ART UNLIMITED 37

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PUBLISHED BIMONTHLY, FREE OF CHARGE, JULY-AUGUST 2016, ISSUE: 37 YEAR: 8, YASEMİN ÖZCAN, PHOTO: SITKI KÖSEMEN

Art

Architecture Unlimited magazine is inside!

YASEMİN ÖZCAN Nazlı Pektaş visited artist’s home studio at Pangaltı.

DAVID BOWIE Erman Ata Uncu wrote his life as an icon.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE Galeri Nev Istanbul is exhibiting artist’s special photographs.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ Ayşe Draz wrote about As One exhibition in Athenes.

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Edito

MOVIE STILL FROM RESPIRO (EMANUELE CRIALESE / 2002), VALERIA GOLINO

Hello, As we set out to revamp Art Unlimited our primary purpose was to work up the publication that you are reading now without compromising its quality and the standard it has maintained for the past 10 years. Our first target was to enrich the magazine with new themes and topics in line with this purpose. You will see the first outcome of our efforts within the current issue: Architecture Unlimited. The supplement will be featuring articles and reviews compiled around a specific theme in every issue, the first one being “Place making in the stage of place changing” which was set around the Venice Biennial. We hope you will enjoy reading it.

Another good news is that we will be preparing the Design Unlimited of which the first issue will come out during Istanbul Design Biennial.

The supplement will be published twice a year under the direction of our design editor Dilek Öztürk. We hope it will make up for the existing gap in design publishing and we are really excited about it.

We have a hot and lively summer ahead of us and you will be able to find the summer issue of Art Unimited in Çeşme, Bodrum and Göcek in addition to Istanbul. We hope it will be a great summer…

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Icon: David Bowie

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Unlimited visits: Yasemin Özcan

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Festival: Cappadox 2016

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Photography: Robert Mapplethorpe

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Feuilleton: Being Queer in the 80s

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Paris: Strange is the place

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After: Gökçen Cabadan

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Music: From the phonograph to the silent disco

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Everybody hurts, sometimes…

SELEN ANSEN, PHOTO: ELİF KAHVECİ

and this has been the case while we were conceiving the exhibition. Perhaps the artworks on display do not directly touch upon the country’s agenda but for instance, when I first saw Mikhail Karikis and Uriel Orlow’s video installation of an abandoned coal mine in Scotland which they made together with old miners (retired old miners perform underground sounds in an abandoned coal mine) the Soma coal mine catastrophe had just happened. So when I watched the video at Palais de Tokyo (Paris) Soma had resonated strongly in my mind and I was deeply affected by this connection also. On the other hand, similar to what I am trying to achieve by not tackling the concept of falling through verticality, while osculating the specific time and the geography of the exhibition, I preferred a more indirect approach to create a space in which everyone can relate in their own way.

This is why falling, as a concept is important to me; it is a common space for all of us, for objects and individuals, for tangible and intangible things. We all have our own stories of falling. There are funny stories and tragic ones. Perhaps the fact that we find a common ground in the idea of falling is something that begins in childhood, when we were trying to learn how to walk. You fall at school and your friends laugh at you. The whole school can laugh at you just because you fell. In fact it is a moment in which you feel yourself naked. You are in a vulnerable position but with a completely different perspective of the world. This is a place at the ground or surface level, which is rather attributed to animals in philosophy or in theory. According to a human-centered construct that sees humans as privileged, ground or floor should be the footing of animals; it is not for humans. It was important for me to bring about a perspective that disarrays established directions and stereotypes.

Can you elaborate on the process of instantiating intangible ideas while building an exhibition; how do you put into practice the conceptual framework?

In fact I cannot make generalizations since this is my first group exhibition at Arter. Before this one, I curated only solo exhibitions; in both Berlinde de Bruyckere and Marc Quinn exhibitions the theme was not the determining factor. In group exhibitions, in other words in exhibitions where the determining factor is the theme, I am more inclined to simultaneous processes rather than following a chronological order like before- nowafter. Every process somehow shapes the others and we proceed this way or sometimes an idea comes up and we go back... As for this exhibition the idea of falling came first and I worked on it; rather than a clear, established decision on the artworks to be exhibited, I had a clear vision of what I didn’t want to delve into, in other words, what I didn’t want. There were artworks that had a powerful impact on me, touched my emotions as well as those I did not have the chance to experience before, the artworks I knew and wanted to experience, which is indeed a luxury; curating exhibitions comes with such luxuries. For instance I knew Ryan Gander’s work but had not experienced before, although it is really an artwork that was conceived to be experienced, an artwork that produces an experience. Taking the concept as the main focus while curating the exhibition would somehow yield a dull, lifeless result. Rather than making a clear statement like this is the concept and these are the artworks that represent it, it was better to create a space that gives shape to that concept, where the concept can

The group exhibition entitled Not All That Falls Has Wings which will be on view until September 18 at Arter, transcends the obvious and widely accepted connotations of the act of falling and takes it as an universal common ground. Devised in a very flexible manner in order to give the viewer the opportunity to draw their own conclusions and open up new discussions, the artworks on display morph into diverse propositions depending on the perspective, similar to a kaleidoscope.

Known with her previous Berlinde de Bruyckere and Marc Quinn exhibitions again at Arter, the curator Selen Ansen talks about the act of falling.

What does playing with notions like downfall, fall, and balance refers to at this point in time, in this part of the world?

I have been contemplating on the concepts of fall/ downfall, writing about them, tackling them from different angles and approaching them from multiple perspectives for quite a while. In fact I seem to have been focusing on these issues routinely in various media in recent years. The important thing for me in this exhibition was, not to include artworks that reflect the usual or expected vision of the act of falling. However while saying this, I need to add a ‘but’ here, as one of the artists, the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ander, exhibits a series that in fact comply with the usual understanding of the concept of falling. Still, it was important for me not to follow a necessarily vertical line from top to bottom or from bottom to top and instead, to refrain from a human-centered stance and question verticality. The construct of humanity and civilization, especially in modernist thinking, often conceives itself through verticality and progression, disregarding the other side of the medallion and does not question the fact that what goes up must come down and the notion of descent was intrinsic to the act of rising. As for the timing and geography, we have been working as a team to build this exhibition for nine months and within this time period a lot of things have happened in Turkey in terms of politics, culture and society. Moreover we are in a period in which changes come about too fast

be transformed into an experience through the artworks on display. This is a process of reciprocation in which the main determinants are of course the artworks. When I look at the whole process from the beginning to today, (I see) there have been many changes. There were artworks that I considered but would not fit in this specific exhibition while some unexpected ones came within the process. In this sense, it is truly a team effort. It was me who came with a concept, with an exhibition idea, but everyone in the team contributed to it.

As a person coming from academia, did actually practicing the theory change the way you read theory and thereof the practice itself?

Of course. What does experience mean? Experience incorporates time and space. People working on theory are inclined to theorize space and time. However I believe an artwork or any act of making or production should be evaluated taking into account space and time.

There are limitations and also there is the idea of how to make use of these limitations so that they contribute to the production. Phyllida Barlow for instance; many of her past artworks cannot be seen today since due to a lack of space, Phyllida dismantles her works after exhibiting them and creates new artworks using the same materials. This goes on for years.

Do you think curation of a group exhibition can be considered a collage? Can we say that?

I would rather talk about a kaleidoscopic approach.

Not for all exhibitions but for this one, I would say so...

Because, we have nine artists among, which four of them are duos and looking at the artworks I chose or chose together with some of the artists, there is diversity. We are not talking about artworks with a single postulation or refer to gravity only, so what is the connection between them? I really mediated on this while preparing this exhibition. What is a kaleidoscope? It is a toy. You rotate the tube to get a new reflection. It is made up of bits and pieces that make up a whole. For me, this exhibition has a similar characteristic. Of course there are connections, quite a few connections between the artworks, and I know why I chose to bring together this specific artwork of this specific artist with that artwork of that artist under the same roof. There are multiple connections between the works of Anne Wenzel and Cyprien Gaillard for instance, but the important thing for me was not to undermine the diversity they constitute by underlining these connections. On the contrary I wanted to present them within their diversity. Of course it is not as easy as rotating a kaleidoscope and get a new reflection or an idea every time, since like every exhibition space, the building that Arter is located in has an architectural structure, an order; you have an entrance, the viewer can use the stairs or the elevator to go to upper floors but we don’t have ten options. The building itself has a construct. But I wish and hope that the viewer can forge a connection between Phyllida Barlow’s artwork at the entrance floor and Anne Wenzel’s work at the third floor. In fact they are very different from one another, they have very different textures and sources of inspiration. This is why I like the kaleidoscope metaphor. It transforms. It is a whole but it is made up of pieces that have their own existence, their own stance. Each piece has a separate world of its own and does not have to get along with other pieces.

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“NEXT GENERATION”LA EN DEĞERLİ VARLIĞINIZ GELECEĞE HAZIRLANIYOR.

Türkiye'de ilk kez gerçekleştirilecek olan genç liderlik programı Next Generation başlıyor.

En değerli varlığınız kendi bağlantılarını kuruyor, ''varlık yönetimi'' konusunda bilgilenerek yarınki sorumluluklarına bugünden hazırlanıyor.

TÜRKİYE'DE BİR İLK Detaylı bilgiye 444 00 72 numaralı özel müşteri hattından ulaşabilirsiniz.

• İstanbul (Bağdat Cad., Etiler Merkez, Ataşehir, Nişantaşı, Yeşilköy) • Ankara • Bursa • İzmir

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YAĞIZ ZAİMOĞLU, PHOTO: DENİZ YILMAZLAR

Waiting for Yoko

Borusan Contemporary’s new director Yağız Zaimoğlu underlines permeability between art disciplines and teamwork. His personal dream is to transform Borusan Contemporary into a venue with and opening party Yoko Ono would like to attend.

You are now directing an institution that is constantly in the limelight and open to powerful influences. What changes will you bring?

When I first began at Borusan Art in 2009, our Chair Zeynep Hamedi and the rest of us were working as a close-knit team, even like a family. As a family we were open to changes, we shared ideas, set goals collectively and everybody did their best to attain these goals regardless of their job descriptions. Borusan Contemporary now becomes a part of this family. With its unique office-museum structure and the new acquisitions to the collection Borusan Contemporary plays an important role in the development of contemporary art in Turkey. Thanks to everyone who has a hand in this… I am very happy to have been deemed worthy of directing such a successful institution.

From now on, together with our artistic director Kathleen Forde we want to render Borusan Contemporary more than a museum to visit, a center of attraction where people meet in the weekends, spend quality time, talk to each other, learn, experience and produce, in the setting of our new exhibitions, parallel events,

and our contemporary art collection which can be considered the best in Turkey in terms of new media.

When you were managing Borusan Music you didn’t focalize on only classical music and opened the door for modern, experimental musicians. Can we expect a similar move at Borusan Contemporary?

As I told earlier, everything we did at Borusan Art were the shared dreams of our team. Now Borusan Contemporary is also a part of this. Therefore we are certainly planning concerts and performances that will go together with our exhibitions. Permeability between disciplines… New media art cannot be thought separately from new music where envisioned sounds are created in digital environment with the use of electronics. Within this context we want to make use of music, performance art, talks and artist meetings as parallel events supporting our exhibitions. We have already organized such an event in last May with Günseli Kato and Handan Akdemir in cooperation with Doğan Kitap (publishing house). Candaş Şişman and Deniz Kader will be creating live images during percussion artist Amy Salsgiver’s performance on June 18. With the coming of September you will be seeing more of such events in our program along with new exhibitions.

Do you have dream projects, or institutions you take as an inspiration source?

We begin every project with a dream. Our artistic

director Kathleen and I have long conversations; let’s do this, let’s have this exhibition too… Then we identify the most plausible projects and devise our short and medium-term plans. My personal dream is to transform Borusan Contemporary into a venue with an opening party Yoko Ono would like to attend.

After the lively and noisy Istiklal street, could you adapt to the peaceful Rumelihisarı neighborhood?

How will you attract people to Rumelihisarı?

I’ve been working in Pera region since 2003. Is it really possible to leave Pera? My friends, the shops I go, my favorite pub, everything is there. However Rumelihisarı and especially the Hunted Mansion we work in is a magnificent building. It’s almost like every window presents a different color of the Bosphorus. And in terms of architecture it is so perfectly planned that despite its grandeur the building does not overshadow the artworks on exhibition, it underlines them. Yes, the place is not very central in terms of means of transport.

People plan ahead and make time for coming to Borusan Contemporary, which is very precious to us. We should be able to remunerate, not only with the exhibitions we host but also with our ticket office, Museum Café, gift shop and our guides… We are responsible of the happiness and content of every single visitor. We should be able to do that. // MB

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LEFT TOP: EVA HESSE,1963,PHOTO: BARBARA BROWN BOTTOM LEFT: EVA HESSE, PHOTO: HERMAN LANDSHOFF RIGHT: EVA HESSE, PHOTO: GRETCHEN LAMBERT

Shooting star

Director Marcie Begleiter’s Eva Hesse is the first feature-length documentary dedicated to the brief but brilliant career of one of the most powerful artists of the 20th century.

Hers is a short, sad story full of love, passion and a lot of pain. Born into a Jewish family in Nazi Germany and died at 34 from brain cancer in the US, Eva Hesse was one of the most brilliant artists of 20th century and one of the founders of the post-minimalist movement. In her brief life she had to endure a movie-like escape from the Hitlerzeit, the suicide of her chronically depressed mother, an unhappy marriage to an established sculpture (Tom Doyle, who was inevitably overshadowed by her) and a painful return to Germany where her artistic expression literally exploded. With a blue-chip education at Cooper Union and Yale University School of Art she was one of the few women to make work that was taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s. She was widely recognized as a major artist for her mind boggling, abstract, intuitive and very powerful work, which can be classified as neither painting, nor sculpture but a cross-breed of the two.

Directed by Marcie Begleiter and produced by Karen Shapiro, Eva Hesse is the first feature-length documentary dedicated to her life and career, based on the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with her close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and contemporary as well as archival interviews with fellow artists (among

them, Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham) who recall her as a passionate, ambitious and tenacious personality. The world premiere of the movie was done on May 17th at Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA). Unfortunately it will take a while until we will be able order a copy from Amazon or watch it online (or at least cross our fingers with the hope of seeing it in one of the coming film festivals in autumn).

In the meantime, here is a short interview with director Marcie Begleiter: Tell me about your fascination with Eva Hesse, what made you to take an interest in her work?

I have an abiding interest in the art and life of Eva Hesse. The work moves me deeply in the mysterious way that powerful art can function. It’s hard to categorize; inhabiting a space that moves fluidly between media and ideas. The work made me want to know more about the artist and that led to Lucy R. Lippard’s Eva Hesse, the first book written on the artist after her early death in 1970. This volume includes fragments from Hesse’s unpublished journals and the single audio interview she gave in her lifetime.

I connected strongly with the voice and heart that came through in these short quotes and began to search out more material from Hesse’s archive. Like Eva, I also have roots in the European Jewish community, a history that comes with many opportunities as well as inherent challenges. The female perspective is also very strong in her writing as is her ambition and bravery.

No biography in English has been published, so I decided to go visit those unpublished journals at the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio where they are housed. Given a pair of white gloves, I sat for a week in their rare manuscripts library, reading through hundreds of pages. The journals told a deep and compelling story about this remarkable woman’s journey.

It was characterized by loss, but more importantly for me, by a triumphant commitment to work and living life to its fullest. By week’s end I had fallen for the woman as I had for the work and began a series of projects of which this film is the latest incarnation.

What is her most striking characteristic as an artist and/or woman?

