) and I (restlessincorporated)
Manifesta Magazine, 2004

Is it like giving someone a book you loved?
or more like reading an unknown writer and publishing him?

restlessincorporated: You know it is Sunday. Postcuratorial is the topic of the day.
artist: Plagiarist can utter a truth that does not belong to him. The author can write his fake books. The author cannot escape the noise The plagiarist cannot catch the noise. Good topic yes. i am having a problem lately. I keep hearing a certain noise all the time.
restlessincorporated: Like an interference?
Artist: alarm bells it’s called in corrections (franzen). As if I came home from a loud party and when everything else is silent, there is this beep. Sirens of alarm The novel to be written is lost in the noise. The noise is the foundation all stories appear from. The truth of the author is hidden in the noise. (that’s Calvino on Calvino; you know his brilliant 'if on a winter’s night a traveller' where the whole of the structure is made up of beginnings and "maybe the complete book consists only of beginnings." Calvino’s approach is based on Greimas's theory and his grammatological square —if that’s not a horrible translation— and Calvino is free to manipulate this system, play with it, and one hundred percent appropriate it; simply because of two reasons: first one is that he is writing on his own work and secondly he is a fiction writer.
restlessincorporated: I was thinking last night how you have become impossible to include in a group exhibition, and how copies of your hand-drawn Radikal newspaper of something like 150,000 copies —all originals— permeated the Istanbul Biennial as uninvited guest. I thought the piece was tamed down and became an object as Radikal kept copies of the paper on display for the whole seven weeks of the exhibition. It became part of the show, I mean who would want to look at or read a paper from a month ago? Let us however salute the editor-in-chief for taking part in such an economically absurd idea.
artist: The economy of a piece and the economy of a large show might not coincide. Although, personally I must say I feel much more comfortable with the situations that I initiate without having been invited to. That does not necessarily mean the piece will be better in a voluntary situation but it gives one a certain drive. Stronger than, say, any invitation to any large show. You remember our last chat: "I do not want to be a member of a club that does accept me as a member." (be it Groucho or Karl, or Woody Allen).
restlessincorporated: Postcuratorial is basically a located practice, interfacing aspects of nineties secular curatorial practice and late-eighties self-organized artist initiated programs quite unlike what Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt describes in her text in New Institutionalism. I am prefer to substitute the notion of (new) institutional practice as has been exercised by the Rooseum, BAK and others with the term postcuratorial.
artist: you know when I started my project of discussions, as a matter of fact I did not know that it was a project in terms of being framed before the executed; on the contrary it turned out to be a long term project without being stimulated. I had been initiating discussions with different people, among others many of these people happened to be curators. when I was trying to buy a plane ticket to somewhere, from my budget at Rooseum, Charles (Esche) said something like: "if you do not define this carefully it might turn into interviews with famous curators." implied is of course; famous curators that you normally try to nail down and be acquainted with so that you can make your way into their famous and big show as they were. Although there is a certain difference between a more usual model of an art institution and places like Rooseum or yours as there is a certain difference —I believe— between a more usual model of an artist or a curator and my practice. I was wondering, can you try and define the role of the curator in these institutions (among others rooseum, bak, platform etc.)
restlessincorporated: I think our practice is more provisional, relativist, concerned with our situatedness. It is not production-obsessed. We do not have an in-house curator. I prefer both the artists and the audiences to coexist within the spaces, but it is only a model for our street in Istanbul. Regarding the provisionality of the postcuratorial, I think these medium size institutions will help transform the larger ones. It is a mode of organizing possible subject representations in the new European societies
artist: I think most of the time these places are more slick than any artist run space. When I think of the Superflex show at Rooseum for instance, it looks like a well-designed coffee table magazine. Do you think curators (usual or not) are into style and design more than the artists? At least in this very show I was talking about.
restlessincorporated: In that particular instance was a museum-like display satirizing the Nordic design dimension and the hollowed out forms of a democratic ideal, more object than document, and certainly more mausoleum. The whole thing was intentional.
artist: Okay I got you. To what extend do you think the budget plays a role?
restlessincorporated: No role at all, it is not about the money honey! But, not having it can be quite problematic. We were abused last December by NIFCA and Kiasma in Helsinki during Jens Hoffmann inititated Institution2. They distribute justice with their public funds.
artist: how poetic...
restlessincorporated: Sometimes in the Nordic countries there is a distinct way of doing that.
artist: lets think of my piece with many many slides; in Istanbul and at Beganegrond. First one no budget, more or less self initiated and the second one new context, more work, and now I can not even use one picture of my piece. Well I think, if there is money an object will occur and find a way to come to life. Like in Jurassic Park when they were going to see the animals and the founder of that place says that all the dinos are female thus no offspring; our man in black says: life will find a way. Because, money itself is an object, an object of exchange. You cannot get rid of it. You cannot turn it totally into labour. (And you know that guy in black was starring in "the fly." I mean in that movie the fly itself also found a way into life. see, it was accidentally in the chamber. The transformation chamber or whatever, I don t even remember what the guy was trying to turn himself into but in the end the fly succeeded to take over. Vasif, there is a fly in all of us, you know what I mean. a black one, one house one, a musica domestica)
restlessincorporated: Let us separate this notion of production from the notion of the bogus copyright that a photographer takes of your work gets paid for the photography and still claims right to image when you sell the document of the work. Let us not go there.
artist: Well I still cannot see why art is closer to painting and not to literature or economy or anything for that matter. It seems its natural in the first place that anything can be the substance. But, even afterwards when you "show" it; it becomes a painting or let us say an art object. Painting. Nowadays when someone asks me what my profession is I say painter or sometimes sculptor but it is a bit more problematic. 'painter' wins with no excuses whatsoever. (I guess I also have personal issues with that kind of profession or 'duty')
restlessincorporated: Art is further away from painting than literature, economy or anything for that matter. We still maintain some productivist lineage which is not only related to the notion of painting, but what really gets me is that we still oblige ourselves to make some stupid comment about the staying power of painting in order to confirm its lebensraum so to speak.
artist: so this provisional moment of yours is in fact a middle stage between the artist’s pure 'ignant and shit' initiation and the money invested to find a way for itself to become a work of art —a painting as said. Who needs to change the louvre? it is about framing, no? restlessincorporated: the narratives of the Louvres have to be changed or at east diversified, as well their conditions of presentation and contextual frame.
