ART UNLIMITED 38 SEPTEMBER 2016

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PUBLISHED BIMONTHLY, FREE OF CHARGE, SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2016, ISSUE: 38 YEAR: 8, ÇAĞRI SARAY, TUNCA, MEHMET ÖĞÜT , PHOTO: ELİF KAHVECİ

Art

MLADEN STILINOVIC Ahmet Ergenç wrote a farewell to the Croatian artist that we lost last month

ÇAĞRI SARAY, TUNCA, MEHMET ÖĞÜT Nazlı Pektaş visited their shared studio in Yeldeğirmeni

GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA Gökcan Demirkazık reviewed her exhibition of Hamburger Bahnhof

TANER CEYLAN Mujde Bilgütay meet the artist just before his London exhibition

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Following artists from Turkey World map of artists from Turkey that you’ll find abroad this season.

CANADA

FRANCE

MONTREAL - Musée d’Art Contemporain Le grand balcon 19.10.2016 - 15.01.2017 Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin

PARIS - Centre Pompidou Cher(e)s Ami(e)s Until February 6th Hale Tenger TOULON - Hotel des Arts Toulon Les parfums de l’intranquilité

DENMARK

AARHUS - ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Aros Focus/New Nordic Until September 11th

Until September25th

Meriç Algün Ringborg

CANAN

USA

NEW YORK - Guggenheim Museum But a storm is blowing from paradise Until October 5th Ergin Çavuşoğlu; Gülsün Karamustafa C24 Gallery Seçkin Pirim

NETHERLANDS

EINDHOVEN - Van Abbemuseum How did we get here? Until September 25 Barış Doğrusöz; Aslı Çavuşoğlu

ROMANIA

BUCHAREST - MNAC Shape of Time - Future and Nostalgia Until October 9th

Ali Kazma; Nilbar Güreş; Şükran Moral

POLAND

TORUN - Znaki Czasu Contemporart Art Centre (COCA)

This yearning is ours!

Until September 18

Nasan Tur; Mehtap Baydu; Ayşe Erkmen; Nezaket Ekici; Murat Germen; Belit Sağ; Volkan Kızıltunç; Ali Kazma; Servet Koçyiğit KRAKOW - Mocak Utopian pulse - Flares in the darkroom Until January 22nd

Halil Altındere

ISRAEL

TEL AVIV - Israel Museum Ruth Young Wing Wire(less) Connections Until March 18th Servet Koçyiğit

COLOMBIA

CALI Museo la Tertulia Future Perfect Until November 20 Nasan Tur

SOUTH KOREA GWANJU 11th Gwangju Biennial Until November 6th

Ahmet Öğüt

BRAZIL

BELGIUM

SAO PAULO 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial

OTEGEM

Deweer Gallery

September 10 to December 11

Until November 10th

Güneş Terkol

Nasan Tur

SWITZERLAND GERMANY

ZURICH Manifesta 11 Until September 18 Ahmet Öğüt; Aslı Çavuşoğlu

BERLIN Hamburger Bahnhof Chranographia Until October 23 Gülsün Karamustafa n.b.k. September 14 - November 6 Halil Altındere Hebbel Am Ufer Köfte Airlines September 14 - October 8 Halil Altındere Akademie der künste Uncertain states October 14 - January 15 Nasan Tur GELSENKIRCHEN Nordstern Video Art Center A sense of history Until December 18 Halil Altındere DRESDEN Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Language September 24 - August 20 Halil Altındere FELLBACH 13th Triennal of small scale sculpture Until October 2nd Aslı Çavuşoğlu; Banu Cennetoğlu FREIBURG Museum für Neue Kunst Freundschaftsspiel Istanbul : Freiburg Until October 9th Hera Büyüktasçıyan; Handan Börüteçene; Selim Birsel; Cansu Çakar; Aslı Çavuşoğlu; Şevket Dağ; Cevdet Erek; Nilbar Güreş; Ali Kazma; KOMET; Merve Kılıçer; Kurucu Koçanoğlu; Necla Rüzgar; Kemal Seyhan; Serra Tansel; Yavuz Tanyeli; Erdem Taşdelen; Mehmet Ulusel; CANAN; İnci Eviner; Leyla Gediz; Şener Özmen; Ferhat Özgür; Didem Pekün; Zeyno Pekünlü; Aykan Safoğlu; Hale Tenger

TAIWAN HONG KONG

Edouard Malingue Gallery Solo show Opening in October Nuri Kuzucan

ITALIA

VENICE 15th Venice Architecture Biennial Until November 27th

Darzana - Pavilion of Turkey Hüner Aldemir; Hande Ciğerli; Gökçen Erkılıç; Nazlı Tümerdem; Yiğit Yalçın SANTOMATO - Fattoria di Celle Farm Opening on October 16th Gori Collection Hera Büyüktaşçıyan