The work was absolutely original. It was logical and absurd, soft and hard - it had that ineffable quality that great art has - you cannot pin it down, why it moves you, but it does over and over. And the art is still working it’s magic; it is as relevant today as it was when it was made - in ways even more so. As a woman, she was someone both of her time and ahead of it. A proto-feminist who never let being a woman keep her from what she wanted - to be part of the central conversation in the art world. Yet she strongly identified as a woman.

And there is her writing - poetic and searching. Not many artists leave such a deep history of their thoughts.

We were very lucky indeed. // MB www.evahessedoc.com

D E S I G N PO R T R A I T.

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ERGİN ÇAVUŞOĞLU, DUST BREEDING, 2011, PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID HEALD, COURTESY OF SOLOMON R.GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM

Storm in paradise

But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise exhibition at the New York Guggenheim looks at contemporary art from MENA region and displays works that are recent acquisitions of the Guggenheim’s permanent collection as part of the museum’s UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, including works of Ergin Çavuşoğlu and Gülsün Karamustafa. The exhibition will be on view until October 5 and will move to Pera Museum in 2017.

But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa is the third exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Organized by Sara Raza, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa, the exhibition features a wide range of artistic voices and critical concerns from a rapidly evolving region through installation, photography, sculpture, video, and work on paper. As with the two previous exhibitions in the MAP initiative, which focused on contemporary art practice from South and Southeast Asia and Latin America, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise features artworks that have been recently acquired for the Guggenheim’s collection, including the works of Gülsün Karamustafa and Engin Çavuşoğlu. Interwoven with

questions and ideas about the region’s colonial histories, the exhibition investigates such themes as architecture and geometry, modernism and migration, and the process of unearthing hidden ideas. The exhibition will be on view until October 5th 2016 and move to Pera Museum in 2017. Curator Sara Raza answers Art Unlimited’s questions.

If it is possible to read the sociology of a region through artworks produced, as the curator what do you think was the most striking finding of this exhibition?

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative was a collection building exercise from a curated non Euro-American centric lens. As such two different yet interconnected methodologies were employed. First exploring the gaps and areas to supplement in the existing collection and secondly to bring forth new scholarship in regional art practices and those related to the region.

There has been a rising interest in the art world towards artists and artworks from MENA region especially after the Arab Spring. Why is this exhibition is different from previous ones that focus on the same theme?

Firstly this is not an exhibition about post Arab Spring, but rather one that explores the complexities of modernism and how the constructed nature of the region

was in effect created during the formation of Western modernism. The central theme of the exhibition is rooted in conceptual geometries as a study of mental and physical space, a way in which to explore the construction of a region that was formed after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Further it explores geometries as a branch of the thinking sciences namely mathematics and how this relates to logic and truth and through the show I explore subjective truths or varying avenues into what constitutes as the real. The exhibition also explores a number of auxiliary themes such as the ideologies of architecture, migrations and ‘conceptual contraband’ by which I mean the smuggling in of ideas that are somewhat uncomfortable.

How did the idea of cooperating with Pera Museum come about, why Istanbul, and will the exhibition travel to other cities after Istanbul?

Istanbul is an important city located at the intersection of several ideologies, which mirrors the curatorial thinking. The Ottoman legacy is important, as is the historical connection. In addition, the Pera is an encyclopaedic museum and I am very much interested in the relationship between different genres of histories and have a deep interest in science. // MB

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MIKA TAJIMA, VIEW FROM EMOTION COMMUNE EXHIBITION, COURTESY OF 5533

Is Istanbul a smart city?

Robbie-Lee Valentine interviewed Mika Tajima on her latest solo exhibition ‘Emotion Commune’ organized by Protocinema at 5533.

Please tell us more about your relationship with digital technology. How do you incorporate this into your work?

It is undeniable that digital technologies have transformed these fields you mentioned and creative producers, including artists, have integrated these new technical tools, equipment, and modes of working native to logic and flow digital production. However, I see my work as an examination of technology itself, specifically how technologies are inseparable from power and interests that seek to shape an outcome, a body, and a society. That is why I have been interested in architecture, office design, ergonomics, fitness, and self-care as subjects in my research and artwork. These are sites in which different types of technologies are employed to maximize activities and life. My interest is in unpacking the relationship between technology and culture of maximization, which is often tied to greater control on us and less freedom to do whatever. We need whatever freedom more and more, I think. My recent Meridian mood light sculptures uses ‘smart’ technology as a tool to produce an experience and a space of questioning. It’s less a demonstration of consumer technology as it is making subject our consumption of a certain type of technology. That is, ‘smart’ technology is part of a larger system to connect people, and objects, and cities together in unprecedented ways - to what ends?

What is a smart city and what significance does İstanbul have with this idea?

Through my research, I found out that in 2015, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) created a ‘smart city’ initiative by joining an international consortium of state and corporate entities to integrate technologies that seek to streamline city operations for citizens and enhance crisis and disaster management including civil unrest. That means a certain type of technology has been adopted by the city that would affect all citizens in a very specific way. These ‘smart city’ initiatives are always implemented in the name of “quality of life”. I was interested in this argument and reason — also questioning a technology that is implemented from above on citizens.

For Emotion Commune, I had Istanbul as a city specifically in mind when conceiving the show -- this was also informed by my visit to the city. In thinking of a city that I would connect with the exhibition, I wanted to choose a city that was both distant to Istanbul but also had very specific shared technological conditions.

I chose New Songdo City in Korea as the ‘light source’ for the exhibition because it is touted as the model of a fully integrated ‘smart city’ of the future -- built from scratch from a master plan. By linking these two sites and cities, I was hoping to create a space and image of the ‘emotion commune’ of people living in a transformational city space.

“The installation employs language processing technology that uses computer algorithms to interpret data scraped from thousands of Twitter feeds per second using software to detect human emotion.” This is quite a feat, how does this idea actually manifest itself in your work?

The infrastructure is widespread and global. It involves someone tweeting in New Songdo Korea, a server in New York to process the tweet as light color information, a server somewhere else in the world to instruct the bulb in Istanbul to turn a specific color — all in real time. The color of the lights respond in real time to the aggregate sentiment of citizens in New Songdo City, a new master plan ‘smart city’ in South Korea (5,000 miles away) considered to be a template for urban futurity in which the entire environment is embedded with computational technologies that provide urban management and regulation. The Wi-Fi-enabled ‘smart’ lights that I use in the Meridian light sculptures draw on this very technology. And in this way, it brings the exhibition space into the network of The Internet of Things, a technology that seeks to integrate physical objects in the world with sensing and data gathering technologies.

The feed from New Songdo City is scraped and analyzed by a custom sentiment analysis program that uses natural language processing to extract sentiment information from an individual tweet -- it looks at individual words, phrases, and machine learned usages to give each tweet a quantified sentiment value -- on a positive and negative scale. The analyzed tweets are averaged and the light colors of each sculpture change as this number fluctuates. Two colors are assigned to negative

and positive sentiment values and its intensities.

Where did the idea of Emotion Commune come about and what did you expect from your viewers?

I’m interested in this concept that Hannah Arendt describes as ‘social evaporation’: When something that is specific and tangible becomes abstracted and immaterial through a process of transformations, moving from different equivalences and states. In Emotion Commune there are material elements such as the transparent paintings on the wall and the light fixtures but there are also immaterial elements such as light that have different qualities and react to distant things (tweets that appear as shifting light/color and changing the color tone of the gallery space). In a world where globalism is the assumed and the modus operandi, maybe it will give us pause to think what this globalism--these abstractions and equivalences--manifest and shape our lives.

The Meridian light installation at Protocinema essentially transforms the entire space into a lighting appliance — one that emits vibrant and shifting colored light to create different affective zones within the environs of the Istanbul Textile Traders Market. The space becomes a lamp that affects its surroundings, broadcasting distant emotions that have been analyzed, computed, and transformed -- not pure emotion but a mediated one.

Tell us more about what’s coming up for you?

I am doing a public commission with Sculpture Center based here in NYC. For this public artwork, I will create a vaporous disappearing sculpture—a void that also functions as seating and meeting zone—filled with mercurial color vapor, which dissipates in a matter of minutes. The colors of the vapor will correspond to real-time global sentiment for gold commodity, a peculiar material that derives its value from the social perception of its qualities and the collective “mood” toward geopolitical and economic events. These vapors will bathe the viewer in these complex sentiments embodied in gold, as a material with such fluid and dematerialized exchangeability. Reflecting on the materiality of contemporary life, this object is a ghost or mirage of a familiar object—a fleeting visual trace of a material form as it fades into abstraction—into thin air. I am also participating in the Gwangju Biennial opening September 2016. // RW

Our relationship with paper k e e p i n g a l i v e fo r t h i r t y o n e y e a r s without big words elaborating on small details.

Kağıtla olan ilişkimizi büyük laf lar etmeden k ü ç ü k d e t ay l a r ı ö n e m s e y e r e k otuzbir yıldır canlı tutuyoruz.

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CAPSULE

Showcasing creativity

LEFT TOP: KARL FOURNIERAND & OLIVIER MARTY, PHOTO: STUDIO KO NOEL MANALILI RIGHT TOP: VILLA OASIS, PHOTO: NICOLAS MATHEUS BOTTOM: YVES SAINT LAURENT MUSEUM MARRAKECH, EXTERIOR,2016, PHOTO: STUDIO KO, COURTESY OF FONDATION PIERRE BERGE

Two museums entirely dedicated to 20th century’s iconic designer Yves Saint Lauren’s work and life will open in Paris and Marrakech next year. The architects and designers involved in the twin projects tell us about ‘showcasing creativity’.

Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent opens two museums in Paris and Marrakech to preserve and protect the designer’s 40 years of creativity and production. Scheduled to complete in 2017 the museums will host a vast collection comprising five thousand haute couture garments and fifteen thousand accessories, as well as thousands of sketches, collection boards, photographs, and objects. Yves Saint Laurent is known to systematically archive his work since the creation of his couture house in 1961. From original sketches to prototypes, warehouse records to retailing books, the collection also sheds light on the mundane details of the designer’s daily life. The Parisian museum will be hosted in the historical couture house, 5 Avenue Marceau, where Yves Saint Laurent designed and created his work for almost 30 years. Stage designer Nathalie Crinière

and interior designer Jacques Grange, who both collaborated on numerous of the Fondation’s past projects, will rethink and refurbish the exhibition space. As a city Yves Saint Laurent had discovered in 1966 and then visited regularly, Marrakech remained essential to his inspiration and work. The conception of the museum to be built here is lead by French architectural practice Studio KO founded by architects Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier. We asked the designers involved in both projects to tell us how did they approach ‘showcasing the creativity of an iconic designer’.

Interior designer Jacques Grange: “My relationship with Yves Saint Laurent is timeless.

Of course Yves is a great artist, but above all he is my friend. Having decorated a number of his houses, my understanding of his aesthetic world is such that it is entirely natural for Pierre Bergé to seek my collaboration on this project, in order to turn these Foundation-owned spaces (in Paris) into the Yves Saint Laurent Museum. He trusts me to understand Yves’ aesthet-

ic codes and obsessive quirks, and to breathe life into them on this project.’

Stage designer Nathalie Crinière: “It is truly a privilege to be able to work on the YSL museum project in Paris. We were lucky enough to have met M. Yves Saint-Laurent in this specific place. What we are looking for now for the museum is to fill it with his spirit. Each visitor must feel his presence. Our idea really is to create something more than just a museum but rather a place where he was and where his creation is now part of the walls.”

Studio KO (Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier).

“We designed the building like one would cut fabric for a dress, by composing curves and lines, in the fashion of the working drawings white traced on black paper that we discovered in the designer’s workshop and archives. Its facades would be wrapped it in a brick trim, like a drape, a throw, a cape. We also wanted it to be mysterious, opaque, inward, and with textures and materiality that would help it mingle with the city chromes.”

22

CAPSULE

Scenery and memory

SITKI KÖSEMEN, FROM SCENERY AND MEMORY SERIES

First of the series on settings, scenes and portraits versus immaterial values of images with photographs.

One of our deepest needs is awareness for sense of identity and belonging.

A common denominator in this; is human attachment to a scenery and also how we depict identity in a location or a space.

Landscape; therefore is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: We see it with our eyes but interpret it with our mind and assign values to a view for immaterial – spiritual –

reasons. Landscape can therefore be seen as a cultural construct in which our senses of place and memories are settled.

In this series of photographs; with the leftover pinups on the walls in the Jewish Boy’s Dormitory, back from the 70’s in Ortakoy (now deserted); Sitki Kosemen explores some of the associated ideas of environment & memory, and how they fill much of our thinking, of who we are; with a particular focus.

The idea gaining ground in this region of the world surely is:

Crossroads 4 ArtOn Istanbul hosts the exhibition called Crossroads 4 from June 11.

Within this exhibition ArtOn points its contribution to young artists’ production. In the exhitibion Ahmet Çerkez, Olcay Kuş, Erman Özbaşaran and Olgu Ülkenciler reflects the power of art with a rich material selection. One of the strongest works of the exhibition is Ahmet Çerkez’s and Erman Özbaşaran’s collective work called Bane. This three meter height monumental sculpture is made of construction rubbles. All works are takling about “the city” dealing everyday events the we encounter. The four artists of the exhibition are showing a new side of their works that we never saw in their past solo exhibitions. That reflects the vivid part of their production. Olgu Ülkenciler shows us new three dimensional works with reliefs. Olcay Kuş gathers newspaper pages in order to show how male behaviours are major in the media. Crossroads 4 is a must-see exhibition, hurry to add it into your agendas!

Until July 30 at ArtOn Şişhane

RIGHT: OLGU ÜLKENCİLER, LEAF, 2016, ALUMINIUM, 240X225 LEFT: OLGU ÜLKENCİLER, SPIRAL, 2016, ALUMINIUM, 126X165X130

“Istanbul; a multi cultural / sociopolitical history, a city of perfect harmony.”

After the Değiş Tokuş exhibition DETAIL FROM DTS 2016

Words Ezgi Arıduru

The Değiş Tokuş (Exchange) Exhibition opened its doors on Friday, the 15th of April; lasted until Sunday, the 17th following a two-day marathon. 45 artists were present, each with a single work, at the exhibition that had the maxim: “Art auction where money is not valid: Exchange the work you like, with any offer of your own”.

Açık Radyo acted as a media sponsor of the exhibition, with Adasanat as the space provider. Ofix stood as a main sponsor for the first time, while Workattack was the design sponsor.

Apart from the 43 artworks exhibited on the opening day, two works were created on the spot in Adasanat: Graffiti artist CINS was painting his 2x3 meters canvas made of 6 little canvases on the terrace of the space, while Sidar Bakşi was working on his tattoo that was not tattooed on the skin. “When you get used to active Fridays, you want the weekend to be more crowded as well. I think we achieved this. Yet, we gathered over a hundred offers only on Sunday”, says Céline Feyzioğlu. Viewers were given the chance to observe the production process of the two works made/applied simultaneously. “We wanted to stir up the performativity, the interaction of the exhibition with the visitor”, says Güray Oskay. The production process of the works indeed continued Saturday, under the spotlight of curious eyes, first with small questions, then with warm conversations in the following hours.

Orhan Cem Çetin who came to the exhibition space on Saturday towards the closing time to observe the other offers, and update the offers he himself gave, said: “Upon a comment I had from a student of mine

about the exhibition, I thought about it and realized that an important feature of the exhibition is that the work is not evaluated by the artist or gallery but by the viewer. And this value is a first-hand, absolute value.

Because normally works have a price tag, and the value written is not arguable. This time, you are assigning a value to the work, and you do this by asking yourself ‘what kind of a sacrifice can I do in exchange for this, what can I give up?’ This valuation leads you to really comprehend how much the work has affected you. You are faced directly with the work itself, unaffected by a price tag. On the other hand, as a participating artist, I got to better see how much the viewer was affected by my work, how they valued it, independently from the price I would associate with the work.”