artist: Correcting the history. Can I ask you where does your responsibility come from? Unconditional hospitality brings responsibility says Charles Esche quoting Derrida. I think that’s a crucial point. The point of responsibility. I personally don’t even like the noun. It's funny how curators seem to like these concepts: e.g. justice! responsibility! Enemies of individuals in fact. Sword of Democles. I say: no responsibility! Justice is always bad!
restlessincorporated: History cannot be corrected, There is no such thing as history at all. Responsibility for me is a personal prerogative. Do you mean accountability?
artist: how can it be personal if you are responsible for something which is not you?
restlessincorporated: where does 'you' end for those of us working as agents in civic spaces? I felt responsible and saved our conversation to disk.
artist: okay cool, no history no framing no recording. So how can you make big assumptions or statements? That's what I was talking about; you saved it and it's -- shame -- there even before we started it. restlessincorporated: I feel often like that too in the way that although I cannot make the world a better place, I will not stop from attempting to do so (I just found out that someone said this before). I am, however, in full consciousness of this missionary position. I doubt I know any other option.
artist: Let's go back to practical examples and provisions. Like many philosophers that have bad taste in art I feel like a crap philosopher (I mean an artist that is a crap philosopher. Oh, there is a lovely passage in E. L. Doctorow’s Waterworks where the main guy says —or our guy in black: "Harry was an idiot. Although the hand of an unseen god made him paint beautiful paintings. I reckon that it was like that with all the painters." (you can imagine I read the book in Turkish and now recall and translate at the same time but you got the drift, no? artists: idiots; philosophers: bad taste.) And I see you getting excited about art works. So, the role you are undertaking is more of a middleman's. The institutions you are starting are there to stay. I guess all these people you mentioned -- the provisional post curators -- are kind of restless and changing their status constantly.
restlessincorporated: What gets me excited is not the thing but what it does to me.
artist: it's hard to catch up with the dynamics though, since in the nordic countries, things are very slow. Extremely slow.
artist: is it like giving someone a book you loved? or more like reading an unknown writer and publishing him?
restlessincorporated:
artist: s 'sureyyya has an idea that today's art is akin to the punk movement. The actors believe that without being capable to read music or even play properly, they can form a punk band and make music. restlessincorporated: That is 'sureyyya who may not comprehend today's art believing he can make an intelligent and sweeping point about it. That is such a retrograde position. But, there is too much professional knowledge in the art world today that I tell art students in the academies to stop history crunching and display how much they know.
artist: i don't think it is about the students in the academies. that is what i was also trying to get at. Confession: I really get bored in front of paintings in museums. I mean all my friends —artists, post curators— told me to go and see the El Greco show. I went and saw the show. it is good, great and all but ... is it art? Creativity is like horse race, our friend Orhan Pamuk said once; everyone is talking about the winner but only after the race. (i guess he got that from somewhere else... whatever.) I always thought of you as someone who doesnt care much about career. for some reason i dont know. But you know that i have a project for you when you take over the Louvre.
restlessincorporated: All along the way is frustration. Our international community does not make our audience. The friction with those who construct your local narratives, and your international community takes place at right where you stand.
artist: but again your international community writes your history, the History. They are the ones that record and frame. And, somehow this international community creates its audience. Oh, we still have the problem of the art work as being in one place at one time. restlessincorporated: I know. You know how much I want to direct a major European museum, and why I turned down the big show.
artist: thus your carelessness for career
restlessincorporated: International community is part of a parallel history, fickle and equally displaced, equally vulnerable. That is why I prefer it. I remember your email that I keep using in lectures. It ran "Let's start by not publishing this report." The report…
artist: becomes the only one. The rest is not interested in writing it. In a few decades it's a bestseller, i think it was in Rousseau's confessions: "he told me that if people were given the chance to change their roles, the number of people that rule will descend" I didn't say that. So, is platform an off the record organization? Also that you keep organising these lectures, talks, workshops etc which only a handful of people can participate in and it is always the same people. That's the core activity restlessincorporated: our lectures are about density, our exhibitions are visited by thousands of people, You can't fold one over the other.
artist: but you know it is a bit irrelevant how many people visited your show during the biennial. I mean I am sure more people visited the shoe stand next door. Scary
restlessincorporated: We have probably more people interested in us than the shoe stand or the shops around because we are free. Although, I don't see a fundamental distinction in the visitor experience; the exhibition space differentiates itself by way of an accessibility without utility, a challenge and generosity, and this is a critical situation in Istanbul where art is associated with high-brow culture, in effect a kitsch condition.
artist: And I guess that is where the newspaper project differs from that experience. So where does the money come from?
restlessincorporated: Core funding is Garanti Bankasi, and the rest are public funds.
artist: maybe your real audience is the members of the bank, I mean people who put their money there. I know that Platform as well as other galleries of that bank or any other bank in turkey are considered as PR, and this PR affects the customer profile. Platform I believe is a substantial part of it.
restlessincorporated: The terms have changed, PR is older lingo, new terminology is less obtuse. Also, Platform does not operate like any other bank funded art institution. If Platform would impact the customer profile I could only be happy for it, if the independence of the institution is jeapordized, it would be time to move on. What if Platform would be a model for a bank? What if the bank was administered like Platform?
artist: if we could go back to the mutuality between capital and product and the status of the middleman, i guess it is significant that the effects are not clear in the first place. What I mean is that platform and its capital are not linked with an umbilical cord. If the bank was administered like platform we would all be rich. How would you insert this position into an old European museum though?
restlessincorporated: I couldn’t, it would need a new plan.
artist: one last one: "this work originated from my fear of losing everything. This work is about controlling my own fear. My work cannot be destroyed. I have destroyed it already, from day one. The feeling is almost like when you are in a relationship with someone and you know it is not going to work out. From the very beginning you know that you dont have to worry about it not working out because you simply know that it wont. The person then cannot abandon you, because he has already abandoned you from day one —that is how I made this work. This work cannot disappear. This work cannot be destroyed the same way other things in my life disappeared and left me. I destroyed it myself instead. I had control over it and this is what has empowered me. But it is a very masochistic kind of power. I destroy the work before I make it." Felix Gonzales-Torres.

