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| Losing Oneself in the City. Destination: 9th International Istanbul Biennial Solvita Krese Istanbul awaits the visitor as a surprising adventure, one that doesn't conform to preconceptions and stereotypes regarding the Turkish capital. This could be the opening text of a tourist guide. One could go on to talk about this milieu, saturated with symbols and signs of different cultures, and about the positive and dynamic atmosphere, inviting the reader to follow in the footsteps of the protagonists of the film "Diamond arm", or offer some other kind of psycho-geographic experience. It's a city where one can willingly lose oneself. Sadly, this article is not the place to describe alternative routes, since the focus here is on the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, and it is in a sense a story about purposefully losing oneself in the city. The city will be considered more as platform, as a theme for this year's Istanbul Biennial, which has in recent years been drawing the attention of a wide audience, striving to join the list of the world's art hotspots, and this time, it seems, has become one of the events of the year in contemporary art. Seeing that realisation of the project had been entrusted to a team of curators that included both experts on the local situation, such as Vasif Kortun, director of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in Istanbul, and such radical transformers of the art scene as Charles Esche, and knowing the style of work of these two curators, a positive symbiosis was foreseeable. At the recent conference in Linz on "The future of institutional critique", Charles Esche discussed the changing role of art institutions, emphasising "hospitality" as one of the keywords, seeking to imbue this term with the idea of open, interested communication and collaboration. The idea of "hospitality" can also serve to characterise the 9th Istanbul Biennial, reflecting the attitude towards the artists, the local setting and the audience. | |
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The Istanbul Biennial in the context of the institutional system of art
In contrast to the accustomed praxis of the regular mega-exhibitions, where we often witness the rotation of the same works or artists, or else a wish to bring every work of art within the stipulated context, the 9th Istanbul Biennial demonstrates the curators' and artists' interest in the concept of the "here and now". Most of the works have been created while the artists were living in Istanbul, developing projects rooted in this context. The biennial is not an attempt to record the latest trends in the praxis of contemporary art, but instead reflects the intention of reacting to the specific character and issues of the city, the everyday conditions, the causative and accidental features that have shaped its development. The curators have striven to avoid the incorporation of the biennial into the agenda of consumer society or its instrumentalisation, which would promote the packaging of the city as a product to be offered on the global market. This is an attempt at a fairly difficult task: extracting the biennial from the structures specific to event culture and placing it back in the city, rendering it accessible to the population and the visitors, who are offered the chance to become much more intimately and personally acquainted with the city. As pointed out by the curators, good art permits us to think about something we would never have been able to imagine before. The praxis of both modernism and the avant-garde has challenged previous models of art and sought alternatives. Modernism has focussed more on the search for aesthetic qualities, while in the frame of the avant-garde tradition, attention has been concentrated on the search for meaning, something that is also seen in the works included in this biennial. The biennial has become a kind of platform inviting utilisation of the local setting in articulating meanings that can have relevance even outside the specific spatial and temporal context. The Istanbul Biennial can be viewed as one of the significant steps marking current changes in the art scene. Art processes taking place at such outposts of the territory of art as the Rooseum in Malmö, the Munich Kunstverein and the Palais Tokyo in Paris, which have seen projects involving the denial of representative functions, focussing instead on the aesthetics of relationships and critical discourse, have begun to shift from marginal areas to the centre, so that, by gradually changing the traditional representative character of the mega-exhibitions, they are becoming an element of the institutional and hierarchic system of art. These process may be perceived as reflecting the capacity of the capitalist system to feed on any shoots of opposition, integrating and bringing into the mainstream processes that are rooted in antagonism and subculture, or else as muscle-flexing by new processes in art, on their way to changing the institutional system of art. Biennials have become influential as a force directing processes in art: one vector of the biennials, oriented towards consumer