1067 different offers were received to the works shown at the exhibition with more than 1500 visitors, most of them at the opening night. The opening was very crowded like every previous year; in addition most of the visitors stayed at the space until the closing hour: “Our inviting policy was in the same line as our target audience policy. Everyone we thought would be, is, and should be interested in art. Most of our artists, and ex-artists were there too” tolds us Sibel Özdoğan.

The artist is provided with all of the offers that are inventoried, the following week of the exhibition. At the time when I submitted this article, the artists were still thinking about which offers they would exchange their works with.

As the exhibition only lasted for three days, the only remaining significant resource remains to be the website: degistokussergi.org. This year’s works were pho-

“Our inviting policy was in the same line as our target audience policy.

Everyone we thought would be, is, and should be interested in art. Most of our artists, and exartists were there too” tolds us Sibel Özdoğan.

tographed for the catalogue; upon the completion of the selection of the artists, the 2016 catalogue will be available on the website as well. You may also find a simple summary of the exhibition process, and previous catalogues on the website. You may want to have a look at the participating artists, their works, and what they exchanged them for.

One of the early Değiş Tokuş artists, Aslı Aydemir, commenting on the exhibition as a visitor this year, denotes a point that I had also thought about while visiting myself: “To me, The Değiş Tokuş Exhibition has reached a maturity point where it could select not only the artists, but also the works to be exhibited.”

This year, the exhibition received requests to participate from the artists in the early promotion stage. It looks like for the next and fourth exhibition in 2017 -that I hope will take place- the process of the selection of artists, and works will be much more challenging.

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ICON

25

An organic alien:

David Bowie Words Erman Ata Uncu

The man who fell to earth description for David Bowie is so much more than a reference to the movie he starred in… Considering his career as music and film star, complementing his ingenuity in every medium, it could really not have been otherwise. This means that David Bowie was not just a well-fit cast in Nicolas Roeg’s The Men Who Fell to Earth. Yet, his whole career demonstrates that he fell to our planet earth from somewhere in the space in order to dynamite our usual dilemmas. He riveted his situation by cutting the ground out from under the male-female duality especially during the glam-rock period. His performance during this period is not yet a drag-show based on the gender mainstreaming parody. It is an interim period where both options (male or female) were imposed upon, as well as invalidated. Herein, it is not a coincidence that he took one of the most disorienting icons, Marlene Dietrich as an example. In his relationship with pop history, he is both as passionate as a fan, and as destructive as an avant-garde. The naturally popular culture that he brought forward is an expired, olden archeological find on which nothing can be added. Therefore Bowie is the saboteur of his own status. Him being one of the richest rock stars in the world, whose albums sell in millions, does not obstruct his problematizing of the manufacturing types of the star system in question at every opportunity.

In her article ‘Music video: Messages and structure’, Deborah H. Holdenstein examines how Bowie problematizes his status as a rock star in the Let’s Dance video. In the video where two young Maori’s, one male, the other female fall under capitalism’s spell, later on alienated by the same system, Bowie is both the main driver of the story and the face of capitalism…

He both impersonates the musician at the bar where the young dance, and the tough boss at the production facility where they work. In short, Bowie is no different than an alien fallen to earth with the mission to flesh out the irony.

Irony, or consciously undermining one’s own status, is obviously one of the best-known strategies in Pop history. In recent times, Lady Gaga does this by repeatedly “re-discovering” that the earth is round. Her

antecedent Madonna had become a star by playing with the indicators of the images she benefited from.

David Byrne had made irony the backbone of their careers especially during the Talking Heads era. Yet, among these names, David Bowie’s irony was the most natural, and this was the purest form of irony…

Hence, Bowie’s relationship with art does not evolve on a common interaction line. Bowie acts as an agent with his experiences between two fields in the centers of art such as Berlin, New York, and London.

He furnishes his Jump They Say video with clear references to Chris Marker’s groundbreaking movie La jetée. But when Bowie is in question, he is much more than a pop star sprinkling a pinch of eccentricity to his career drawing inspiration from a work outside the mainstream. The video of the song he was inspired by the suicide of his schizophrenic brother, pictures Bowie as a businessman who is experimented on in cold blood. The plans where he flirts with the camera, with wounds and bruises, and a black eye, gains another meaning when you think of Jump They Say as Bowie’s comeback video after years of silence. La jetée portraying a never before, and never will be post-nuclear war space; again conduces Bowie to break the ground below his own rock star status. Following his Tin Machine years, Bowie makes an outsider, wounded comeback, far from the time process as shown by the La jetée references, rather than a magnificent one.

Another moment where he acts as a mediator between mainstream and the outside is the fruit of his Berlin years. Following the years from 1976 to 1979 when he moves to Berlin to get away from everything, and recover himself, he makes a comeback with an accompanist quite outside the radar of the mainstream viewer: Klaus Nomi. This German new wave icon, with a make-up whiter than Buster Keaton’s, and latex space costumes, singing a wide array of classic pop songs to Baroque arias, accompanies Bowie at his Saturday Night Live performance in 1979. This is certainly one the most privileged performances the SNL stage has witnessed: Two beings outside this earth sing The Man Who Sold the World with a performance pushing the limits of theatricality. Could there be a more unor-

dinary case for the TV viewer of the end of the 1970’s?

Here, his ‘iconoclasm creating new images’ as signaled in the ‘Theater of Gender’ article by Camille Paglia, comes into play. This is when Bowie brings the sense of humor of Marcel Duchamp, whom he always expressed his admiration for, into view. Chris Burden, the performance artist he refers to in the lyrics of his Joe the Lion song dated 1977, [“Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car”] might not be known by the majority of his audience. Yet this art reference so organically becomes part of a rock’n roll piece that the space in between disappears.

How prosaic is the rather tabloid friendship between Lady Gaga and Marina Abramović next to all of Bowie’s relationships with the different performance fields! On one side, we observe a PR machine using various art disciplines as a prestige element, and on the other side, a popular culture icon, having control over the undermining, destructive power of art rather than prestige. This is the reason why Bowie plays a key role on the verge of mass and popular culture.

With his resources he gives reference to while projecting his image, and the collaborations he realized with avant-gardes such as Lester Bowie, and Brian Eno, the artist, opens up the space in front of his audience, and viewers, and leaves the doors of the new worlds of meaning ajar. He doesn’t rasp the ridges in order to fit in the mass culture. Yet he is at the same time one of the creators, and few giants of the music industry. And this paradox transforms him into one of the most genuine representatives of rock’n roll soul. For rock’n roll soul is not just made up of slavish imitations of Buddy Holly or riots with effects limited to stadiums, or the vicious circle of sex and drugs. Rock’n roll’s main sentiment is to transform and sometimes destroy the conventional perceptions of the daily life with little games, like Bowie did with his persona that he carefully knitted.

26

PERFORMANCE

However the act of counting did not suffice

For the Abramović method I counted the rice It is the month of April. We are in Athens. Heading towards the Benaki Museum in Pireos, which is a small museum with a charm of its own. Our final destination is the As One exhibition taking place at the Benaki Museum between the dates of March 10-April 24 featuring 27 performances and 29 artists.

Words Ayşe Draz

Although we are in Athens, one of the cities where the impact of the refugee crisis is felt and made visible the most intensely, we have mentally isolated ourselves, even if partly, from the realities of the world outside since we are headed to an exhibiton, an art exhibition.

The Abramović Method, realized as collaboration between NEON and MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) is what interests us the most among the works in this museum that is completely transformed into a performance platform during the exhibition. On this occasion we will not sit face to face and stare at one another with Marina like she did during her exhibition The Artist is Present realized in 2010 at New York MOMA and which could qualify as the work signifying her rebirth. On the screen placed in the museum coffee shop is a video in which Abramović talks about herself and her works. Not the music video of Picasso Baby by the American rapper Jay Z featuring Abramović. (in this ‘performance’ realized by Abramović for the song, she does not stare in the eyes of those who come to visit her in the gallery but dances face to face with them s to the music of Jay Z) That music video later on sparked a commercial dispute between the two artists. Besides, we will most probably never be able to know how much of the method we are about to experience owes to Ulay, the former partner of Abramović who has recently

sued her with regards to their past works’ copyrights.

Abramović has worked together with some young emerging performance artists she has chosen for this exhibition and provided guidance to them so that they create their own performances. However the most interesting part of this exhibition is The Abramović Method which promises to “get us in touch with our long-lost selves,” rather than the work of these young performance artists.

We confine ourselves to a quick and brief look at these performances which mostly consist of the repetition of certain actions, and in which the artists push themselves to their ‘limits’ since they sustain the repetition of these actions for a very long time. In a subtle but sure way our feeling is that life has already become a one big repetition itself and that the ‘limits’ of and the ‘borders’ in the world are being tested enough. Yet we wonder about Abramović’s work. If you ask why, the best answer was already given by Robert (Bob) Wilson,

one of the most important figures of contemporary theater, when he recently visited Istanbul on the occasion of the staging of his The Threepenny Opera staged together with the Berliner Ensemble.* Just like a shooting star, the art and product of a specific time, performance art Bob Wilson is a prominent artist working in various disciplines besides working mainly in theatre. While he was talking about his performance works, he also made a reference to Abramović and stated that performance art, just like a shooting star is the product and work of a specific time. He mentioned that the works of performance art are constructed on the personas of the artists such as himself and Abramović. After claiming that works of George Balanchine, one of the most important choreographers of the 20th century who has divorced himself from his work, will dure against the time, Wilson underlined that his and Marina’s works are highly dependant on their personas and that thus

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AS ONE | NEON + MAI BENAKI MUSEUM, ATHENS, MARCH 10-APRIL 24, 2016, PHOTOGRAPH: NATALIA TSOUKALAS, COURTESY OF BENAKI MUSEUM

they will not last. He also mentioned that when young kids try to do what Abramović did in the 70’s their attempt is vain. Here I will make a brief digression; Abramović who once claimed that the most important performance of hers would be the staging of her funeral, did not yet realize this as a ‘performance.’ However Robert Wilson staged his opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramović in 2012 featuring Antony Hegarty from the Antony and the Johnsons, and the famous actor William Dafoe besides Marina Abramović herself. Thus Wilson proved that the dream of Abramović, who defines performance art almost as the opposition of theatre **, could be achieved only through the art of theatre itself.

The Abramović Method that claims to ‘get us in touch with our long-lost selves’ If we return to the The Abramović Method that claims to ‘get us in touch with our long-lost selves,’ let’s say that after we queued for a while in the line to enter the exhibition/performance/ experience space located on the ground floor of the museum, we were lead to a room with lockers where we were asked to deposit our personal belongings including our watches and phones.

After we were purfied of our belongings, facilitators tutored by Abramović led us in groups through a series of warm up and breathing exercises to which those familiar with theatre excercises would be very accustomed, and which are aimed to wake up the senses, center the mind and stretch the body. In the next phase, we are given special noise-canceling headphones and told that we are to keep silent. Once we enter the designated area, we are free to experience at our own timing various Abramović acts/activities ranging from lying on barrack style beds to staring, seated on chairs and as long as we wish, at colored rectangular surfaces on the wall; from freely wandering in the space as they blindfold us as if we are to play the childrens’ game blind man’s bluff, to holding a mutual gaze with whoever is seated across; from moving in slow motion to separating and counting the rice and lentil grains spread on white sheets of paper. If during the process the facilitators notice that you are bored or moving relatively too fast in comparison to the rest of the crowd, they come and make small interventions as they either invite you get slower or try to enagage you in oth-

A er claim- ing that works of George Balanchine, one of the most important choreographers of the 20th century who has divorced himself from his work, will dure against the time, Wilson underlined that his and Marina’s works are highly dependant on their personas and that thus they will not last.

28

PERFORMANCE

TOP: AS ONE | NEON + MAI BENAKI MUSEUM, ATHENS, MARCH 10 – APRIL 24, 2016, PHOTO: NATALIA TSOUKALAS, COURTESY OF BENAKI MUSEUM BOTTOM LEFT: AS ONE | NEON + MAI BENAKI MUSEUM, ATHENS, MARCH 10 – APRIL 24, 2016, PHOTO: PANOS KOKKINIAS, COURTESY OF BENAKI MUSEUM BOTTOM RIGHT: AS ONE | NEON + MAI BENAKI MUSEUM, ATHENS, MARCH 10 – APRIL 24, 2016, PHOTO: PANOS KOKKINIAS, COURTESY OF BENAKI MUSEUM

er activities leading you by the hand. Actually a new awareness of being in the present moment, brought on by the fact that we are isolated from outer sounds and that in a designated area we are blindfolded, consumes us. However when I sit down to separate and count the lentil and rice grains, something tells me to question why I am doing that. My mind questions whether this experience that I am sharing here with people, an art audience not much different than myself, anticipating to experience such rituals, protected by the the safe confounds of the museum, does provide me with a new perspective on what has been going on in the outside world. Whether an artwork should have such an aim can be disputed, however I don’t think that it is an artistic experience either; nor is it a theatrical experience.

Because as the famous playwright Peter Handke says, “[in theatre] light is brightness pretending to be other

brightness; a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair.” Yet I am seated on a real chair, counting real rice grains…I am counting and counting but the counting does not end. At last, I seek solace in observing how the others are experiencing this situation; yet at that exact moment I feel distressed and the voice of the outside world infiltrates my ears in spite of the headphones I am wearing to make sure I am present in the present moment, within the magical world of Abramović; ‘see’ the voice whispers, ‘this what you will keep doing as you get out to the streets of Athens, to despairingly observe people as they count the grains of rice, though this time doing so necessarily since they will be really hungry.’ *In the link provided below you can watch the video recording of this panel moderated by Koken Ergun, a video artist who has previously worked as Robert Wilson’s assistant and whose works are today exhibitied

in various museums and galleries all around the world.

The panel provides insight into how Robert Wilson approaches artworks as well as into his personality. https://youtu.be/WJYKzlKRceg ** Abramović says, with regards to theatre that: “To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre...Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.”

EXHIBITION

29

The exhibition

*Kirli

SEVİNJ YUSİFOVA, UNEASY, FINE ART PRINT, 2015

Words Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergül

Anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter out of place”. This definition implies that dirt is designated through its symbolic meaning within a system rather than through its material qualities. The threat generated by the fluidity and contagiousness of dirtiness, of impurity acquires meaning when it is considered together with the excessive significance placed on the formation of borders and the disgust that originates from transgressing them. More importantly, when we pass on to the symbolic realm, we realize that “what we find impure” is a socially constructed phenomenon that is forced and impressed upon us. In such a chain of significations, purification, that is, “cleaning” can come to mean murder, destruction, and annihilation.

Indeed, every time when the border maker can not content with its symbolic power and intrudes the micro spaces of reality, the language retreats to the unwillingness of disgust and a discourse which dignifies a certain understanding of cleanliness and stigmatizes the

rest with impurity, collapses onto bodies and bodily practices.

Art is one of the strongest branches we can hold on to, to expose such an oppression and then to reinstate the linguistic distance. While sexuality, the field of giving pleasure reciprocally is smeared through discourses about chastity and impurity, which is believed to be cleaned only with blood, the exhibition Dirty looks at this twisted but prevalent mentality that associates blood with purity and sexuality with impurity, from various angles, at a time when the homophobic massacre at Orlando and the homophobic threats against the Pride March capture the headlines, thereby providing us with an opportunity to confront deep-seated problems that demand immediate solution. In spite of those who restrict sex to an extremely narrow, almost one, proper form and finds all the other sexual behaviours against “these lands” “our traditions” and “us”, the works on display at the Dirty exhibition, by blending collages

with miniatures, religious rituals with performances, demonstrate that belonging here has a thousand variations, just like sexuality. It invites us to ponder on how the banality of our daily lives that flow at the background creates the violence of the foreground, how we prefer to play dead in order to avoid violence, and how we end up giving birth to death. *Dirty, the second exhibition hosted by the TOZ Artist-Run Space which was established by four visual artists (Elvan Ekren, Volkan Kızıltunç, Sinem Dişli, and Ece Eldek) in Yeldeğirmeni, Kadıköy, is open from June 17 through July 15. Video and photograph works

by Berkay Yahya, Hüseyin Badıllı, Nur Gürel, Özlem Şimşek, Seyhan Musa, Sevinj Yusifova, and Sinan Tuncay are on display at the exhibition titled *Dirty which consists of critical works on gender politics and on the relationship between body and power.