On Gabriel Lester

2004-10-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

For the brochure of Gabriel Lester's Exhibition, IASPIS, Stockholm

Gabriel Lester employs the age-old tradition of installation practice. His installations make you feel like you are walking through an editing studio. All around you are sequences of single frames of film footage. They are arranged in particular orders; this order in which they are intentionally stacked and serialized does not at first make sense, and looks, at best, scattered. The film itself is one that is finished and was screened some time ago. This strategy is echoed in an early single-channel video, Grafitti (1999), where the viewer is treated merely to the credits at the end of film, and the names keep on rolling. The credits remain consistently out of focus, forcing the viewer to make things legible again in exactly the same way one has to negotiate his/her own story out of Lester’s installations. The end itself is neither provided nor even suggested. At times, Lester’s work feels like a take between takes, the take that never makes it to the seamless story and ends up being discarded. Lester writes that “in one of my first films was a ‘long-shot’ of a parking lot where one person was standing. Every now and then somebody would pass him and greet him, say something or make some gesture. What I was looking for with this image was how in one scene the message or narrative or atmosphere can change according to the people who enter the scene. The ‘story’ surrounding the man on the parking lot was shaped by him meeting others...”

Lester’s critical entry into contemporary art came with a work that he showed first at the Rijksakademie van Beeldenkunsten, in Amsterdam, where he created a syncopated sound and light installation; it was a Hollywood-based cinematic collage of overlaid scenes from thrillers to seventies disco floor except for the images that would accompany it. The process of taking a story apart, and allowing a different reconstruction from fragments is something that Lester has been preoccupied with – the rift between telling a story in images and images that tell stories. The viewer, enveloped in this atmosphere of auratic immediacy, is left with one choice: work a bit, enjoy a bit and make fiction from fiction.