TAİPEİ - National History Museum Picture the world

September 23- Novermber 1

Burhan Doğançay

AUSTRIA

SALZBURG - Museum der modern Poetics of change Until October 9th Nilbar Güreş VIENNA - Q21 What is left? Until November 22nd Halil Altındere; Nasan Tur Galerie Krinzinger Gülsün Karamustafa Until October 8 Kustplatz Graben Until October 30th Nevin Aladağ LINZ Ars Electronica Festival September 8-12 Cengiz Tekin

İLHAM KAYNAĞI DOĞA Doğal olanla insan yapımı olan arasındaki ilişkiden ortaya çıkan villalar, topografyasıyla ahenk içinde benzersiz bir konfor yaşatıyor. Ege’nin muhteşem doğası, Canyon Ranch’in sınırsız olanaklarıyla birleşerek, sizi eşsiz bir geleceğe çağırıyor.

Bodrum/Milas Havalimanı

10dak. 30dak. 50dak.

www.kaplankaya.com

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Edito Hi, On a platform where political agenda rushes, cutting our veins open, we keep doing what we love doing, with patience, and confidence, hoping that everything will be for the better: to deliver the sounds of other worlds and other people.

In this issue, we tried to express how crucial creative industries are for a country. You may start by our talks with Minima Moralia, and the young creators of Art Night London, about the difficulties they encounter during the production stage, and continue with the first of our series in Limited magazine that analyze the problems of young artists. All economically developed and developing countries invest in creativity with the conscience that it leads all other sectors. Like dear Selçuk Şirin said “a passage to dream economy.” There is no need to mention the prerequisite of free thought and freedom of speech in order to achieve this. Isn’t Taner Ceylan, who insists on living and producing in his own country despite the threats that he receives, a great example of how we hamper our own power? To witness how three young male artists create wonders in their humble studio in Yeldeğirmeni, to be able to visit the fifth edition of the Çanakkale Biennial despite all struggles, to encounter Gülsün Karamustafa’s retrospective in Berlin today, knowing she has at one time produced behind the bars, to finally rejoin Bilge Alkor’s book of 80-years of production, to celebrate Art Unlimited’s tenth year anniversary… Could it be that there is no hope? No, it would be unfair to say so.

Despite everything, Art Unlimited that took the mission of becoming a bridge in conveying the creative sounds will celebrate its tenth year anniversary, by publishing a book that will voice the views of those who have served the magazine until today. At the end of this year you will be able to find different players of Turkey’s culture-art world in this book.

This fall, you must not miss the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennale that will open its doors on the 22nd of October, in order to consolidate the value of creativity in your minds. The first of the two Design Unlimited magazines that will be published twice yearly will be distributed in the city concurrently with the biennale.

Wishing you happiness despite all.

Merve & Oktay

BRIDGE, ILLUSTRATION: CANER YILMAZ

HERMÈS TA B I AT I

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Farewell to Mladen Ahmet Ergenç

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Gülsün Karamustafa: Where to, now?

Gökcan Demirkazık

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Çağrı Saray, TUNCA, Mehmet Öğüt studio Nazlı Pektaş

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Being queer in the 80’s (3) Serdar Soydan

Year: 8, Issue: 38 Bimonthly published, 5 times a year.

Distributed free of charge. Authors are solely responsible for the content of submitted articles. All rights reserved

by Unlimited. Quotations not allowed without permission.

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Spectating the atmospheric in-betweenness: Peeping Tom Mehmet Kerem Özel

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Fiona Banner and the bastard words Elif Bereketli

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Editors-at-large: Merve Akar Akgün merveakar@gmail.com Oktay Tutuş oktay.tutus@gmail.com Editor-in-chief (responsible): Merve Akar Akgün Advertising and project director: Hülya Kızılırmak hulyakizilirmak@unlimitedrag.com Editor: Müjde Bilgütay Photography editor: Elif Kahveci Office assistants: İdil Bayram, Tara Sarper Design: Vahit Tuna Design applications: Yusufcan Akyüz

Taner Ceylan’s latest exhibition: I love you Müjde Bilgütay

Contributors: Barış Acar, Elif Bereketli, Ege Berensel, Gökcan Demirkazık, Ahmet Ergenç, Mehmet Kerem Özel, Nazlı Pektaş, Louisa Robertson, Serdar Soydan, Merve Ünsal, Caner Yılmaz Translation: Çağdaş Acar, Elif Bereketli, Müjde Bilgütay, Hande Erbil, Ahmet Ergenç, Mehmet Kerem Özel

Communication address: Refik Saydam Caddesi Haliç Ap. 23/7 Şişhane, Beyoğlu, İstanbul Ofis: +90( 212) 243 24 90 / 91 info@unlimitedrag.com Instagram: unlimited_rag Web: www.unlimitedrag.com Print: A4 Ofset Matbaacılık San. ve Tic. Ltd. Şti.