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UNLIMITED VISITS 3; Pangaltı

Yasemin Özcan’s studio home

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Words Nazlı Pektaş Photograph Sıtkı Kösemen

Yasemin Özcan makes memory’s silent and preserved existence speak with the life she welcomes through her door. She listens to them, and she is sincere to both herself and to life. While life and things execute their own performance, Yasemin gets involved in the goings-on sometimes with her body and sometimes through metaphors. Yasemin’s studio home is a visible/invisible island/ space for the statements she implies between memory and things in this relationship.

Pangaltı is a district where the neighbourhood sounds, colours, and odours are still in place, just like in old Istanbul. The sounds of the neighbours, the grocery store, the fruit seller, the antique store, the taxi station, the old woman next door watching people come and go from her window, one or two rather new chic cafes, delightful Assyrian dolmas, and Ben-sen with its homemade meals… All in the right place… Remembering that Levantines were the previous inhabitants of this district, the buildings that remained from that era, and the cultural diversity even though it has changed over time, ties the texture of the neighbourhood from the past to the now.

Before entering in Yasemin’s studio there was life in front of the door. Yasemin Özcan, adding many life objects that touch her eyes, hands, and heart to her story, was the one to open the door.

Yasemin Özcan’s studio is also a home where she lives, sleeps, entertains guests, and produces in. The house adorned with old-fashioned crown mouldings on the ceiling, and the ceiling beams, lent its memory to Yasemin via the pull sofa that the previous owner left behind.

Yasemin is an artist who lived her childhood, and youth in the Tunel area. During our talk, she tells me she used to carry sculptures on her way from university (Mimar Sinan FA University) back home. And she adds: My childhood was nourished by the cakes Madame Ida would offer, and the Kumbara magazines Madame Sara (a retired lawyer from İş Bankası) would give me. When we were moving, I remember women from Mardin on the terrace next door, carving the inside of mussels in order to prepare mussel dolmas. What’s on the walls of a kid’s home while growing up, in his/her early youth, what sounds s/he hears, what flavors s/he savors are really significant factors. Tunel’s splendid architectural examples, and very distinct cultures fed me as much as the studios in the region did.

Yasemin Özcan sustains her production and her life in a face-to-face re-

lationship. For instance, her neon installation entitled Soap Opera Synopses, dated 1997, is an object on the wall of, as well as a part of the living room.

It reminds Yasemin, and the guests of this house, many issues of the 90s.

Political World Map scale: 1/2007, a photograph dated 2007, reminiscent of a cannon ball at first sight later recognized as a watermelon, found its place right behind the dining table. This is a memory home, exhibiting the artist’s production throughout the years, and keeping the memory between now and yesterday alive. On the painting right next to the dining table is her work official-civil. Exhibited at the 5th Sinop Bienniale, the work starts with a writing Yasemin saw on a display window in Sinop. On Güven Terzi’s (tailor house) window, it was written ‘any kind of official and civil clothing can be sewn’. Considering that her mother Zeynep Hanım has run a haberdashery store in Şişli for years, and that she has graduated from Madame Anna Peçaropulo’s tailoring school, this work is again one of the stronger knots Yasemin has cast upon her memory. And of course it presents us with a short but to the point study for our memory pondered in the official/civil controversy. Installed in A4 frames, the grey abstract spaces are a tailor’s rules, determined templates. Yasemin exhibits these grey areas put in golden frames, along with the definitions of official-civil.

Yasemin is also an artist who knows how to ingeniously transform the objects present in her own universe into metaphors with creativity, and via memories. Her invitation of the numerous materials, and diverse production forms in her work contains the memory and labour of the different works she executed in order to sustain her life on a time and space plane, of her training, and of her childhood. The involvement of the objects, the photographs, the words, and the colours she encountered on this journey in this home studio is obviously not a coincidence.

For instance, the pull sofa in one of the rooms of this big home-studio in

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UNLIMITED VISITS 3; Pangaltı

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Pangaltı, overlooking the backyard, is a deposit from this house’s memory.

A big favourite of the 80s, and the 90s, this pull sofa with shelves and closets on its back, has not left the house thanks to the welcome of Yasemin herself. Now, in the room where there is also the library, the artist exhibits the works given to her as a present by her friends.

While the long corridor linking the back and the front of the house reminds us that this is a living space thanks to the shelves with spices, glasses, and Yasemin’s ceramics on top, the zigzag ceramic tiles, again invited by Yasemin to stay, keep the steps of the past in today.

The ‘actual’ room opening up to the corridor is Yasemin’s studio. As a calmer room compared to the others, the studio creates a place to reflect by adding the production counter on top of the object, work, and life journey.

Here you can find photographs from the past, traces of the previous works.

Yet, you may also find various objects giving hints on the new works, notes (and this may simply be a bag, on which ‘Arzum’ is written on, glued to the wall), and plenty of sunshine.

The writing, and jewellery design tables, sofas left over from Yasemin’s family, a faded journal, and an ivy plant tying me up to my childhood.

These are some of the details tying the studio to memory…

The silent and preserved existence of memory escalates the meaning that Yasemin hid in the relationship between object and space. On this journey, experience opens up an important space to Yasemin. At some point she says: “If I didn’t have the experience in jewellery designing, and the jewellery industry in general, I could not have done the work entitled üçyüzbir (threehundredone). I find those specific points that this process has nourished and transformed me, to be much valuable.”

Yasemin Özcan is an artist casting upon from her own life towards her art practice. A TV show, jewellery studio, a huge watermelon, a tailor shop she passed by in Sinop, a piece of fabric she has observed in a shop’s window, in no time become pieces of art by tying itself with the past, and the current somewhere in one of Yasemin’s memory cells. In the family photo albums I found in her library, I realize another strong knot: Yasemin’s father Aziz Bey’s picture with his little Yasemin, with the old man wearing a military uniform, belonging to her uncle who has just accomplished his service… Talking about the moustache as a symbol of civil life, and what having his picture taken with a military costume could indicate, Yasemin says: “Men’s sincerity towards himself, and towards life is a layered subject; I think and work for this.”

For an artist like Yasemin, who knows how to add objects, notebooks, writings, and feelings into her life in different forms, or who succeeds in taking herself out of memory’s little cells through things, appreciation is an important matter. The green bound notebook that her mother kept during her Anna Peçaropulo tailoring school years dated 1970, is a refined example of women labour in the family, and it also carries the value of an important historical document for what has been happening in the tailoring world of the period.

For Yasemin Özcan who propagates the state/society/institution relationships in a performative production language, by comparing the involved spaces of things in the thought and on the platform of civil and official, the relationship between space and body carries a rather significant role. Looking at her productions from such a perspective, the home studio she lives in nourishes and shapes the artist’s performative production language. It would be wise to call this home studio in Pangaltı, an island which maximizes itself, and the life, by opening up to the world through Yasemin, amongst objects and things.

Yasemin gibi, eşyaları, defterleri, yazıları, hisleri, türlü biçimlerle kendine dahil etmesini bilen, yahut kendini belleğin odacıklarından şeyler vasıtasıyla çıkarmayı başaran bir sanatçı için kıymet bilmek önemli bir mevzu.

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FESTIVAL

Let us cultivate our garden:

Cappadox 2016 Words Murat Alat

MAIDER LOPEZ, YELLOW MOUNTAIN, 2016, PHOTO: MURAT GERMEN

Let death get used to us, Let it enter in our garden like a dance Ergin Günçe, ‘Genç Ölmek (Dying young )’

We are nature’s crippled kids. We considered the blessing of death to be a weakness, crippled ourselves, and we seek to take it out on our mothers. We stuck our teeth in their chest like vampires, sucking up their soul. Although we are the only creatures endowed with the power of creation, we run away from paying the price of our creations; yet it should not be possible to trick the cosmos. Our debt to death piles up in the dark, and imposes itself on us each time the sun disappears.

It’s noon, the sun has painted the earth in yellow; a few poor trees in sight are the only shelters for shadows. We slowly go down the earth road towards the valley, little vineyards here and there. When we lift our heads up, unrivaled landforms reveal the sublimity of nature with an unfamiliar aspect. A couple bends ahead, a huge red rubber circle wrapped around a magnificent fairy chimney far in the valley tells us that we have found what we were looking for: Ayşe Erkmen replies as oppositely as possible to nature’s show of power.

Erkmen’s installation entitled Ödül (Prize), acts as a roof for the Let Us Cultivate our Garden exhibition prepared by Fulya Erdemci, and Kevser Güler as part of the Cappadox Festival. The fairy chimney’s monochrome, amorphous structure taking form over time, is intertwined with a man-made flawlessly bright object. According to the artist, the work is a piercing applied on the fairy chimney.

Keeping in mind that piercings and similar applications that wound the body, mark humans with the reality that they are ephemeral, the link between the power of creation and death is formed. The fairy chimney’s decayed form over time aiming at plenitude… rubber resisting against time…. This relationship expands also over the remaining works at the exhibition.

Erkmen’s relationship with plastic finds itself a reflection in the floor tiles, all of them painted in different colors, installed on both sides of the path carrying us towards the heart of the exhibition.

Maider Lopez’ Yakınlaştırma (Zoom In),

is made by extracting the selected tones of the color scale of Kızıl Çukur, the area which hosts the exhibition, from nature.

In a way to be considered as an abstraction processed over the colors, this work puts the fundamental dynamics of the paint technology on which visual arts are based on, in between parentheses.

The moment when the pattern between art, creation, and nature is the most evident occurs when Marila Daradot invites the participant to make meaningful or meaningless sentences with the flowerpots in the shape of letters, where she first asks to cultivate the seeds of various plants. The work entitled Sanat Eserinin Kökeni (The Origin of the Work of Art) has those volunteers, who map the relationship amongst the world, the language, and the representation, witness the intertwined state of meaning and life creation by underlining this sense via physical labor.

As the source of the power of creation, the soil is the raw material of Teneffüs II (Breathing/Break), hidden amongst the

vineyards. In Murat and Fuat Şahinler’s modest work, the ground inflates and deflates like the stomach of a breathing being thanks to a mechanism hidden under the soil. The explicit relationship of breathing with life and death apart, this movement on the ground, also reminds us of a swelling heralding birth. This swelling that can be interpreted as the belly of a pregnant woman, as well as a seed pushing the earth’s crust up, can also look like, if we leave ourselves to free thinking, a model of the volcanic movements making the Cappadocia region as unique as it is today. The archaic power of birth and creation affects the viewer in a spooky way, although in small scale.

In the exhibition where life and death forces are woven like a net, Nilbar Güreş, and Hera Taşçıyan’s works create the meeting point of this structure with the history of religions. These works installed around the Üzümlü Church in the middle of the valley, contrary to the discourse of the monotheistic religions promising transcendence, hunt for a pagan sanctity

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Erkmen’s installation entitled Ödül (Prize), acts as a roof for the Let Us Cultivate our Garden exhibition prepared

by Fulya Erdemci, and Kevser Güler as part of the Cappadox Festival. e fairy chimney’s monochrome, amorphous structure taking form over time, is in- tertwined with a man-made awlessly bright object.

TOP: AYŞE ERKMEN, PRIZE, 2016, PHOTO: MURAT GERMEN BOTTOM LEFT: HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN, KARŞILIKSIZ ALDINIZ; KARŞILIKSIZ VERİN (FREELY YOU HAVE RECEIVED FREELY GIVE) BOTTOM RIGHT: JOHN KÖRMELING, GÜNEŞİN BÜYÜKLÜĞÜ (SIZE OF THE SUN) ,2016, PHOTO: MURAT GERMEN

from inside the world. Hera Büyüktaşçıyan uproots the grape, and the wine of which grape is the raw material, from its place in Christian mythology, and places it on the tiles which she created, influenced by the Üzümlü Church, Konstantin in Mustafapaşa (Sinasos), and the stone rubbings covered with grapes at the entrance of the Eleni Church, which she later buries in the ground as if it is an archeological find. The ground and representation relationship in Daradot’s work is reversed, and the grape figurations are given back to earth as if they are seeds. Karşılıksız aldınız; karşılıksız verin (Freely you have received; freely give) is a work based on the relationship of holiness, about to disappear from the world. In a structure carved in the rocks right across the Üzümlü Church, two animal sculptures are installed in front of a hole overlooking the valley, called Sırt Sırta (Back to Back), which constitutes the most concrete form of the relationship built with Anatolia’s belief culture. The Shaman references in these sculptures are reinforced with the instal-

lation called Düğümler okunursa (Should Knots be Prayed on), made up of cloths, totems, and charms. The forces beyond the representations of the objects in paganism are brought to the exhibition with these two works, and intervene the ongoing discussion on the structure of the work of art, from a non-Western way of reading history of art. In a cosmology, where the transcendent, and the abstract cannot find themselves a place, objects find themselves a place without renouncing their powers of intervention. The works of these six artists, reciprocally connected in a circular structure, installed in the Kızıl Çukur Valley, generate a strong alternative to the current economic, and political systems under various titles. While doing this, they suggest an utterly tangible proposition, without getting caught in the nets of metaphors, and references, thanks to their respect towards the powers of this geography, and claim in adding these powers to the exhibition experience. The most important feature allowing the exhibition to tackle the dualities it faces in the sub-

jects that it tackles, is that it doesn’t allow conceptualizations which try to shape our very existence, such as the inside and the outside of the residential units carved in the volcanic rocks of the Cappadocia region, or the private, and the public, hereby excluding the concept of boundaries.

The work where the subject of boundary concretizes is John Körmeling’s Güneşin Büyüklüğü (Size of the Sun). It is based on revealing the relative structure of seeing, and perceiving. Körmeling calculates the size of the sun during both its rise and its set, from a point he takes as a center on a plateau on the Red Valley, and installs two nested circles made up of flowers symbolizing the apparent size of the sun. What the real size of the sun is, where its boundaries start, and end, whether the thing that we call boundary gets bigger and smaller according to distance, hence if it is dependent on the perspective is problematized with this work. As the passage from a human-based cosmos to a cosmos where humans occupy only a small part will abolish the sense of boundary along with per-

spective, this work contributes to the socio-economical model that this exhibition presents us with a theoretical proposition.

Apart from the works installed in Kızıl Çukur Valley, and around, the Let Us Cultivate our Garden program expands with Uç Hisar based Christoph Schäfer & DJ Booty Carrell’s small shop named Stüdyo Yannış Tercüme (Studio Mistranslaşion), where Schafer paints surrealist landscapes on the walls, while listening to DJ Booty Carrell’s psychedelic rock vinyls from Turkey, while Asunción Molinos Gordo’s video installation called Purpose, Scope, and Penalties expands with a video documentation of research on Turkey’s politics on seed. Added on the exhibition program, Floral Walk, allowing the participant to get acquainted with the region’s flora, and Living Culture Perception Map created by Murat Germen by following an alternative route in the region allow the visitors to witness the regions unspoiled structure by keeping the visitor away from the touristic routes, and the polished Cappadocia image.

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FEUILLETON

Being Queer in the 80s

(2)

Words Serdar Soydan

We resume the journey that we started in the last issue. We carry on listing major happenings about LGBTI existence in the 80s in Turkey from where we left off.