One could say that all of Lester’s work is contingent upon the memory of something read, shared or experienced. This dependence on memory is critical to the operation. In the course of our correspondences in the past, Lester wrote “who is to say that if we would indeed invent the wheel all over again it would lead to same application?” and in another letter, “Like the Sex Pistols to ‘My Way!’” This may describe how his way of working implicates the viewer, in that the truth about a situation is neither predetermined nor can it be predeterministic. This is a generous way of being with the world. For This is for Real (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2000) Lester wrote a critical speech about the institution, pressed it to vinyl, and had two DJs perform it at the opening. The DJs fragmented, re-layered, sped up and slowed down the speech to give a sense of the source material. He is completely circumspect about the use of the fragments. Paradoxically, he does not employ the practice of obfuscation, but, on the contrary, employs a practice of generosity where the viewer too has to do some work. You have to give to get, and it is not about asinine trickery or a masquerade of quick-wittedness, but something that tickles the mind and the soul by whatever means possible.

In Lester’s recent installations one has the uncanny feeling of walking onto a film stage. The installation is like a piece of skin grafted on the place it inhabits, confirming at once its improbability. Such is the case in the waiting room through which the viewer is unexpectedly led through a secret entrance to something that looks like an emptied yet pristine and scary laboratory in the installation at the Fons Welters Gallery (Amsterdam, 2003). The film scene where an inquisitive intruder pulls a book off a shelf in an office or a smoking room, a lever is triggered, a wall rotates around its axis, and the intruder finds him/herself in the enigmatic position of a protagonist or a villain of dubious interests. Here, there is a waiting room for a story to be made or deciphered, and the anteroom where the laboratory sits has been emptied out so as not to give a hint of what has transpired there. Between the space unpromised (the waiting room) and the curious promise of experimentation (laboratory), as ominous as it may be, we are left in a limbo of half clues. Art ain’t what is used to be, and the stage-set operates like an afterthought. The Cut to the Chase (Gemeents Museum, The Hague, 2002) and the Gift of Gab (Platform, Istanbul, 2002), are installations that took in the antithetical cities of the Hague and Istanbul, the thin stripes of mirrors on the walls, and the thin columns of timber as well as the painting-objects behind them evoked visions of abstract modernism with the fragmentation of time/place in the Hague, and recalled the scaffoldings and the fire-stairs frames of Istanbul. These self-conscious references are, however, presented in an informal, and at times downright jocular context. Such was Altar (De Appel. Amsterdam, 2001) that looked like a shooting gallery, rhythmically sequencing a large memorabilia wall for a pub cum community center. The memorabilia was invented on the spot when Lester persuaded passers-by and total strangers who were in front of the De Appel to come in and pose for the project.

The installation, A Beautiful Gamble, at the IASPIS gallery, evokes the carpet shop’s display of hanging and folded carpets, when backdrops fold over each other to create a dazzling display of colors and forms in one continuous wall. Each show is hopefully a gamble, and the further gamble lies in the hope of realizing the show with very precious historical landscape backdrops from some of the large theaters in Stockholm. In opposition to the stark winter of the North, and the kitsch-reception of the fundamentals of Swedish design, the project offers an incessantly oriental frame like a nineteenth century over-the-top orientalist studio where hierarchies are dissolved for one big warm and all-enveloping atmosphere.

A positively depressed view of the situation

2004-10-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

Where Here
Text for the catalogue of where here exhibition at the Saitama Museum, 2004

Istanbul is getting busier each day. For many years the city had nothing but local artists and artist-organised exhibitions. From the end of 1980s, with the advent of the Istanbul Biennial, the city took great strides in developing relations with the international arts community and the situation, once dominated by art academies and provincial galleries, began to change.
In the last two years two new institutions, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, opened to the public. Proje4L is the city’s biggest museum-quality exhibition institution. Platform has a flexible exhibition space, a library, an extensive archive and a residency program in the city’s most active art district. The two institutions have been pursuing an international program, as well as organising conferences and events. On the other side, a new gallery, Galerist, has provided new impetus and healthy competition to the best of the older ones, such as Galeri Nev. The maverick publication art-ist, now printed in Turkish and English, maps the field. The institutions founded in the late 1990s such as the Borusan Art Gallery and Karsi Sanat, as well as an artist initiative like the Loft or a hybrid space like mentalklinik, embrace diverse roles.

The economic downturn of the last two years has forced private funders as well as grant seekers to focus on responsible and sustainable projects, as opposed to the showy one-off events of earlier years. It seems that people have sobered up. The end of the support of populist practice could be said to have had a positive effect on contemporary visual culture. Formerly excluded, the contemporary is slowly becoming a partner in the local economy of art.