society, clashes with the ambition to follow the traditions of the avant-garde and become a platform for alternative expressions. Within the frame of this system, works of art become inscribed with a certain meaning, handing them an entrance ticket to the art market, and it seems that the difference between biennials and the leading gallery markets is growing ever less clear-cut. In parallel, a second tendency is appearing, driven by the search for a way out of the present economic and political system. Although there is the view that there is no "outside" position from which one might analyse global capitalism, but there is a search for alternative models of communication and collaboration that offer radical forms of democracy. Several large-scale, regular art events are striving for new approaches and formats. The curators of Manifesta have discussed the possibility of opening an art school at the next exhibition venue, the Cypriot capital Nicosia. The organisers of the Baltic Triennial in Vilnius have taken a leap forward in relation to accustomed exhibition praxis. Omitting all signs and information, they leave the viewer to wander in an exhibition that manifests the denial of the author, where, using Xerox copies, quotations and video compilations, the mechanisms of representation and the role of the viewer/consumer are deconstructed. Suggesting a different approach in the next documenta XII are the words of curator Rodger Buergel about avoiding the aesthetics of the art market and focussing on a smaller number of artists. The opening of the Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, opposite one of the main venues of the 9th Biennial, served as an illustration of a different praxis of art. The museum was opened the day after the opening of the biennial. Brought together in the exhibition "Centre of Gravity", curated by Rosa Martinez, were works by the big names in contemporary art, which might constitute an educational programme in this city that has not been pampered with a great deal of contemporary art. The works in the exhibition illustrated its title quite literally: as seen in the objects suspended from the ceiling by Louise Bourgeois, and the spatial trompe d'oeil structures of Anish Kapoor. A smart exhibition in keeping with art market aesthetics, isolated from the surrounding context and placed perfectly in a white cube, successfully fitting into the category of global capitalist products, not only as separate works of art and as an exhibition corpus, but also as the content of the contemporary art museum, part of the city's image. The biennial as part of the city The Istanbul Biennials have traditionally been held in various parts of the city, inhabiting the urban environment, its public spaces and cultural monuments. This year, the biennial has deliberately ventured outside the city's historical centre, where various activities by artists were previously seen. The Sultanahmet district, the old town of Istanbul, which has most of the historical monuments and buildings, has developed into a real tourist area. In order that tourists, oriented to the consumption of products created by event culture, would not be the main visitors to the exhibition, the biennial was concentrated in one of the city's liveliest districts, which offer dynamic everyday life and where the exhibition-goers include both local people and those guests of the city who wish to become acquainted with developments in art. The venues of the biennial - the Beyoglu and Galata districts, where intensive trade developed already from the 19th century - is home to many immigrants and minority groups. The district has various foreign embassies, and centres of culture and entertainment. The creators of the exhibition wished to give more attention to the city's contemporary reality, rather than to aspects of its multi-layered history. At the present day, Istanbul is a city experiencing rapid changes, along with the boundary situations connected with these. Capitalist development often comes into contradiction with local tradition, the mechanisms for controlling it are at times powerless here, and at the micro and macro scale, the free market is seeking possible models of coexistence. In seeking exhibition venues - factory buildings of the 1950s, which mark the economic growth of that time - the organisers encountered problems brought about by the rapid pace of contemporary development. Privatisation of the potential venues occurred more rapidly than the organising of the exhibition could proceed. In order that the art might fit into the city as organically as possible, comparatively anonymous and insignificant buildings were chosen as exhibition venues, buildings that do not in themselves add an additional context to the artists' expressions, but instead mark the character of the local setting and permit the visitor to become more closely acquainted with the diverse districts of the city, which are usually not included in tourist guides and which constitute a non-representative part of everyday life. The topography of the biennial offers the visitor the chance to wander seemingly without aim, exemplified by the term flâneur, borrowed from Baudelaire and