3. What the days brought by On Sunday, the 25th of October 1981, Uğur Dündar’s TV program Günlerin Getirdiği (What the days brought by) investigated the topic of “homosexuality”. With stage bans, police violence, and exiles on the agenda, homosexuality had become a subject put under the spotlight. Uğur Dündar created a very significant program on this popular, and attractive subject; Günlerin Getirdiği hit the headlines, and fired up an intense discussion.

It should be noted in between parentheses that, in the beginning of the 80s, or even during the 80s, homosexuality usually meant transsexuality. Uğur Dündar used the terms “homosexual tendency”, and “tendency to look like a woman” together, and following the sensational program, the subsequent news preferred to sometimes use the term “homosexual”, and sometimes “transsexual”.

Günlerin Getirdiği was a rather noteworthy show for two main reasons.

First of all, the program was a pioneer. Yes, trans individuals were subject to plenty of news during those years, and even sometimes found themselves a spot in

the first pages of newspapers, and magazines. However they had never appeared with their own voices or words. They always took part in the contemptuous, marginalizing reflections of non-trans, often transphobic reporters. In Uğur Dündar’s program, they were in front of millions of people with their own immediate voices, unfiltered.

Of course, the questions asked, and the fictitious answers also mattered. Uğur Dündar’s questions were unfortunately not that innocent after all. He would ask those who had gone through sex reassignment surgeries, and were in their transitional process, whether they regretted, and if they did or would attempt suicide in envy of re-becoming men. Hence, the interviewed women consequently reported their misery, and despair, creating a very pessimist, unfavorable picture as a result.

This was a fictitious, thus conscious circumstance.

Such that in the promotion of the TV program on Milliyet newspaper’s TV pages, it was written: “Moms, dads, kids, make sure to watch this program. Uğur Dündar brings the drama of men who became women to the screen.” Thus the viewer is prepared for the drama even before getting to hear the questions, and the answers.

Due to the created misperception, a group of trans individuals from Izmir, had to give interviews to the

Hafta Sonu (Weekend) newspaper supplement and announce that they are happy. Melda Koç who spoke in the name of her friends Güneş Sezen, Sevgi Yanık, and Bihter Akay, wanted to show that there were also positive cases: “There are 20 thousand people who have had this operation. Were they to be surveyed, eighty percent would say that they are deeply happy. At least we are happy with our lives. We have a social life of our own, and we definitely do not miss our old male years. And we do not think of suicide like those on the program. I would probably consider suicide were I to stay a man.

Our regret is in our misrepresentation in the public.”

Yet the title of the news, and the subtitles unfolded the transphobia of the press. The title was: “They were men too… They changed their sex… ‘We’re happy’ they say”. Their happiness is in between quotations. The last sentence of the paragraph right below the title complements this: “Their sincerity is very much dubious…”

This is to say that the press considered unhappiness, depression, and tendency to suicide fit for ‘homosexuals’. The sincerity of those who got out of this range, and regarded themselves to be happy was questioned.

Another feature of the Günlerin Getirdiği program was that it opened sex reassignment operations up for discussion. In fact, this subject was in the news in 1981 when the gossip of Bülent Ersoy wanting to have an

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3 4 1 MINDIKOPLU STATES HE WAS TRICKTED 2 GÜNER KUBAN, INTERVIEWED BY YALÇIN PEKŞEN FROM CUMHURIYET NEWSPAPER 3 THE PROCESS WAS TO LAST FOR SIX YEARS 4 MINDIKOĞLU SILENT, TRANSSEXUALS SPEAKING UP 5 PROMOTION OF THE BOOK OF COLOR OF MAKING LOVE 5

operation went around, later herself announcing her operation date. (One may find some of those news in Veysel Eşsiz’ book entitled Sexuality Puzzle.) Thus the sex reassignment surgeries, and transsexuality were discussed medically amongst doctors.

Uğur Dündar learned that some of the ‘homosexuals’ he interviewed, had their operation without the consent of the assembly, off the record, and uncontrollably, and that some of them had their operations even before they were eighteen.

I may need to open the term “off the record” up. For until the change in the 40th article of the Turkish Civil Code in 1988, the control of the transitional period of transsexual individuals, and the conditions were not identified. The state did not recognize transsexuals, nor stood beside them in their sexual reassignment, and transitional periods, nor protected them. More and more, according to the 471st Article of the Turkish Civil Code “Anyone who performs sterilization on a man or woman without his or her consent, and anyone who has this deed, and action done on his or herself, is sentenced to imprisonment from 6 months up to two years, and a penalty fine from 100 liras up to 500 liras.”

Therefore, there were some opportunist doctors who performed this operation in their own private clinics, or private hospitals, without any supervision, and in secret. Uğur Dündar’s program revealed this,

and the plastic surgeon Prof. Dr. Ali Nihat Mındıkoğlu was called up to the studio to state his opinion on the subject.

Ali Nihat Mındıkoğlu was a plastic surgeon who taught at the Faculty of Dentistry in Istanbul University, and worked in Cerrahpaşa Medical Faculty, and upon the reception of his general surgery diploma in 1960, went to the UK to get his surgical expertise.

Mındıkoğlu who came to the studio, was shocked to hear Dündar’s questions, and said that most of the operations were performed for the purpose of research.

When he was faced with a patient who was still a minor, yet had undergone the surgery without any consent or approval, he stood up, said “This would argue against me” and left the studio saying he would need to get the faculty’s permission to speak.

Including this scene, the program made a big sensation. Before the program featured on TV, Mındıkoğlu even went to Ankara to speak to the General Manager of TRT, in order prevent the program from broadcasting, and had a dispute with the journalists who wanted to take his pictures.

After the program, the prosecution of the martial law pressed charges on Mındıkoğlu, and started an investigation in Istanbul University. The homosexuals who underwent the operation were also sent to court under the aforementioned 471st Article of the Turkish

Civil Code.

Ali Nihat Mındıkoğlu was suspended upon the university’s investigation for a month. Almost six years later, on the 18th of March 1987, the case was abated because “the defendants were not suitable to have children even before surgery as demonstrated in the reports by the Forensic Science Supreme Council of Health, and the 2nd Chamber of Specialized Board.” In other words, neither Mındıkoğlu, nor the women exposing this crime by their statements were punished.

4. The Color of Love Making Lesbianism, especially in the beginning of the 80s was rather invisible. We rarely encountered the word “lesbian” in news texts, or books. Homosexual, and bisexual women almost did not exist. Here, Attila İlhan’s books shall be mentioned. İlhan is an important name that wrote a lot about the subject in his novels Fena Halde Leman (1980), Haco Hanım Vay (1984), and research books Hangi Seks (1976, Which Sex), Yanlış Kadınlar, Yanlış Erkekler (1985, Wrong Women, Wrong Men). Nokta magazine would lead the way and publish a case called “Women to Women Love: Lesbianism” with the head piece “Nokta breaks a taboo.”

However, in 1983, in times of dearth, the Color of Making Love was published. The author of the book Güner Kuban, wrote an autobiographical novel. Istanbul born author lived in Amsterdam, and managed a

FEUILLETON

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3 1 MINDIKOĞLU WITH A PATIENT 2 THE PRIVATE ÇAPA HOSPITAL WHERE SURGERIES TOOK PLACE 3 MINDIKOĞLU LEAVES THE STUDIO

gay club called Homolulu. In fact, in the first edition of the book, there was no specific explanation as to the text being an autobiography. But those who start to read realize that the protagonist’s name is also Güner Kuban. In the text, one could even find the contact information of Kuban’s gay club Homolulu.

Two notes were added to the second edition in 1989. On the first note, Kuban wrote that her book aiming to oppose a national taboo was successful in its mission, and that it helped immortalize her feelings towards the people she shared the private memories of, while on the second note, underlined that even the names of most people in her autobiography were real.

Well, how were the reactions towards the book?

Did it sell, was it read, was it easily found?

We learn how much the book arouse interest from Güner Kuban’s interview with Cumhuriyet newspaper dated 1st of November 1986.

So, Güner Hanım, what were the reactions after your book was published?

I had many girls give me a call. I had explicitly written the name and phone number of the club in the book. I hadn’t written this with the purpose of publicity in Turkey. It was more for Germany, and France, but I had the most phone calls from Istanbul.

What did they want?

They were asking things like: Can we get in touch, we read your book, we’re in love with you, can you give your address, when will you come to Turkey?

What did you say?

I said some things…

In an interview dated May 29th 1988 in Milliyet newspaper, she told her aim in writing the book.

This book had the mission to break one of the taboos in our society. I was conscious that a book of such compulsory, and objectionable mission had to be written in a very plain, open, and correct way. No one can expect me to live by the taboos of those who are deprived from living life with their hearts open. The games played behind the screens of morality, and honor, and the hypocrisy of those players always disgusted me.

Before Kuban, there were very few writers touching on the subject of lesbianism. Ahmet Rasim’s Hamamcı Ülfet (1895, Ülfet, the Bath Attendant), Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Saime (1899), Şahabettin Süleyman’s Çıkmaz Sokak (1909, Dead End), Memduh Şevket Esendal’s Miras (1925, Heritage) are some of the fictional texts. During the Republic era, a considerable number of literary works treated lesbianism as their subject.

The importance of The Color of Making Love, as I touched on the previous article, is in the set up of a

direct communication for the first time. For the first time a woman, a gay woman, reveals her experiences, and her feelings with this autobiographical novel.

She made her voice heard; and with great candor, and courage… This was an important, and big step for that period.

Naturally, negative reactions were to follow up.

The news in Cumhuriyet newspaper dated 3rd of June 1985, entitled “The Colour of Making Love Pulled Off The Shelves” announced that the Istanbul Second Civil Court of First Instance decided the novel was withdrawn from the market on the grounds that it offended people’s feelings of modesty, bashfulness, and decency. Besides, Güner Kuban was prosecuted for imprisonment from 2 months up to 2 years.

Fortunately, the book was to be republished in 1989, and Güner Kuban was not to be punished. Introduced, and even complimented in important magazines such as Milliyet Sanat by respected critics such as Vedat Günyol, The Color of Making Love was to be discussed with an autograph session in 1990, and Güner Kuban was to meet with her readers for the first time.

Next issue: Turks’ Exam with SIDA, and the ‘M’ case

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QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, 1976 ( DIRECTOR : CHANTAL AKERMAN) DELPHINE SEYRIG

Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

CINEMA

Words Murat Alat Let us start with a quote from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera: What keeps mankind alive?

Capitalism, of which we’re nearly ashamed to mention the name of, is a matter of morality; it has been built on Christian morality. The fundamental problem in morality is what we would do with our desires that constitute the source of our life force. Capitalism exchanges the moral discipline with desire economy, and sets the ground for operation on desires rather than working hours, or stock shares. The ideaology serving the capital constantly indicates us what and how we shall desire, and instead of fulfilling the natural needs of men, operates an unsatsifiable mechanism of desires, later harvesting the released energy. When translated as “What does mankind live with?” (Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?) Brecht interrogates this structure, and inverts the fiction of capitalism by saying: “Should first sort out the basic food position. Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins.”

Brecht’s question intersects with another question from cinema. What keeps us in a dark room inactively, staring at a movie for minutes, running after adventures by putting ourselves in the protagonist’s shoes? “What keeps mankind alive?” What keeps mankind alive in life and in the movie theater is the same thing; his desires. More precisely, what withholds us from leaving the movie theater, or tying the knot around our neck in this world, is the promise that our desires would be fulfilled.

In the action based mainstream cinema, roughly called Hollywood cinema, the desire of the audience is kept in rush with the expectation of being fulfilled; if the viewer gets bored, the movie fails.

During the editing, moments, and scenes considered to be boring are eliminated until there is only pure action left. The movie mechanics, consisting of successive moments where there is no room for blank, and emotions are in summit, spreads in our manner of organizing our daily life. Slavoj Zizek says that cinema is the ultimate pervert art, and adds “It doesn’t give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.” We want daily life to be full of fun just like in a hit movie. We don’t like boring people, we run away from them. Boring times are idle times.

Our maxim is to live life to the fullest with its ups and downs. Well, what are these ups and downs that our desires run after? What are the desires pledged to us?

An average Hollywood movie heralds to fulfill the following two desires: sexuality, and death. According to psychoanalysis, these are also men’s two main impulses: Eros, and Thanatos. Life and cinema intersect yet again on this plane.

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) turns the foundation that the mainstream cinema is built on upside down, and aims to present us with a different film experience. The movie is based on scenes popular movies would avoid to screen. It narrates three at first glance ordinary days in a Parisian apartment. What pulls this

time period out of the ordinary is the love scene at the beginning of the movie that we’re not allowed to fully see, put out of the frame, and the murder scene reflected from a mirror at the end of the movie.

The movie is put in parentheses by these two events; the remaining two hours are spared to the recurring daily life of a widow housewife, and his adolescent son living with her. Sex, and murder are cleansed from their mesmerizing power contrary to their conventional use in cinema. Akerman notifies us in the first scenes of the movie that he would leave sexuality out of the context of the film; as for the murder, it happens without any preparation, or any expectation given to the viewer.

When these two significant forces linking the audience to the movie are taken out of the equation, what are left behind are routine, and boredom. We’re now face to face with daily life’s banality, and the daily repeating actions of cooking, eating, and housework that don’t harbor any desire in them, starting to create a hypnotic effect. We are convinced that nothing will happen, and our desires settle down.

At this point boredom backs away. This is not an effort to canonize daily life, or to discover secret powers behind the banality if looked carefully. Sex, and murder are not mythicized in a romantic effort, on the opposite are ordinarily normalized; this is the point where morality is excluded. We cannot speak of a suppressed sexuality, or a hidden pathology. The unconscious glorified by Surrealism, cannot find itself a place under this rather extremely

realist view. Adultery, and murder strictly banned as the greatest sins in holly books are pushed to the two edges of the narrative in a simple manner.

Should we consult Brecht yet again, Jeanne Dielman’s driving force is not desires. In this movie, desires are left out to make space for the daily life, eating, sleeping, and warming up. You should first sort out the basic food position, and then comes the good, and the bad. The only bit of desire which can potentially interrupt the daily life on which the protagonist delicately balances her economy, appears at the end of the movie, leaked in the frame. Yet the murder is the ransom of this desire, and is in an unjudgeable position.

Jeanne Dielman is a movie impossible to be loved. At least in the conventional sense. It doesn’t present us with a world we can run away to, nor does it allow a cathartic effect. What solely remains from the movie is the Brecht sense of alienation. Akerman gives the viewer back his/ her own life. It puts the boring moments that we tuck in between minutes, that we run away from without looking back, and that we do not want to recall, right before our face; yet once and if we get used to the rhytm of the movie, the boredom is as puissant as to present us with ways of releasing ourselves from the torture of desires.

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PHOTOGRAPHY Aesthetics, form, and details

Robert Mapplethorpe The year 2016 flies by as a silent Robert Mapplethorpe year all around from Europe to America. With the first half of the year behind, a new Mapplethorpe exhibition is added on top of two comprehensive ones in America’s two large museums. On the occasion of the Robert Mapplethorpe 1979 – 1989 exhibition at Galeri Nev in Istanbul, open until the 31st of July, we pieced together the headlines of the artist’s visual world.

Words Sami Kısaoğlu Few artists lived their lives in front of the public eye like Robert Mapplethorpe did at the last quarter of the 20th century.

And few artists led mind practices in the artistic field to change, to transform with what they took away from the lives they lived. As a signature behind the widely discussed, hell raising, investigated photographs from 1975 until his death in 1989 at the age of 42, Mapplethorpe succeeded in two things, maybe unexpectedly. With his works that emulated Antique Greece, and sought the excellent, he played a major role in photography being accepted as a branch of art; he also caused the change of the conventional points of view in photography through his selection of subjects. Mapplethorpe took his position in the stage of art history during a period when photography was perceived as an academic discipline in American universities, and a branch of art in the museums; the first photography auction took place at the Sotheby’s in NY in 1975; and Susan Sontag’s On Photography was published in 1977. This period when the artist started his commercial career as a photographer also corresponds to the same period when the sexual revolution took place in the

societal sense, America’s most famous gay bar Stonewall Inn was busted by the police, significant protests took place, and New York’s first gay movie theater opened its doors. All of this was sure to have various reflections on his art in the years to come. His relationship to poet and rock musician Patti Smith as a lover, and then a friend, his relationship to American curator, and collector Sam Wagstaff as a friend and then a lover, were also to become diversely inspiring experiences in his short life.