At the same time there are certain warning signs for contemporary practices. Corporate initiatives that support well-worn exhibition projects occupy much of the city ’s cultural life and satisfy a kitsch sensibility. From the bank galleries of the 1980s, through the bank-operated cultural centres of the 1990s, the phase has now moved to the building of museums by banks. While it is quite commendable that financial institutions have been able to compensate for the lack of public support and philanthropy, they have also edged out independent programs, making their existence quite difficult, and cannibalised an all-too-eager media. A much worse case is the branding of cultural initiatives under corporate identities, such as lifestyle promotion masquerading as art in the media and the wilful evaporation of public speech in favor of orthodoxy.
For many years, contemporary art was hard to come by in the city. Not only were the institutions not prepared for it, there was also little common ground for negotiation between the artist, the institution and the audience. The artist was a self-styled orphan. S/he was irreverent towards the restraints of the cultural establishment, the market base the establishment would conceal so deftly, the suffocating arguments of accountability and right-to-representation. There were very few anchors other than the reticent support of the Istanbul Biennial. Home was a kind of diaspora because the possibilities would often come from an occasional project abroad. If you did not untangle the knot of identity from within the local cultural lineage, you could be exiled. That led to the creation of micro communities where liberated conversation and occasional self-organised events took place. But things have changed in recent years, with new institutions, brilliant artists, exhibitions that went beyond the average and an increasingly integrated international situation. I would go so far as to call it the ”Istanbul Miracle.“ History has proven that if you just make people believe the hype, and empower it with a voice, it can really happen. While things are undoubtedly not what they used to be, not only in Istanbul, but also in many places around the globe with their incontestably common reasons, other questions remain unasked. But, let’s not spoil the fun today. Belatedness produces speed. The sense of the global party is immanent; finally everyone is invited. But the hosts have just left the table. You make do with the leftovers. You may be outside the temple, but with reasonable leftovers, one must not lose humour, but rather build one’s conditions for survival.

Let’s come to the question of how contemporary art culture circulates in a megalopolis of over ten million inhabitants? Or, is it a city that is many cities disconnected by differences in class, culture and access? Istanbul remains an ad-hoc city that looks as if it makes no claim about the contemporary and too much claim to history. It seems that despite all odds, we have to accept that contemporary visual culture operates with an international syntax morphed by local temporality and situatedness. One could be written off as an eager and privileged subject of globalisation. Although the art that comes from here may be, at some point, not visibly original, it is replete with contingencies in structure and constructions of significance. And, only time will tell if Istanbul’s little miracle will not only take place in semi-public discussion, in artists’ folios, and during the days of the Biennial, but in the everyday.

a discussion with Seçil Yersel

2004-10-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

Interview published in Bidoun, 2004

Vasif Kortun
Seçil, I want to discuss how institutions are defined in the context of the “Istiklal Street syndrome.” Nearly all of Istanbul’s artistic and cultural institutions are located here, on a single stretch of two miles. Can we talk about opening new possibilities, and the need to establish different sets of relationships with the city that are sorely lacking?

Seçil Yersel
If an art scene or an institution functions only by securing itself, by primarily guaranteeing its position, what’s the point? Such a perspective seems to be more appropriate for a city like Ankara. But now even Istiklal Street is about to be domesticated. The fact that Istiklal Street has become a sort of obligation is distressful. It loses its quality as an alternative. It’s now a glass dome enclosing elements which are considered different, but are in fact becoming increasingly similar. This situation restricts our movement in the city. We have everything, so why should we get out? Instead of isolating itself, perhaps the main concern for an institution should be developing relationships with its surroundings, and, above all, to grasp where it stands in the location it exists, to know its neighbors. What is the range of art institutions in the city? How much of Istanbul can an art map cover? It seems the scope is too narrow.

I’m interested in making art accessible, comprehensible. Gültepe makes itself heard, and opens itself to discussion. How can you isolate yourself when there is an elementary school right next to you, and a place like Gültepe in the background? Who is the artwork’s neighbor - not its viewer, consumer or collector - but its neighbor? In other words, who is coincidentally nearby, and is perhaps different, but has to coexist? Where can we build a common language, what if we need to build a third language and spread out? Those who come to Istiklal Caddesi must either surrender to those who already speak the predominant language, or just be content with the excitement of ‘different and interesting’ personalities and situations that come up once in a while. Even if Istiklal Street has provided many possibilities, it began to consider itself the center and is now complacent with the situation. When are we going to be able to go to Pendik and see an exhibition? On Istiklal, the art becomes a mere display next to many other colorful displays. But when I see an art institution, I try to see its relationship with its surroundings, and when there’s a contradiction, a juxtaposition, the attraction, the curiosity rises. The neighbors are curious, and even when they aren’t, the art gains an everyday quality, and perhaps it becomes harder to consume. It can no longer relax in its own space. Otherwise, art loses its capacity to diffuse, it doesn’t disagree with the system, but becomes an extension of it. It determines a point of view and says ‘this is the way to look at it, from here, and only from here.’

VK:
You’re looking at Istiklal from without, but let’s also try to look at it from within. It’s not simply a homogenous or static area.

SY:
I did not say it was homogeneous or stable, I am wondering how a homogenous structure is produced. There are no open spaces, no gaps there. There are no transitions between venues, no individual territories. After a while, all the supposedly distinct voices become one bulk, because there is no breathing space to distinguish people and venues from each other.