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Adress: Refik Saydam Cad. Haliç Ap. 23/7 Şişhane

Yeni BMW 7 Serisi

www.bmw.com.tr

LÜKSÜN ZİRVESİ.

YENİ BMW 7 SERİSİ.

Zamanın ötesinde bir teknoloji ve hayallerinizin ötesinde bir deneyim sizi bekliyor. Modern lüksün, tasarım, inovasyon ve konforla buluştuğu Yeni BMW 7 Serisi Borusan Otomotiv Yetkili Satıcıları’nda.

Sheer Driving Pleasure

CAPSULE

Invitation to dance Architect Jean Verville wins coveted Montréal Museum of Fine Arts’ invited competition for the development of Museum Avenue with his installation made up of five thousand golden footprints called DANCE FLOOR. Isn’t this exactly what the whole world needs right now?

PHOTO: MAXIME BROUILLET

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Creativity as an industry

THOMAS BOANO & JONAS PRISMONTAS

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF THOMAS BOANO & JONAS PRISMONTAS

Bright minds need a nurturing atmosphere to flourish.

While developed countries of the world measure their levels of development by looking at how much they can sustain their creative people, there is an eye opening solution for countries like us who try to stop (or not stop) the brain drain: Minima Moralia.

The installation proposed by two young architects Tomaso Boano and Jonas Prišmontas at the London Festival of Architecture was in fact aimed at raising consciousness about how London takes for granted its creative young people or made them suffer. The owners of this mini-studio named after Theodor W. Adorno’s namesake book describe their project as follows: “We have started building this studio as a conceptual critical piece of architecture in our backyard. The reason it is critical is that it was conceived after our desperate and unsuccessful search of affordable studio workspace.

This is a real problem for young artists and other creative in London. It just so happened that the theme of LFA this year was about community and artist integration. Our project proposes to place these pop-up studios

around London in the unused back gardens in residential neighborhoods, giving local artists the opportunity to practice their craft.”

It was indeed a coincidence that while the project named after the German philosopher was on view, the streets of London were literally echoing with the aftershocks of Brexit. The echoing sound came from a truck carrying a ginormous triangle painted in yellow, pink and blue with an inscription saying “Dear Start-ups, Keep calm and move to Berlin”. The budget needed for the truck to tour London’s Westminster and Shoreditch areas for 12 hours came from the German political party FDP. The two young architects draw my attention to an article saying “UK’s Creative Industries generate nearly £9.6 million per hour” (at www.gov.uk) an add: “The creative industry plays a substantial role in UK’s economy, and if people are not given opportunity to explore and develop their talents, that has a direct impact on the whole country. But it is not our intention to talk about the big picture. We are simply trying to draw attention

to the fact that there is a significant lack of local workshops, studio or any other kind of affordable spaces for making stuff and it can be quite frustrating. Life in London, as everywhere else, is easy when you have money. Artists tend to usually not have money, unless they are famous – but we are not addressing celebrities with our project. We are talking about the people who are passionate and creative, but cannot make a living with their art and have to have a full time job to be able to afford rent. Having a full-time job means the best you can give to your art is the weekends, maybe evenings, lunch breaks and train/bus journeys. And it is fine if the work you do only requires a sketchbook or laptop. But the problem becomes more clear when you want to design a piece of furniture, or make a large painting, design a dress, make a sculpture etc. Residential properties are not power-tool friendly. I’m sure I don’t need to list issues related to using oil paint, angle grinder or soldering tools in your living space.” OT

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CAPSULE

PHOTOS: DIDER GOURDON

The extraordinary outcome of an extraordinary career

First of all, the watch you now see on this page is worth 685 thousand dollars, there are only 30 of these watches in the world and they are hand-painted by graffiti artist Cyril Kongo in a year. It is possible to talk about a certain awareness towards graffiti (merci Banksy!) in the world. Merely looking at this watch makes me want to say many things about the man who worked on it and graffiti…

Cyril Phan (a.k.a Kongo) is the offspring of a French mother and a Vietnamese father. The alias Kongo comes from the fact that he had moved to the democratic Republic of Congo with his mother when he was 14 and lived there for four years. To us he is a self-taught artist but he describes himself as an “impressionist”. He had been his own teacher but when it comes to self expression, he really doesn’t believe in formal education.

“We are in a period in which the whole world recognizes graffiti. In this sense, Jean-Michel Basquiat is a first. I have never had a formal art education. I went to the school of heart and learned from the streets. I think I am lucky because I believe we are more similar to impressionist artists like Monet. If I asked you to name one impressionist artist could you instantly name one other than Monet? Someone with academic education?