Mapplethorpe has always been a much-debated artist with his male and female portraits highly stylized, his nudes referencing the Antique Greek, and Roman sculpture art, nature morte series with erotic connotations, self-portraits, his shots of sado-masochism variations, and the scenery he transferred from the gay culture of the 1970’s. A couple of months before his death on the 9th of March, 1989, his touring exhibition entitled Perfect Moment at Philadelphia’s The Institute of Contemporary Art put him under the spotlight of major debate yet again. The exhibition where over 150 works from photo-collages, to polaroids, and to gelatin silver prints, etc. produced

with diverse techniques from different periods of his 25-year career were shown, was to take place in 5 more museums in the USA yet things didn’t really carry on as planned. While the fact that this exhibition was pursued with public budget was highly criticized at the American Congress, The Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C) dismissed the agreement two weeks before the exhibition upon the reaction they received. His XYZ portfolios at the Perfect Moment exhibition, which were subject to the obscenity lawsuit started against an art center and its director for the first time in American art history (Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati), were made up of 3 main headlines. The (X) that took gay sado masochism as a subject, the (Y) made up of flower nature mortes, and the (Z) that included naked portraits of Afro-American men.

Mapplethorpe 25 years after Perfect Moment For Mapplethorpe who is yet again on the agenda of the art world with the two concurrent retrospectives in memory of the Perfect Moment exhibition that completed its 25th year, and the events that took place around it, 2016 is almost

like a year dedicated to him. The exhibition entitled Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium that J. Paul Getty Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosts until the 31st of July is surely the foundation of the quietly developed Mapplethorpe year. While one of Paris’ major galleries, the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropas, showcases the artist’s stirring series XYZ under the title Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, the English publishing house Phaidon presented to its readers a book including the flower photographs he took from 1973 until 1989. Besides the 368-pages specially bound book Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers, the Mapplethorpe documentary directed by Fenton Bailey, and Randy Barbato is also touring festivals around the world. Named after American senator Jesse Helms’ critical exclamation, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Picture, the documentary was shown at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals as well as the If Istanbul film festival.

What brought the artist, remembered by the international art world via various events, under the spotlight of the local art scene after 5 years is the exhibition at Galeri Nev in Istanbul that opened its

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His portraits of Philip Glass to Arnold Schwarzenegger as a studio photographer, led Mapplethorpe to gain recognition.

TOP: ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, ALISTAIR BUTTLER, 1980, SILVER GELATIN, 20X16 INCH, EDITION 15/15, COURTESY ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION LEFT TOP: ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, HAND, 1980, SILVER GELATIN, 20X16 INCH, COURTESY OF ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION LETF BOTTOM: ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, HANDS, 1981, SILVER GELATIN, 20X16 INCH, EDITION AP 2/2, COURTESY OF ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE FOUNDATION

doors on the 3rd of June. Curated by Serra Yentürk, and focusing on the artist’s quest for form rather than the established works, the exhibition of 36 black and white photographs, is consisted of body images, outdoor shots, portraits, and nature mortes. As a selection from the 10.000 photographs of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation’s digital archive, the exhibition shows a sequence of the artist’s production from the last ten years of his life. The exhibition hunts for his quest for classic form in photography starting with his use of a medium format machine in 1975, and does not include his polaroids that allowed him various experimental opportunities. The purpose of this selection where sculptural and geometric forms are more apparent, and inspection and fiction are in the foreground, is to present a different point of view, and to read his work, otherwise. Another crucial resource is the exhibition Proportio that Yenitürk visited a couple years ago in Venice. Curated by Axel Vervoordt and Daniela Ferrati, the exhibition founded a structure that lets the proportional parallelisms amongst different disciplines (music, architecture, art, science) during the history of civilization

from the Antique to the contemporary. Observing a similar link in the works of Mapplethorpe, Yenitürk wants to draw attention to the artist’s unique perception of form in this sense.

It is possible to trace down the beauty that the artist sees in the details in most of the photographs that we get the chance to see in Istanbul, dated to the second period of his career when he runs after eternal beauty. Photographed in studio, close shots of hand, faces, and other body parts make up the most elegant examples of the human body being framed as a form, starting with Edward Weston in the 1920’s, and continued with Minor White. Mapplethorpe’s view founded with his unique sense of aesthetics, in time, becomes his hallmark. With his poetic point of view, the artist gives a different sense to any object that can be perceived as repellant or ugly by the society.

It would be meaningful to end an article on Mapplethorpe, a true radical in his lifestyle, and his works, with the following quote: “I went into photography because it seemed like the perfect vehicle for commenting on the madness of today’s existence. I tried to catch this madness, and put it in order.”

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PARİS

Strange is the place: Art and awareness at the Palais de Tokyo Words Cris de Oliveira

How romantic still the notion of Paris, ro ticket, I drawl out my own meshow easily and seductively the city lends sage, the opening line of a bad novel: itself to the artistic itinerant who wishes “I came to Paris on a whim. I always to lose themselves in the cobblestoned wanted to write that.” corners of painters and poets past. StopThis is the weight of history withping in the ubiquitous Shakespeare in artistic expression we seek out, and Co. bookshop, conceived by Sylvia the hold a particular place yields Beach and maintained later by George over us, calling to us, fulfilling our Whitman, one cannot help having high desires to be part of ‘something imexpectations of the Lost Generation’s portant’ merely through presence. stomping grounds. The entrance floor Paris is strung with a series of places is a conventional bookshop, with tightin which art asks us to consider the ly-packed sturdy hardcover and glossy strangeness of purpose, of our own paperback treasures neatly enfolded into place, imagined and self-hewn, withthe building’s particular slopes. One is in the world. still tourist, book-buyer, while perusing I am a woman of the written word, these selections, but when one climbs hence my long-winded introduction onto the second floor, the bookshop’s DOUBLE JE,VİEW FROM ARTISANS D’ART ET ARTISTES EXHIBITON, PALAIS DE TOKYO, PHOTO: AURELIEN MOLE via the space of Shakespeare and Co., permanent library, one slips into the before turning to the visual arts. We well-worn attire of the pauper writer, hunching their gazes forlornly onto the building’s ceiling, a wilted dare not grant the same attention and rapture to expeshoulders to fit into the curved ceilings and cozy shelves, plant. Towards the front, there is a small cubicle in a riencing art that we grant to reading texts. More often burying themselves into the nook of shabby armchairs hallway, crowned by a vintage typewriter. There travel- than not, we are intimidated by the notion that we do and make-shift beds. The smell of books, new and fin- ers scrawl messages of presence and literary aspirations: not know how to interpret art, are not suitably instructger-flipped alike, is intoxicating – or is it the smell of “I was here, from Korea!” followed by several stars and ed to do so and as such, should not do it. Leave it to Papa’s cigar and Joyce’s Fendant de Soin wine that waft smiling faces; popular quotations by Pascal and Hous- the professionals, we say, with a dismissing flick of the from the pages? The weight of footfalls on the uneven saye; and original thoughts, “I’ve lost my anchor to this wrist. This is terribly naïve and lazy of us. Like reading floorboards echoes those of many before, and one could world and am adrift in another,” declares the unknown, a book, there is no wrong interpretation of art, there well trip over the feet of literati ghosts dashing to and melancholic E.K. It is an interesting, perhaps uninten- is only experience. Notice the verb I am employing to fro, a completed manuscript triumphantly proffered in tional, art piece curated by the people, an endless, con- describe our interaction with art: “experience.” Art is by their invisible hands. One corner houses a piano asking tinuous content generator whose pen is on the pulse of no means static, and neither, by extension, is our relato be played despite its lack of tune, a window which the populace. I am not above its charm. On a used met- tion to it. We take in art holistically first, noticing the

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DOUBLE JE, VİEW FROM ARTISANS D’ART ET ARTISTES EXHIBITION, PALAIS DE TOKYO, PHOTO: AURELIEN MOLE

overall composition and the immediate feeling it ignite in us, a primordial, wordless response of pleasure, wonder, disgust, and apathy. From this, two following reactions spring, the first being that we seek to disassemble the work’s components in order to understand why and how it makes us feel. Whether we know the name for a technique being employed and who coined it and in what year and who first utilized it is not important; what is important is that we notice that this particular sweep or brush or color is catalyst for us. Secondly, we search for the “big meaning” or purpose of the work, spinning a narrative and coherence that may be beyond our immediate grasp, but if effective, we will turn over in our mouths for days to come. When reading a particularly difficult text, we turn to the signs that language and plot indicate to us, follow their trails like a diligent detective in order to arrive at the big meaning, which, depending on how modern your text is, may have none.

Experiencing art is similar, for it demands of us a conscientious contemplation of design and meaning, not just a mere gaze, a quick reading of the plaque bearing title, year, and patron. Art asks of us, “who are you and what place do you occupy here?” It demands presence, and we deftly shy away from it due to fear and impatience.

Reader, I dare not bog you down with misguided, quasi-philosophical and theoretical notions of art (of which, as a graduate student in the Humanities, I am well acquainted with) for I am merely bumbling guide, not holy priestess. We must dispense with the intentionally difficulty of theoretical language, that jargon

so preferred by Lacan and fancy sommelier alike, when discussing art in order to generate accessibility. With this disclaimer in hand, I ask that you consider the reasons we travel far to visit museums. Is it not to experience art as both formalist intention and emotional confrontation, to elicit the emotions we have carried within us always and seldom dare to tackle?

Most of us are an idiot audience, suffering through the laborious security lines of the Louvre, traipsing clueless through its vastness with the sole mission of reaching what we have been told are the ‘important’ pieces: Venus de Milo, The Seated Scribe, Gabrielle d’Estrees and Her Sister, and naturally, the Mona Lisa. The Louvre’s own visit map indicates where the time conscious traveler can find these, and they blindly rush through hall after hall, barely looking at the wondrous creations that flank them, for these are neither famous nor valuable. The real attraction, in fact, is the number of tourists huddled around the postage-stamped Mona Lisa, cameras and cell-phones manically flashing, hoping to guard the memory of an experience the mind will not keep, to reassure that yes, you were there, you saw it, you were sophisticated, hashtag selfiewithmonalisa. There is nothing wrong in being a tourist, for we all strangers in strange lands, but the manner in which we approach art now is akin to thoughtless violation, a disservice to the artist and to ourselves. A mantra for the modern times, repeated ad nauseum, holds true: be present. Look up from your phone, your camera, your tour guide, and take in your surroundings. Wonder why a sculpture’s gaze faces a certain corner of the room, if

the artist favored the angle you are now admiring, if the curator adjusted it just so that the sun would hit this one particular spot of electric blue paint, making the entire canvas suffused with the hue. Notice how thick the slabs of pigment are, or how fine and sleek, how humanly close to the flatness of a photograph. Meet the direct gaze of the portrait before you, a gaze that transcends temporeality, regarding us as if we were the art piece, as if our time were past and hers the true present.

Look back, answer her. Search within your mouth for the words, which may not exist, for the sublimity you are feeling, or the rage or the incomprehensibility. It does not matter, as long as you feel. Regret that you do not have more time to admire each of the things your eyes over, that you will forget the particular details – was the background a street scene, or a forest? Was the sitter’s hat yellow or red? – but console yourself that the emotion you caught in your chest will echo throughout you, that the image you captured will exist in the velvet-black draping of your mind’s eye. Situate yourself within the context of your circumstances, and wonder.

With every second, the objects within the museum become more ancient, more removed from us, more subject to the consideration of wonder, of impressing us with the effortlessness of its understandable expression of the human experience. How can something antiquated seem so current, so dynamically in discussion with us?

Let me arrive at the particular place I wish us to pause and consider, a place where it may be easier for us to achieve a direct connection to art without the distinc-

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DOUBLE JE, VİEW FROM ARTISANS D’ART ET ARTISTES EXHIBITION, PALAIS DE TOKYO, PHOTO: AURELIEN MOLE

tively oppressive layer of time. At the avant-garde Palais de Tokyo – how silkily the tongue traipses through the name, reaching for the roof the mouth, closing its pronunciation with the O lipped gesture of one blowing a cigarette smoke ring – there is an engagement between the audience and the art seldom achieved in traditional museums. Massive concrete structure gilded by metal and glass, it is high hipster art reminiscent of an Urban Outfitters; its entrance is punctuated by carefully draped carpets and sitting cushions which ache for bodies to lounge on them, a Willy Wonka colored gift shop, and the millennial favorite photo booth. While at the Palais, I was awestruck by the infinitesimal precision and detail of the collective installation “Double Je” (“Double I”). The piece centers around an innovative concept, the translation of the modern detective novel into a physical space, exploring the obsessive attention to detail a criminal, a detective, and an artisan share. Based on a short thriller by Franck Thilliez, the installation recounts the murder of craftsman Natan de Galois at the hand of his artisan rival, Ganel Todanais. Worry not, I have not given away the mystery, for there is a shocking twist ending awaiting the spectator at the conclusion of their excursion. A bright yellow “Investigation Report” booklet plots out the saga in micro-chapters, with diagrams and maps of each installation supplementing the experience. The story flows through several linked rooms which visitors can explore Natan’s apartment, garage, and studios. Each room has been painstakingly decorated by the Atelier d’Arts Appliques du Vesinet, alongside twenty-nine other artisans of cutlery, lace, textile, wood, stonework, ceramics, and scenography, submerging the spectator into several exquisitely crafted rooms where the artistry of function

and the functionality of art are one.

We are immediately thrown into the details of a life, and our innate penchant for voyeurism is such that we are delighted, and simultaneously wary, of being allowed to wander through the intimate space of another.

Each section is perfectly lit, acclimated, and dressed to such a degree that you cannot help but glance over your shoulder to make sure you are not being followed by the murderer. The garage, a gritty and dim space where an airbrushed vintage muscle car is center stage is contrasted by the furious fashion of Maxime Leroy’s plumed motorcycle, “Celine.” The biker’s gloves and helmet, the airbrushing station, the neat wall of wrenches – every single object is a consciously crafted for us to consider not only its aesthetic form, but also its function. Exiting the garage into a maze, we are thrown for a very literal loop. Unexpected, this literal maze which houses a “a large dark whirl” at its center represents the Minotaur, and as one of Thilliez’s character explains in the Investigation Report, “is the thing hidden inside all of us and which is constantly trying to escape from the maze of the subconscious.” The maze then leads us out to Natan’s studio, an unsettling and eerie space replete with stags’ horns, frantic chalk scribbles, pliers, and petri dishes of decorative objects. The intricate relationship between creation and madness is explored via Maya Rochat’s slum bedroom, We are going Down, a space in which “you go in, you come out, not always intact,” the artist explains. Plastic, paint splashed curtains divide the studio into a sad sleeping space comprised of a soiled mattress and erratic TV set endlessly blinking. The physical representation of “mental territories” is further evidenced in the jigsaw assembly of posters, photos, and maps that make up Thibault de Gialluly’s Ceci

est une ouvre de fiction (III), and culminates in the adjacent room with Jean-Alain Corre’s ceramic and metal projects. Headless ceramic jaws and necks enmeshed in metal and tubing embrace and kiss, their tongues brandished like swords. Across the room a head, or rather a mouth and right ear, the top having been eviscerated, thrusts its toothless tongue at us, a series of clothing strewn about its own metal encasing. Tubes run around the head, and the repetitive, off-kilter hiss of air being pumped creates an uncomfortable rhythm of arrested breathing, a person forever gasping for breath.