VK:
The boundaries of the glass dome you mentioned are well-defined and tight. All you have to do is walk two blocks, towards Tarlabasi, or toward your right, walking from Galatasaray to Taksim. There’s an imposed proximity, an uncomfortable immediacy between radically different places such as Istiklal and Tarlabasi.

SY:
Obviously this juxtaposition generates many hybrid structures, but it is becoming a painful situation, and I cannot figure out exactly what the position of the galleries is.

VK:
Actually, proximity, coexistence doesn’t mean you’re in contact.
As you may know, Istiklal Street was created in the 1860s, during a kind of semi-colonial period that lasted until 1909. During this time, there were more than sixty exhibitions on the street, some taking place in the smaller storefronts. Now, over the past six years, we’ve been witnessing how shops and restaurants are changing ownership with increasing speed. The shoemakers, tailors, barbershops and corner stores are being pushed out by bars, chains and cafés, and flagship stores of international companies. Part of this process indicates that modest art centers will be pushed out and replaced by more glamorous commercial galleries and cultural centers. But today, it is still a place where Turkey’s experience economy is practiced in a more colorful way than in a shopping mall, and it is crucial that art centers are a part of it.

SY:
I agree that it’s important to have art centers in such a district. However, if the main art institutions are coming here instead of diffusing into the city, I cannot support your point of view.

VK:
Don’t you get sick of seeing nothing but shops in traffic-free zones? At least this street has not been completely cleaned up. Platform provides an experience for more than 100,000 people annually. This holds symbolic value for the city. You could say that, in reality, this freedom and anonymity caters to a consumer culture and an experience economy, and you’re right, it does. But the abundance of cultural centers on Istiklal doesn’t necessarily wipe out the possibility of other institutions elsewhere. The two proposals are not even commensurate.

SY:
It may sound strange, but in a place where galleries, shops and restaurants are so close to each other, I go into Platform like I go into a shoe-store or a bookstore. Within such proximity, in such a suffocating area, there’s no time or mood for contemplation, interpretation or even criticism.

VK:
When visitors come to Platform, despite it’s affiliation to a bank, they do not pass through metal doors, are not watched through surveillance cameras, and are not confronted with the suspicious gaze of an armed security guard, nor with an environment that implies, ‘there is ART here, lower your voices, behave, and you probably won’t understand anyway.’ We’ve resigned ourselves to the fact of where we are, and are trying to use it with ease, and also to clarify the barriers between the inside and outside of the art space. Yet this is only one institution in one certain location. It can only set an example for itself.
There are many difficulties for an art institution in terms of choosing a location. There are no public funds, and the generations of artists who have not been exposed to a public funding policy can no longer even imagine alternatives. But the self-organizing model you mention is very different. The question is, how can a third language be created by an institution that has its foundations in the international art discourse, and in the city where it is situated? Especially if there is no art scene in that city that will support this kind of configuration? How are these models going to be funded? What are the possibilities of making them interact without a centralized focal point? These are the questions I’m mainly interested in. We have to go beyond pouring content into an existing model (local contenting), just like we have gone beyond reassembling existing models (montage).

SY:
I don’t think the restraints in choosing locations are merely due to the absence of public funding. You’re right about ‘local contenting’, but this condition has never been reflected on, while it’s ‘montage’ that has always been favored. But first of all, to create a new infrastructure, we need to organize a series of long-term discussions embracing different contributors. A space for thinking out loud, a site where universities, galleries, curators, critics, artists, sociologists have a place. A meticulously formulated discussion platform that allows new actors to come forth. It seems to me that otherwise, we’ll keep moving in a circle.

We can start from the idea that there is no art scene to support the institutions. The existence of groups like Oda Projesi, who work between people, institutions and situations, and delineate new paths, is crucial. The institution does not have to be the one to build the third language, but groups who already work in this manner will channel the existing energy effectively. Istanbul’s dynamic structure, which can organically self-organize, can itself become a model for institutions. Borrowed art venue models cannot survive in this city. If they stick to those dry structures, Istanbul’s dynamic structures and situations, that would need to be appropriated and integrated, will become languages that are either rejected by all these isolated institutions or only applicable in individual artistic production.

Eye with suspicion those who favor things over the experience of things

2003-10-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Brochure of Veronica Wiman's satellite project in Istanbul during the 8th Istanbul Biennial. The project consisted of interventions in the public space.