analysed by Walter Benjamin, while at the same time searching for the exhibition venue. Thus, one becomes acquainted with surprising elements of the city and comes to grasp its internal logic. Serving as a symbol and recognisable mark of the biennial was the colour magenta, chosen by the "A12" group: this was used on the printed material of the biennial and constituted an intervention in the urban environment. The selected exhibition buildings represented a wide spectrum of urban architectural types, each with its own architectural style and history, such as the empty harbour warehouses or bank buildings, a former tobacco factory, an ornate abandoned apartment building and many other structures, whose functions are harder to identify. All these buildings were in a kind of between-functions situation, permitting the artists free rein. The chosen colour was used to highlight elements of the building, or else a whole wall was painted this colour, which allowed the venues to be identified amid the everyday bustle of the city. The curators consciously avoided locations with dense historical significance, turning attention more to everyday conditions. The artists were invited to create works that might be described as a reaction to the rapid changes in the city, and as an intimate portrait of the setting, where reality meets with imagination. As already mentioned, most of the works had been created while the artists were actually living in Istanbul, and they are closely connected with the city. Certain artists also made reference to other cities or locations, something that emerged in this particular context as the application of urban codes, mythology or the universal language of the city in interpreting the local situation. Fictitious evidence and the contraband of signs One of the most-discussed works, which continues to attract major attention from the media, is the project by Michael Blum entitled "A tribute to Safiye Behar". The artist has spent a year studying and bringing together material on the history of the Republic of Turkey, producing a perfect historical construct or simulation, which has materialised in the memorial apartment of Safiye Behar, with original photographs, excerpts from her diary and the books she wrote and translated, and even a video interview with her grandson, an architect living in New York. The exhibition testifies to the life in Istanbul and Chicago of Jewish feminist and active Marxist Safiye Behar, permitting one to sense her significant influence on Attaturk and on the development of the Republic of Turkey. The way the story is presented in this exhibition can leave even an informed viewer uncertain as to whether the character created by the artist is real or fictitious. Such historical falsifications, manipulating with fragments of reality and contexts illustrate a current trend in art recently described by Irit Rogoff as "contraband". Also functioning as counterfeit reality are the Phil Collins karaoke events, in which the songs of the 1987 album by "The Smiths" are re-recorded together with musicians in Bogota and played in Istanbul, inviting the group's fans to a karaoke party. The 1980s Manchester music scene has re-echoed in the form of an unnoticed alternative subculture in Istanbul. In order to make use of the opportunity to sing their idols' songs, "Smiths" fans are ready to go in front of the camera and permit their performances to be documented for use in the art setting. Another "contrabandist", Daniel Bozhkov, together with perfumers from New York, has created the perfume Eau d'Ernest. It has been promoted by means of a professional advertising campaign, with posters, videos and presentations, all based around the story of a visit to Istanbul by Ernest Hemingway "from a time when America smelled good". A manoeuvre of historical construction, fiction and institutional critique has been undertaken by artist Khalil Rabah, creating in one of the apartments of the Denizi Palas (one of the exhibition venues - an abandoned apartment building) a "Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind", which has several departments, an information centre and a café. Evidence of Palestine before Palestine is presented through fossils and various artefacts, museum archives and popular science videos. In order to create the museum exhibits, the artist has processed and worked olive wood in various ways, creating a reference to the critical commentary of Marcel Broodthaers, which he expressed by establishing an "Eagle Department" of the Modern Art Museum in a Brussels apartment. Rabah analyses the mechanisms of creating history, which include elements of falsification and mythology, and demonstrates the position of strength enjoyed by museums in selecting and evaluating material. A representative of New Slovene Art (NSK), the group IRVIN, engaged in re-writing Eastern European art history, presented a major retrospection - paintings and collages created since 1984. The contraband of signs is one of their methods of work. Synthesising Malevich's Suprematism with Christian iconography and elements of Soviet agitprop, signs are freed from their original meanings and incorporated into a new aesthetic