The success of “Double Je” lies in forcing the viewer to engage through narrative, that is, to “read” each component with an awareness they would otherwise forgo.

In inspecting Natan’s blood wet bed sheets for clues, we notice on the sheets the embroidery of a winged man, his anatomy delicately split open for us, and consider its construction, its meaning. Outside of the context of our “investigation,” should we encounter the same embroidery by Eudes Menichetti merely hung on a wall, we would likely glance at it and move on. The merging of story and art serve to enfold the viewer into the project, impose importance and demand attention, and we must choose to transcend witnessing the moment, to convert it into experience independent of Instagram.

Look around you. How strange is the place we often find ourselves in.

Double Je Palais de Tokyo 13 Avenue du Président Wilson Paris, France March 24-May 16 2016

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SÃO PAULO

A Particular collection: A brief primer on modern Brazilian art Words Cris de Oliveira

“History is what hurts,” Frederic Jameson tells us. It is a hurt which artists seek to address and transcend through their work, and an effort most passionately displayed by artists born into countries with trajectories of colonization and suppression. Uma Coleção Particular, which translates into both a particular, unique collection and a private collection, showcases art in Brazil from the 1980s to the present. Over sixty pieces from the Pinacoteca do Estado’s archive, some never displayed before, establish a dynamic dialogue between distinct mediums and generations of Brazilian and Brazil based artists. The underlying current of the exhibition is the “process of reorganization of political and cultural Brazilian life that occurs with the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985),” per the Pinacoteca’s curator, José Augusto Ribeiro. Ribeiro hastens to add that the collection also underscores the Pinacoteca’s own reorganizational process, occurring between 1994-1998.

Originally built to serve as the city of Sao Paulo’s Lyceum of Arts and Crafts, the Pinacoteca was transformed into a museum in 1905. The museum houses an important trove of Brazilian art spanning centuries, from colonization to the present. One can peruse the evolution of national art through the lens of history – Rodolfo Bernardelli depicts the myth of the drowned

indigenous woman Moema; Agostinho da Motta’s renditions of royal palaces and monarchy ascertains the inbreeding between Portuguese royals (that’s a joke, kids…almost); and Pedro Americo’s study for Emancipation of the slaves is a religious and political treatise on human liberty – as it reaches its current ideation.

The evolution of Brazilian art is particularly important for we can see the movement from traditional, French-Italian schools of painting to current, unfettered original works. Equally important, this evolution dismisses and transcends the stereotypes imposed on the country throughout history as much more than hedonism, soccer, Carnaval, and beaches. These stereotypes have been set and reinforced for hundreds of years, as evidenced by a particular painting the Pinacoteca has chosen to display, as means of significant comparison, a seventeenth century oil on canvas by the German Stephan Kessler. Entitled America, the work shows the arrival of European explorers to the heathen shores governed by naked, lazy, cannibalistic Injuns and their bare bottomed monkey friends. We must grant Kessler some leeway, for he himself never set foot upon any stretch of the Americas, yet his depiction clearly espouses the perception of European settlers, and that of their progeny for years to come, of the new lands.

As Brazil liberated itself from monarchy, slavery, military dictatorship, and continues to struggle with racism, corruption, and poverty, so too do its artists shed the confining influence of outside schools in order to invent its own tradition and culture of art. These artists have moved from traditional modes of expression namely by reappropriating the artistic space beyond the canvas, unfurling their imagination into other dimensions replete with vibrant colors, unexpected textures, and distortions of space.

The discourse of power and tradition is immediately challenged by the entrance exhibition, a gargantuan bronze horse lain on its side, embedded into the forever in a wild fall, its entrails cupped out and filled with blood-red earth. This imposing piece of impressive verisimilitude, constructed from the cast of a real dead horse, is Cavalo by Vanderlei Lopes (Horse, 2003).

The work unseats the traditional notion of horses in art, as instruments of nobility and heroism, by striking the animal into the ground. As much as a symbol of those in power – the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil, the current corrupt political system –the horse is also a symbol of the worker and the farmer. Vitally significant in the realm of agriculture and manual labor, the building blocks of Brazil, the horse is as much president’s as peasant’s. In this piece, the traditional hero’s

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TOP LEFT: WAGNER MALTA TAVARES, HERO, 2010, COURTESY OF PINACOTECA MUSEUM TOP RIGHT: VANDERLEI LOPES, HORSE, 2003, COURTESY OF PINACOTECA MUSEUM BOTTOM LEFT: INTERIOR OF PINACOTECA MUSEUM BOTTOM RIGHT: CARMELA GROSS, A HOUSE, 2007, COURTESY OF PINACOTECA MUSEUM

horse is knocked down and hollowed out, filled with the worker’s earth. The unmounted animal is not defeated, but rather gathering strength to rise yet again – which side will tame it and ride it?

Sounding a more playful tone, there is Wagner Malta Tavares’ Herói (Hero, 2010), a tall fan suspended on spindly iron legs wearing a red cape. Once activated by motion, the fan turns on and its bright cape flaps majestically behind it. A visual pun, the work also addresses notions of self-reliance, as the “heroism” of the fan is activated by its own energy. Nelson Leirner’s Variacao (Variation, 2003) is an equally playful collage of eye-popping stickers, emulating a pre-adolescent’s school notebook.

Efrain Almeda plays with the isolation of modern man in his untitled piece from 2007. A large, blank elevated canvas positioned on the ground offers up a wood carved man, naked save for a modest goatee and serious stare.

The man sits with his knees bent and his shoulders back, hands lightly resting on the ground as if he were steadying himself to rise.

One of the most evocative pieces, a synthesis of the traditional Brazilian art of woodworking and a bright, modern palette is the untitled 2008 sculpture done by the artist Véio (slang for “old” or “dude”; government name Cícero Alves dos Santos). A four legged curve of wood simply painted black and red, the piece’s body resembles

a blinded anteater slinking away on its long, black legs, a Daliesque spider-anteater. Likely inspired by Véio, the Paulista artist Erika Verzutti has crafted Avestruz (Ostrich, 2008). Minimal and jagged, three lengths of bronze have been wrangled into a black coated tripod that resembles an ostrich burying its head into the wooden floor.

Carmela Gross’s neon delight, Uma casa (A house, 2007) depicts a seemingly floating fluorescent house made of violet lights and metal tripods. Our general idea of what a house is – a home, a welcome, a shelter, something solid and stable – is transformed into something nearly intangible and precarious, made of light. Rodrigo Matheus’ Exterior (2013) is an intelligent collage reminiscent of Joseph Campbell. Encased behind glass, Matheus delicately juxtaposes suspended bird wings and feathers against original stock certificates issued by the Brazilian government and national banks. The bird wings, once vibrant and beating nature and now taxidermied into stillness, mirrors the decline of the Brazilian economy, the suffocation within a world that cannot be escaped. Tunga’s True rouge [Vermelho de verdade] (Real red, 1988) is a vibrantly varied array of textures. Suspended midair by red nylon nets are half-filled decanters and glasses, paired with elongated cleaning brushes. Transfixing and whimsical, the piece plays with the jumbling and transmutation of elements. Stepping into the world of Ping-ping – a con-

strução do abismo no piscar dos cegos (Ping-ping – the construction of the abyss in the blink a blind eye, 1980) clearly elucidates Brazil’s shift into modern art and its desire to participate in the game of art outside of its own boundaries. Positioning yourself behind a pair of suspended sunglasses, a ping-pong paddle floating close to your right hand and facing a net and vertically flat traditional Ping-Pong table mounted against a blindingly white wall. Accompanied by a poem written by the artist, the installation questions the fleetingness of movement, the construction and limits of space, and the deceitful relationship between sight and perception.

Unbent by the weight of its history and the instability of its present, Brazilian artists have again and again translated the “jeitinho Brasileiro,” the little Brazilian way, of looking at and dealing with life onto their work – heads high, smiling, ardently marching with a hope that refuses to be sniffed out.

Uma Coleção Particular Pinacoteca do Estado Praça da Luz, 2 Bom Retiro São Paulo, Brazil Nov. 20 2015- Jan. 31 2016

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AFTER

dystopia Gökçen Cabadan and

Words Gökcan Demirkazık

In her article, Critically Queer, Judith Butler leaves the reader alone with a brief yet fundamental description of the concept of ‘performativity’ largely misused nowadays: “unanticipated resignifiability of highly invested terms”. This description reveals the attitude, hence the confused resistance of the ‘established order’ -an individual, institution, or system- during the process of performative shift of meaning –attribution of different meanings to a symbol via an action or statement- which is present at the base of performativity. The Dystopia exhibition by Gökçen Cabadan, shown at Öktem & Aykut Gallery between the 24th of March and the 23rd of April 2016, ‘documented’ painting’s realization of its self-alienation, by moulding both features specific to the art of painting, and factors such as the background, the mat, and the frame that can be called ‘peripheral’, that most of the time play an invisible role in the interpretation of any two dimensional medium, in a (Western) middle class kitsch dough.

All of the works at the exhibition unseated painting from its privileged position amongst other art forms, by delivering persistent hints that were maybe not openly related with history of art-as-anobject, but in respect to the internal-rotting or ‘exhaustion’ of medium (present almost in every work).

In the first room of the exhibition space, there was the tetralogy called Paspartu (The Mat, 2014), of which the figural inclination was the most apparent, a putto that found itself on the

ground, torn from the ceiling of a 19th century building it belonged to, and a wall intervention I thought was made by oil paint. Taken in a plenary consideration, it could be said that this room witnessed –involuntarily and provocatively- the evolution of little bourgeois ‘taste’ over the last century. Such that while the putto on the ground nullified the dashy depth of the turquoise on the ground via the frog-like deformations on its face and lower body parts, its fall from the ceiling, and the support (the paper it was applied on) observed from the sides alluded to the fall of the class-indexed taste, and the values it represented, from heaven. On the other hand, the canvases of Paspartu positioned as if in succession in a corner, of which all of the surfaces including the sides were carefully painted, referred to the rise and fall of the colours, and forms even though abstractly. While the vault silhouettes surrounded by sky blue, and skin colour, gave the impression of a gateway where any image can appear all of a sudden with the brown colour applied in a heterogenic manner, the dynamically round cornered quadrangles just under evoking the middle of the century, ‘matted’ by a pastel petrol green, and a dark mustard tone declared the start of a new era.

Cabadan’s Mercury and the Sun (2016) complemented the intervention made of oval and round celestial bodies tangent to each other. The mustard and skin colours, reappearing on a dark grey oval ground in the form of little spheres,

even tough tried to make the ‘heroic’ tone of abstract painting history, told to be the triumph of modernism, more humble, still remained a little too timid, and too analytic, and distant in its timidity. Similarly, in Untitled (2016), in which a woman whose left arm is painted as a cornered super-humanly long body part, the Fontana-like slit, while minimizing the surface of the canvas for a meaningless figure, it also dribbled past the multi-layered facial expression of the woman.

In the 2016 Dilemma, Cabadan’s fusion of kitsch and surreal, took a simpler, and hence poignant state. Although it is hard to give a sense to what the figure in this painting framed like a photograph is doing with his/her fingers put inside the little bibelot-like vases, and the other hand holding one of these vases, the fact that the pink rose figures on the bibelots seemed to be evaporating as if unchained by their ground, evoked Cabadan’s putto’s rootlessness in the first room. The artist succeeded in bringing together the always highly positioned art of painting with the banal, and the daily; in other words, the pastel squares of the chair upholstery presented the bourgeois interiority by implying its life experience, and without caricaturizing, or even summarizing.

In this context, one of the four pastel works by Cabadan at the exhibition, Moon (2016), pointed the attention to the multi-layered state Cabadan’s production process, while investigating the effect of a rather new medium such as

cinema on the fields of visual perception, and production with an extraordinary agility. In Moon must probably inspired by Jean-Simeon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (1733-34), the mouth of the kid swelling the ‘bubble’, is not shown in the same ‘frame’ as the bubbles. We don’t clearly see these bubbles even in round openings that the mat does not fully cover. It is just possible to suggest that these are the same bubbles –even though different in size- because their contours match. On the other side, the fact that the mat is fully covered with ‘automatic’ scrawl drawings expressing the stream of consciousness of the artist accelerated the blowing action that the mouth is about to take. Even though in Chardin’s pastel, the emphasis is on his ingenuity in inviting an easy lightness, and light to the transparency of the bubble, in Cabadan’s work, we witness the deconstruction of an action by a cinéphilique eye, the figure to be meta-physical like in Duchamp, and not physical like in Futurism, and the artist transforming herself into a process without refraining herself in a conceptual quest. Although Dystopia, is not sufficient enough, in defining this transformation – especially in literature, film, and lately in visual arts - due to its associative world, Cabadan’s works shook off a medium recurrently pronounced dead, and without making big promises, presented kindly thought visual aphorisms in the banal intimacy of the personal.

GÖKÇEN CABADAN, DILEMMA, 2016, OIL ON CANVAS, 100X70 CM, COURTESY OF ÖKTEM & AYKUT

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MUSIC

From the phonograph to the the silent disco As much colorful as the art of music itself, which is divided into countless labyrinths, sidewalks and sub-genres, is our adventure of recording and listening to it again. Many of our adventures with music started and evolved with its being recorded. Recording sound did not only give a timelessness to it, but changed people’s habits of listening to it as well.

Words Sami Kısaoğlu

Fall 2012. A night at Bimhuis, the world-famous jazz club of Amsterdam. The hundred-year-old jazz discs played by Ziya Ertekin aka DJ Blue Flamingo are echoing in the foyer of the club. Almost a refined parade of 78 rpm discs, this performance envelope the entire space with music from a quite old phonograph and a guitar amplifier connected to it. It’s as if this music is not played in a temple of jazz rising above the south of river Ij, but from an old phonograph on the porch of a cottage in New Orleans about a century ago. The past and the present walk side by side on this last day of World Dutch Jazz Meeting, an event that brings music professionals from around the world. It was while I was peeking at the images of drummer Han Bennick scattered around the venue that I started pondering on the cultural journey of sound. Then I remembered... First there was sound. In the space and in the air... Oscillating freely. Everything started to change when humans started recording it. Photography had a similar impact.

Similar to photography, which recorded an image by the use of a camera and imbued that image with eter-

nal existence in the course of history, recording of the sound gave both its subject and its consumer vast opportunities.

Fifty years after Nicéphore Niépce captured the image of a pigeon’s nest in summer 1827, sound would become free in August 1877, like it had never been before. The phonograph, which was developed and introduced by Thomas Edison who was, at the time, struggling with major hearing problems, would record sounds on a cylinder and play the recorded sounds.

Edison’s phonograph, which was inspired by that of France-based Irish inventor Leon Scott de Martinville would soon leave its place to the gramophone and trigger a series of technological advancements like the music box, the radio, the Walkman, the CD player and digital music players. Habits of listening to music also changed in time. The recorded sound could now be heard at the desired time, place and frequency. At the end of the 18th century, sound travelled out into the sky from concert halls, churches and most exclusively from the mansions and palaces of the nobility, but a centu-

ry later it found brand new outlets for itself. This journey went so far as to the living rooms of middle-class families, small boat trips and the dance floor liberating music immensely and paving the way for cultural and social changes.

The second revolution, which followed the recording of sound, was its reproduction at the desired quantities. When, Emile Berliner, a poor German Jew immigrated to the USA in 1870 at the age of 36 and inscribed his name in history as the inventor of gramophone in 1887, a new page opened in the cultural history of listening to music. Many historical events are the cause or effect of another. Likewise, the reproducibility problems of Edison’s phonograph lead to the widespread use of Berliner’s gramophone and discs. The gramophone disc allowed for unlimited reproduction as it relied on a single master, it offered superior opportunities compared to the phonograph’s cylinder, which required recording of the sound each and every time. Just like the phonograph, the sound recorded on the gramophone required another device for listening. Mechanically the

ILLUSTRATION: PELÄ°N KIRCA

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phonograph was replaced by the gramophone, and the cylinder by discs. America in the 20s saw gramophones mass-produced in various models consistent with the trending furniture styles and even portable ones. These all found their buyers in different economic classes and took music to the countryside, the gardens and seaside.