I agree that the notion of "responsibility" harkens back to European religious art, but not to modernism. Modernism was the moment, I believe, when the artist was "liberated" from the notion of responsibility. In referring to LeCorbusier’s creation of modernist space in his urban planning schemes, Mary Jane Jacob says that he created a space of liberty from responsibility, the normal responsibility to others that creates community. Just so, "art for art’s sake" isolated the modernist artist from any sort of responsibility outside internal dialogue of art itself. Public art -- with its emphasis on audience, interaction, dialogue, etc. seems antithetical to the high modernist project, perhaps more akin to pre-modernist art.
Tom Finkelpearl

It was in the mid-1860s when the Sultan Abdülaziz acquired a statue from a fifth rate British sculptor and had it placed in the garden of the palace. It was a harmless sculpture of a bored lion. This was a first. Abdülaziz had visited the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867 and he was in the know. He was the father of Abdülmecit Efendi, a painter and heir to the throne. It was some 50 years, when commemorative statues began to pop up in places like the main square of Istanbul. They were dedicated either to the founder of the country or the war of independence. Turkish sculptors were short in coming, so artists had to be imported. There was probably no shortage of Europeans in those days of return to order. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union led in making these statues of stability! The situation was doubly interesting in Turkey as public sculpture signified the power of the state in a place that had never seen things that frozen and made icon-like on a street. For some it was a flagrant breach of the ban of images in Islam. For others, it would be a sign of civic and national pride, a place in front of which you could pose for a commercial photographer who was always available on the spot. The tug of war between the adversaries has never subsided: between the secularist conservatives and the religious conservatives; between self-appointed modernist eurocrats, and die-hard traditionalists; between those who claim their neighborhoods and re-imagine them as an organic outgrowth of their villages and towns, and those who exercise juridical control over them; between, neighborhood allegiances, and arbitrary control mechanisms.

In the old days the sort of "public art" one associated with came in the forms of statues perched high on pedestals. This tradition has gone on in Istanbul to become the worst kind of derivative and delayed cultural production in the form of an authoritarian translation from historical European models. A typical piece in that sense would be the monument in Beşiktaş for the 75th year of the Republic. A colossal erection that overwhelms human scale and denies eye contact, this object is in complete disregard of its environment, to be seen only from across the other end of the Bosphorus. Governments, both city and state, from the right and left had these things erected from stone, iron, steel, glass and aluminum. Adem Yilmaz sculpture on the Taksim Square doubles as an ad-hoc toilet. Ayse Erkmen`s see-through, trellis-work column gets a new function as a coat-rack and support for banners.

As the notion of public, as borrowed from discourses that are not translatable into different urban situations is an untenable concept, one has to look elsewhere. A possibility exists in remaking the monumental into a temporary document, engaging multiple audiences, communitarian or neighborhood-based. The Kultur project in the 1997 Biennial was such an endeavor. The example of Oda Projesi as an artist collective that circumscribes the general public in favor of returning the project to its representation circumvents the intellectual dead-end of the issue of the public altogether. Forget shared ideals!

2. Ceramic Biennale

2003-10-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

Catalog Text was for the 2nd Ceramics Biennale in Albisola that I was one of the curators of.
Hale Tenger, Nedko Solakov, Bjorn Kjeltoff and Gabriel Lester.

You can never say to a child that raisins are candy and get away with it. ceramic art is like the raisins of the artworld.
Bjorn Kjeltoff

During my first trip to Albisola, the word 'ironical` was brought up for the artists that I had invited to the exhibition. This comment registered furthermore a reciprocality between myself and the artists I wanted to work with for this exhibition. All my arrogant, biting, cynical, defiant, derisive, double-edged, and sneering comments were rendered neutral during the few days I spent there. My body first ticked to a different clock and I began to preposterously fantasize of a languid Italian Riviera, where time dilates under the heat. The visits to the master craftsmen, the remains of the colossal factories testifying to a hyper-industrial second half of the twentieth century, and finally a communist institution organized dance party high up on the mountains, anchored it as a place that has endured its customs. It is obvious that taking time does not imply sluggishness, but we often lack the understanding how different moments, paces and seasons can co- perform. Time is something that is incomputable and of acute shortage. Not only the time of the artist could be fickle and arbitrary, the time of making, drying, baking, and waiting of clay that becomes a ceramic is not so precise either. It is not an exact science, but a belief which is the result of patience and familiarity. One never quite prophesize the result.