system, in which Istanbul, with its density of signs and symbols, provides yet another contextual layer. Tradition and everyday life The interest of several artists was focussed on the study of everyday conditions and social structures in the city. An ironic comment on the life of a typical Turkish woman, determined by the conditions of everyday existence and assumptions and traditions rooted in culture, which are reflected in popular sayings and expressions, has been created with the help of witty kinetic objects by Servet Koçyigit. The artist Pilvi Takala tests the limits of tolerance of Turkish men by overstepping the traditional norms of patriarchal society, arriving in a kahves (café), where men assemble all day long to drink tea and play board games, and expressing the wish to join the game. The situation is recorded with a hidden camera, permitting comparison of the men's reaction in the artist's presence and afterwards, and thus revealing the clash between traditional views and the modern world. Paulina Olowska has made carpets specially for the Denizi Palas, precisely corresponding to the dimensions of each room and making reference to carpet-weaving - one of Turkey's main craft activities - and to daily rituals, a proportion of which take place on carpets. On the other hand, the designs on the carpets - a district of Warsaw where illegal trade takes place, a map or a picture of bikini-clad model Peggy Moffit - creates a different set of references, rooted in the characteristics and contradictions of Turkish culture. Also telling of the clash between traditions and views, the value systems of the old and new world, is the film "Murat and Ismail", by Mario Rizzi, which documents conversations between a shoe factory owner and his son, and which not only permits a better understanding of culture and tradition, but also gives an insight into the consequences of rapid economic development and urban transformation. Urban issues Another group of artists had been focussing on trends in town planning, which serve as an indicator of social changes, and on various transformations of public space. Erik Göngrich had spent several months in Istanbul recording the details of the urban environment and the typology of contemporary architecture, which seems to be developing quite spontaneously and is not supported by tradition or coordinated with the environmental context, testifying to the city's rapid, but chaotic development. The "Flying City" group of artists looks at Seoul, another city experiencing the transformation brought about by rapid modernisation. By questioning street vendors, one of the most mobile social groups, the artists test the successes and failures of the plans developed by the city's administration, and offer alternative solutions. Axel John Wieder and Jesko Fezer use spatial diagrams to illustrate a social history study on changes to the urban environment of Berlin and its cultural setting since the fall of the wall. Solmaz Shahbazi studies the closed villages of the towns outside Istanbul, where the city's new rich live in an isolated environment, creating their own spatial identity. Maria Eichhorn registers the clash between art systems and the city's bureaucracy, as seen in the use of public space, struggling to obtain approval for an information stand in the central square of Istanbul. The testing of public space is also undertaken with the help of intervention and participation. Together with local graffiti artists, Luca Frei has used materials found in the city to create a multifunctional setting in one of the rooms of the tobacco factory, which can serve as a reading room, a leisure area and a room for projects. Ahmet Őģűt has employed pre-prepared stencils to change randomly selected cars in the city's car parks into a police cars and taxis. Halil Altindere carries out a series of performances and events in the main thoroughfare of Istanbul, creating unexpected situations, which sometimes elicit unpredictable reactions by those around her. Artist Hűseyin Alptekin, an artist from Istanbul, reflects on the typology and function of public art. Bringing together information on monuments in Europe that depict horses, the artist encourages viewers to ponder on the iconography of power and strength. The starting point for this work was the four-horse chariot now adorning the façade of St Mark's in Venice, which originally belonged to Istanbul and was stolen and brought to Europe by the crusaders in 1204. The artist was obsessed with the idea of returning the sculpture to its true owner; he even managed to reach an agreement to borrow the original for the time of the exhibition and exhibit it in the exhibition hall of Platform Garanti. Brought back to Istanbul after 800 years, the famous quadriga not only makes one ponder the history of public art and its changing meanings in relation to the context, but also seems to possess a different kind of symbolic status, suggesting something like the handing over of a baton by the older, more representative Venice Biennale to Istanbul, the latter tending to represent a space for art that is open to fresh trends and ideas. | |
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