Years after the children’s song “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, which was the first song Edison recorded on his phonograph, Berliner recorded another children’s song, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”* on his first discs, which became a cult of the 20th century. Disc fairs and auctions would follow one another and prices of first editions would reach astronomical levels. For example, the Record Collector magazine estimated the 1958 disc of John Lennon’s band The Quarrymen, which would later become The Beatles, around GBP 200.000 and The Beatles album The White Album would find a buyer for USD 790.000.

Disc and gramophone manufacturing techniques have brought along many other innovations since their inception. One of the most important of these innovations was the electrical microphone recordings realized in 1925. Disc without a rustling sound, new recording and printing techniques, new alloys used in the raw material of discs, etc. all aimed for a better music-listening experience. The 20s saw much advancement in radio technologies and a more widespread use of radios. Almost 60 percent of American families bought radios from 1923 till 1930. This was a period when radios gained importance for not only broadcasting music, but producing it as well. During the Great Depression of the 30s, radios became widely used in households and many gramophone manufacturers went bankrupt.

Recording stories from the second half of the 20th century The 40s witnessed the most important development after recording and reproduction of sound. Electric gramophones which came to service during these years both provided a better sound quality and other eases of use for the consumers. The forebears of what we know as turntables today were developed in 1955 and the first LP would be released seven years before that. Led

by Hungarian-American engineer Peter Goldmark, LPs were developed in CBS Laboratories and would set the standard for the entire recording industry. It also offered a brand new experience for lovers of music by allowing recording of 20 minutes of music on each sides of the disc. While a 40-minute long symphony could be recorded on many 78 rpm discs, a single 33 rpm disc allowed recording of the symphony on two sides of it. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor was the first recording on a 33 rpm disc (1948, Columbia). In Turkey, the first LP would be Kimi Dertten

İçermiş (1968) of Zeki Müren, a proud pioneer of many firsts in the country.

Throughout the 139-year-old journey of recorded sound, another thing, which created its own culture like the disc, was the tape for sure. The compact tapes developed by Dutch company Philips set the standards for the sector and reached a 150-million market volume by the end of the 60s. For the three decades to follow, it would create its own culture which varied between different societies.

This format allowed the listener to make recordings from the radio or another tape and lived its golden age in the 80s all over the world and our country. Long road albums we compiled from our favorite songs, songs for our lover, songs with special announcements for soldiers, voice recordings of family elders sent by international courier, albums sold by peddlers in marketplaces, the most preposterous examples of the pianist-singer trend, dance tunes and many more... These were all different examples of music-listening in our country which found their outlet through tapes. However, we should not forget the part tapes played in the blossoming subcultures. Demo tapes of many rock and metal bands, which could not find a publisher for their music, would change hands among people and their ads would be published on fanzines of the 90s. Tapes were instrumental in the progress of punk music in the UK, too. For a time in our country, the pirate recordings reached such high numbers that popular singers of that period were known to buy cars as present to their fans who bought the original albums.

While the technologies related to tapes and devices with which they were used changed at a fast pace, Sony and Philips brought their engineers together in 1979 to create the compact disc (CD). History was repeating itself and this new technology was pushing its predecessors to the dusty shelves of history. The compact discs became commercial in the 80s. ABBA’s album The Visitor was the first reprint published in CD, while American singer-pianist Billy Joel’s recording 52nd Street became the first original album printed on CD. Around the same time with compact disc, Sony also offered the Walkman to people, changing their habits of listening to music unimaginably. The Walkman allowed music to be heard independent of a space and also the listener to create a private space within the society. Interestingly, it was the product of Sony’s co-founder Masaru Ibuka’s desire to listen to opera during his Transatlantic flights.

In the late 90s, the Walkman would leave its place to the Discman, which was, for most of the part, developed by Sony and the MP3 format, which would define today’s music-listening habits, would reach a

wide audience. MP3 was, to a large extent, developed on electrical engineer and mathematician Karlheinz Brandenburg’s PhD dissertation on the compression of sound files and people’s perception of it and met its audience on July 7, 1994. It is the forebear of digital music platforms such as Spotify and Deezer, as well as the music we listen on our mobile phones and started a brand new era for our habits of listening to music.

During the last two decades, music has reached us in many forms: sometimes as the background of a telephone operator or the marketing tool of a bank. Apart from being the art of music, it has brought along alternatives for hearing it. One of the last of these alternatives was the silent disco. The roots of silent disco can be traced back to the motion picture Time of Roses, an early example of Finnish science fiction movies dated 1969, where characters in the movie danced with earphones on in a party scene. Silent disco was also an alternative supported by environmentalists of the 90s against the noise pollution and environmental damage caused by outdoor parties. Its reflection on the popular culture was quite apparent in the 2000s and today it is an indispensable part of the mobile club culture. The silent disco parties which were promoted by word of mouth or event pages on social network would bring big crowds in public spaces; particularly those held in London’s subway stations in 2003 had a great impact.

While an event attended by some four thousand people at London’s Victoria Station in 2007 was dispersed by the police, world’s first live music performance with wireless earphones was The Flaming Lips’s concert at the South by Southwest Festival held in Austin, Texas in 1999.

The term silent disco that, once again, liberated electronic music subgenres like house, dubstep, and techno from the dark spaces of nightclubs, was first used at The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival held in Manchester, Tennesse in 2005. The silent disco events, which, at some parties, would host more than one DJ’s performance offering its participants different musical tastes at the same started as a sub-culture movement like many other music-related movements, and transformed into a sector in time. Companies organizing silent disco parties for different fields and group of people in USA are best examples of this. * While this is remembered as a pleasant coincidence in the history of recording, Berliner’s singing of this song with German accent caused both the sector and some publications not to take his invention seriously.

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INDEPENDENT MEDIA

Born from its ashes: The new era of magazine publishing Most of the magazines where my first reports were published in are no more on the shelves today.

They gave in to digital or were shut down due to financial reasons. We are going through a period in which magazine publishing takes a new form, reborn from its ashes. In recent years, we have been laying on our tables –visually- similar magazines. The reasons they are making big impact might seem like a celebrity being a writer, or readers being able to find ‘everything’ in them, and their covers being dashy, but it should be noted that they also each have a different point of view. We personally spoke to the creators of those magazines about the backdrop of the new era of magazine publishing.

Words Nihan Bora Ayı (Bear): “The tree was already there, when we arrived in the shadow” Ayı Magazine took off with the motto of ‘sincerity first’. Completely made up of a collective, the literature-culture-art magazine Ayı does not pretend to give a new direction to literature. They have an egalitarian, and liberalist structure, and the editor in chief ’s 2-year-old niece who said ‘ayı’ instead of ‘dayı’ (meaning uncle), is the one who gave the magazine its name. The team’s purpose is not to change things. “The tree was already there, when we arrived in the shadow” they say, and because they love literature/magazine publishing, issuing their magazine is their sole intention.

Their concern, they tell: “is to break the coldness in literature, and to encourage the reader to write more”. At first, they don’t look so different amongst tens of other magazines. Besides, they themselves say, “It would be foolish to say that we are different than the others”. Yet, if one must find a difference, they say that it would be the attention they give to each of their readers.

Getting to the subject of cover story; Ayı Magazine’s cover is different than the others. In each issue, a ‘bear’ welcomes us. Their priorities are; “no celebrities, and no deceased, and no figure other than the ‘bear’ figure on the cover. You will keep seeing a ‘bear’ in each issue.” Their evaluation of the articles is not based on a research subject determined that month, but rather a thorough reading of the received articles: “In the reception process, we read all of the articles to the point, and move on with those that we’re comfortable with”.

Başka Peron (Another Railway Platform): “We want the reader to be filled with questions rather than answers when s/he turns the last page over.”

“Writing was our journey; our meeting point turned out to be Başka Peron” state the team members, who have met each other at ITU (Istanbul Technical University)’s Literature Club. Leading from each other’s differences, they took the name of ‘peron’ (railway platform), and later to be called ‘Başka Peron’. The writing action following many workshops under the Literature Club started not to be enough for them after a while and “We decided that we wanted to share these productions. Because if we did, we were going to receive feedback, and these feedbacks would not only organize our own production but it would also increase the quality of our works. What could we lose? We rolled our sleeves up, and embarked on this journey”.

When asked about their greatest difference from the other magazines, they say they don’t want to be categorized under such statement. Yet, they explain their distinction: “At first, the design language is the striking element. Instead of framing the commonplaces and putting them at the most visible spots, or piling down several

topics on the cover, we are rather after a simpler, a more content-oriented design that would allow for literature to prove its own value. We want such content that the articles shall not be in parallel. They should be in different directions, or should coincide on one spot, diverging thereon. The reader should be left with questions rather than answers when s/he turns the last page over. We would be quite happy if only one person notices these differences.”

Bavul (Suitcase): “Our concern is reality” The Bavul Newpaper team previously working for different magazines, each had in mind to publish a street magazine, and a magazine that is concerned about reporter journalism. They got together around this very idea, and started a journey of literature-street magazine. The team explains: “We are concerned about the life stories of the people we pass by in silence. We want to interview people who have never been given a chance to speak. We want to go in the ‘no trespassing’ neighborhoods, and take the pulse of those places. Our concern is reality”.

Inspired by the street, Bavul Magazine’s writers alter at each issue in accordance with its soul. Construction workers as well as auto thieves are amongst its writers.

They are not concerned about whether someone died or was born on a day in that month when deciding on the cover. It happens that they decide on names that keep the pulse of the street such as Bergen, and Ciguli. When asked about those who perceive putting decedents on the cover as effortless, “We put deceased faces on the cover to indicate our style. We put them on the cover because we love them. The fact that they are deceased does not give away from our love” they answer.

Deli Kadın (Madwoman): “We want to make the voice of women be heard” A quarterly magazine, Deli Kadın Magazine is published by Eda Ağca, and Melike Ölker. The name of the magazine “was inspired from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist literature criticism book called ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’, dedicated to all women locked in the attics throughout history, voiceless, repressed, iterated, and ignored”.

The reason why the duo wanted to publish a magazine is equivalent to the soul of the magazine. The male-domination in magazine publishing in recent periods led them to open up space for those women who want to make their voice heard. Hence came out Deli Kadın concerned about male domination, capitalist system, and their consequences. Inviting the reader to reflect on feminist literature-art, the magazine also wants to say to those women who feel lonely, ‘you are not so lonely’.

Determining its content not based on names but based on the received articles, the

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team determines the cover story by prioritizing subjects that women would take pleasure in and love to discuss.

Kafasına Göre (After One’s own Heart): “We set off by saying ‘everyone should write following their own heart’” Ankara based Kafasına Göre, is a bimonthly magazine. “Everyone should write following their own heart, and then we’ll see” they said, and hence the name. The awards that students received at Sinemart Writing School led the founders to take a step in publishing. “In 2014, we opened our doors to transfer our student’s writings to the reader and to let those who are not allowed to write with humour be heard. We asked ‘would you write following your heart with us?’ and continued with those who replied back.”

The magazine representatives who host guest writers, musicians, and artists among their writers state: “we say that people should write following their own heart, to freely write, to give voice to everyone, to tell what ever comes to their minds, to bring a different breath, and to make people love reading without boring them”.

Parende (Somersault): “Magazines have a lifetime. For now, we keep on living.”

The Parende Magazine team, starting off with the motto of “Amateurship is king”, say that they wanted to rid people of their grudge, hatred, and prejudices.

As the three co-founders of the magazines were constantly traveling, the name of the magazine turned out to be ‘Parende’, and they reflected: “To avoid making no progress by providing new works to our literature, to change it by trying new genres, to remind our past by remembering, to draw attention and transform the cliché in order to create a new style by performing a somersault.”

The Parende team attributes their decision to publish the magazine to an interesting reason: Worry. They are worried about living, telling, getting understood.

This feeling set them in motion, and they decided to publish the magazine. They want to conduce to the birth of new and authentic works. At the same time, they don’t want to forget about the past, and instead re-showcase it. With their own words, in our country turned into ‘a paradise of magazines’, their biggest difference, and maybe greatest courage is to ‘take the risk to go bankrupt’. For this, they say: “Magazines have a lifetime. For now, we keep on living.”

Peyniraltı Edebiyatı (Whey Literature): “Our greatest concern is solely literature” Peyniraltı Literature Magazine says that the biggest reason why they wanted to publish a magazine is to not be tied up to someone/some others when writing.

The team stating that their sole concern is to really and only read on literature publishes the magazine with an amateur soul since 3 years. They select the name of the cover from amongst their favorite writers. And then they ask themselves: “Will we be able to satisfyingly fulfill the content of the folder? They are taking risks by taking popular writers along with names such as Yukio Mişima, Marguerite Yourcenar, Isaac Asimov, and Asaf Halet Çelebi. When they put popular names on the cover, they make an effort to address them in different aspects.

Pulbiber (Paprika): “Women in the management, and in the kitchen” Women are in the management of the Pulbiber Magazine starting off with the feeling that women need to intervene in culture, art, and life. Concerned about not producing the already existing populism, the team is also concerned about intervening the male

SOME FANZINE COVERS

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It has been told that magazines were about to die; they swept this statement away. They try to criticize, do humour, remember the past, and make up space for different voices. They each have a different point of origin, and concern. mentality. “We publish a magazine with women in the management, and in the kitchen. We wanted to prove that women could have a voice without asking for permission from anyone. And we did it!” they say.

The magazine stays away from those with fanatical statements, and sexist behaviours. Even if they receive a beautiful article, if the writer’s stance is slippery, s/he is not covered in the magazine. About the cover design:

SOME FANZINE COVERS

“Cover design is very important to us. Other magazines put upfront the habits of the reader, and your chance of selling increases as you sustain that habit. We risk selling less, or even being in loss in order to put upfront the aesthetical worry rather than repeating the already existing perception.

UP XIV: “You publish a magazine if you want to see Hitler or Sasha Grey in the same issue.”

Published as a movement at the end of the 90’s, Underground Poetix magazine was back on the shelves in 2015, only this time entitled UP XIV. The journey started like this: “UP was a structure sickly and simultaneously concerned about various stuff, and worried about presenting the materials it collected about these as an action, and one of the main concerns is still to keep it that way. Also, if you want to see the Clash, Bourdieu, Hitler or Sasha Grey in the same issue, you publish a magazine”.

When asked what UP’s concern is about, we get the following answer: “There is a deformed, neatly suppressed culture pool that we want to make the propaganda of.

This pool is an area where weird people from Yugo-Slavia, USSR, USA, Kamchatka, Middle East, and other

geographies, workers, LGBTI’s, ecological resistances, various fashion, architecture, and art works/arguments, science fiction, gore lines, and “merz” gather up. Putting the magazine aside, if you cannot strengthen this with the sound you make, the visual you produce, the group you found, or a speech you organize in different platforms, you do not need to enter the festive world of print or digital. Thus, the magazine becomes meaningless”.

Apartman (Building): “We were characterized as necrophiles” Apartman Magazine, one of the new members of new forms of magazine publishing, took solidarity as a base by thinking about the old neighbourhood relationships.

Their biggest aim is to be frank to the reader. The team describing itself as: “We were people with words, and wished to meet with the readers”, was at some point characterized as necrophiles because of their selection of cover story. “We have not perceived the beautiful names of literature as necrophiles. We imagined the beloved writers as the neighbours in a building gathered on the same table”.

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