As it has distinctively presupposed self-consciousness, irony has been one of the paramount metaphors of art for much of the twentieth century. But, the artists I wanted to work with are hardly ironical. They do not employ irony but they certainly resort to humour and part of the joke may be also on them. Humor is open ended. It softens the way to an infinite number of contemporary concerns, catches the viewer off-guard, suggest implausible alternatives and offers a hospitable, climate for a difficult issue that may follow. Humor is the priveledge of the underdog, the trickster and the court jester. It is also a flexible maneuvering tool to seek freedom outside the highbrow culture and narratives as well as the generated trends. The attraction to ceramics by non-media bound contemporary artists was also because ceramics was often considered to be a lowbrow medium, a medium not in the primary league of high culture. This is what Bjorn Kjelltoff`s works in the exhibition are also about. He unhooks from the crisp, lucidity of life-style design languages of his home country Sweden. Bjorns uses loud colors, decorative patterns and adopts a working strategy of aesthetics borrowed from the pariah of high taste, Ulrica Hydman Vallien. He expounds this particular taste without any hint of irony with the idea of ceramics, and applies it to the indicators of shopping industry such as shopping center anti-theft devices. Nedko Solakov, by far the the funniest storyteller in contemporary art today, has in the past remade himself a snowflake of 106 kgs, is a trickster who has proven that the world is flat. In the work for this exhibition, Nedko brings back the witnesses of his fear of flying. Truly a curse for an artist who travels incesantly, the little deformed pieces of baked clay carry the impressions of his fingers squeezing the clay during flights. It is a failed attempt to exorcise his deepest phobia. Hale Tenger used to be very humorous at the end of 1980s, humorous to such an extent that her work for the 1992 Biennale, a glittering wall installation of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil statuttes and ancient fertily figures with enormous erect phalluses almost awarded her with a ticket to jail. With an MFA in ceramics —a idiosyncratic contradistinction in this exhibition— she conflates a new version of the fertily figure with Ottoman Nicean decorations to create a jovial, if not palatable cultural hybrid. Gabriel Lester is similarly concerned with working with a ready made but with little alteration. A copy of a bust of Giulio Cesare is animated by the onlooker where we see through his inmperial eyes, but watch your back! Gabriel asks the question of what do statues look at, and were we statues ourselves, how would we look stuck in a museum during the day and after hours.

Undesire

2003-10-16T23:51:00.000-07:00

Brochure of Apex Art
Undesire
curated by Vasif Kortun

April 18 - May 17, 2003

Artists: Fikret Atay, Phil Collins, Inci Eviner and Dan Perjovschi

Undesire came on the heels of the so-called coalition forces' invasion of Iraq. The war prompted me to seek a different exhibition altogether; I was already extremely worried with the swift unrolling of the new USA masterplan following 9-11. It seemed that 9-11 was just an excuse to enforce part of a new world plan with the arms (usa), drugs (afghanistan) and oil (iraq) scheme.

The United States, a country where I had spent many happy years, became uncanny. It was no longer a place I could recognize or want to visit again. I suspect the same would hold true for many people living in the USA or elsewhere. I am not the kind of person to give fast response to political situations, and I continue to live in a country that along with Israel is considered 'high on the list' in terms of the disregard of UN resolutions. I have never relied on contemporary art as a tool for directly communicating political issues. Whatever can be reduced to language is often articulated more effectively and quickly through different media. Hence, Undesire as an exhibition is not about representation. It is not even political. I would rather pivot on a notion of proximity, that the exhibition feels close to your skin, closer than one would have liked, but it does not ask for empathy.

Fikret Atay lives close to the Iraqi Turkish border in a small city by the Tigris called Batman. Batman is a sad, oil-producing town with a phenomenally high suicide rate amongst women. The city has suffered under extraordinary security measures and unaccounted murders for the last two decades. Imagine you are twenty years old, and the life you call normal is about living under many different guns, de facto curfews and an oppressive sense of tradition. The two low-tech real-time videos Atay has produced are of very young people. One is a kind of "war dance," a folkloric dance in what seems to be the corridor of a school, and the other is of two kids in a sort of strange local song-and-dance in the cabin of an automatic teller machine during the evening hours.

Phil Collins’ video, Baghdad Screen Tests, is a muted travel log. The protagonists are often silent, as if to say: Why waste their time if there is no truth value ascribed to them, when even the BBC chooses no direct representation of the Iraqi populace? They may be who they are, but in the centuries-old construction of the orientalist subject in media representation, they merely become fiction. Months later, after this work was finished, the aggressive minority of the alleged coalition is busy bombing the hell out of this civilian "fiction" with "intelligent" bombs even while I write these lines.

Inci Eviner has made a wallpaper for this project. The wallpaper resonates at different levels. The wallpaper is something that conceals a place and turns it into a surface, and often covers up the poverty. Eviner's work recalls, as well, the eternal sunsets, the Alpine views, and the idyllic large landscape images used as "wallpaper" from the late 1960s and the 1970s. The images on them, however, invite a rethinking of the interior, almost holy for the various cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, as a site where conspiracy and terror, such as live bombs, can be designed intimately. In the eastern Mediterranean, the street is often thought of as a site that belongs to the colonizer, the state and an ascriptive modernity. The home, to the contrary, is the flag-bearer of tradition, and the final border.

Dan Perjovschi works in the most efficient way possible. He makes simple and direct drawings with very brief texts that then travel across the web to any exhibition. He has created in the last few years a structure that has turned a fragile and disempowered situation into one of brilliant mobility and access. At apexart, they will be projected with the aid of a presentation program, and updated during the run of the exhibition responding to the changes in the international situation and the bloody war that I hope will end soon no matter who the victim may be.