People finally recognize we are artists too. This is good for us. I have been making my art on the streets for 30 years and I have enjoyed things like having my work exhibited in museums, cooperating with such brands and opening exhibitions. And now I am talking to you about my art. This is great for me.” Exactly one week before we had this phone conversation with Kongo Istanbul had been shaken off to its foundation and my generation had to face the malady called a coup d’etat (although I was out of town) so we were trying to pull ourselves together. The horrific truck terror in Nice came on top of it…

When I asked what he thought of all these he said “Madness! People walk like zombies along the streets.

You know what the problem is? Politics, religions, everything are all fouled up and became a mess. While we have many opportunities and means to communicate, ultimately only art brings us together. Look, we are talking now. We hear Turkey’s name with consecutive terrorist attacks. We need more communication, more cultural exchange and understand each other more. Perhaps we should travel more, I don’t know…

These are tough times for all of us… We need more love!”

Luck has been a significant element in Kongo’s career as much as love. While he was painting a wall in Hong Kong a man who happened to pass by asked him if he would care to paint a cap for his son and Kongo agreed. This coincidence turned out to be a happy one as the man was Hérmes’ Hong Kong and Macau director who at the end had Kongo design scarves for the brand. You may find this coincidence too melodramatic and indeed I would agree. However what is important for Kongo is to be able to express himself and talk to as many people he can. And designing a watch for Richard Mille is a totally different story than designing a scarf for Hérmes. Because what is in stake here is an accessory that is sold for more than half a million dollars, probably a collector item, an object of desire, and you are the person who is supposed to add on to its value. For those who don’t know anything about Richard Mille watches let us give some facts. Richard Mille is a visionary and innovative watch producer and the name of its founder suggests multi-digit dollar cumulation in any location around the world as far as micro-mechanic technologies and watch industry are concerned. And this is important because it raises the question why a brand like this chose to set out to such an exhausting journey (from the beginning to the completion of the watches the project took two years) with an artist like Kongo. Moreover one presumes a street artist and a person who even found himself at the wrong side of

the law in the 80s would be more of a rebel. However Kongo can work two years on a watch only a select few can wear and what’s more, he wears one too. “I am interested in art itself rather than money” he says. And when I asked if what he does can be considered art he adds: “Yes, o course. For me art is personal. Every watch I paint is unique and that makes them works of art. Meanwhile, don’t forget this is a first in the world.

This is the first time an artist paints the movement of a watch. Especially a tourbillon*.”

The ground that street art has covered over the years is exciting, especially when looking at a story like this: A self-taught graffiti artist who sees art as self-expression conceives cooperation with such brands as the recognition of his art. And he should… Kongo is definitely a naïve artist who wants to be known for his work and he cannot understand why being a part of such a big thing is regarded strange rather than being appreciated. As he clearly states “…of course I am coming from the ghetto, from street art but I am 47 years old now and if I were still painting train cars or walls in my neighborhood, this would be a sad thing. If I want to win more hearts with my art and reach to more people I need to quit acting like an angry boy and search for perfection.” OT

*Tourbillion: A Tourbillion is (roughly) the mechanism that regulates the escapement against gravity. It was created in early 1800s by Abraham Louis Breguet and now being produced by the most prestigious watch producers in the world. The value of a timepiece with a genuine tourbillion mechanism is two or three times that of an ordinary watch. More importantly, while the weight of every single piece within the watch is carefully calculated beforehand to eliminate technical problems on the whole, the fact that Kongo claims to paint a tourbillion mechanism is an important detail, since it implies meticulous calculations to cancel out the pressure created by the weight of the paint and therefore the design.

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CAPSULE

The art of making automobiles

1955 CHRYSLER GHIA GILDA, Collection of KATHLEEN REDMON VE SCOTT GRUNDFOR, PHOTO: MICHEAL FURMAN

PHOTO: DAVID BARBOUR

It is easy for the aficionado to consider the source or the objects of their desire as art. Automobiles are such things. This is a topic one can discuss or contemplate for hours, days or even months. Some might think that this is often true for men. This is an accepted opinion and although most of the time it is true there is always a margin of error.

In order for an automobile to become a work of art, I believe it should be produced with the meticulous attention an artwork deserves. Indeed most of the automobiles in museum collections or those that are considered artworks don’t have any electronic components and are completely handmade. And when talking about classic automobiles, Italy is the first country that comes to mind. The best examples of such automobiles and motorcycles most of which were produced during the post World War II economic revival in Italy (il miracolo economico) can be seen at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, USA until October 9.

“Wartime work in aeronautics helped Italian engineers and designers develop familiarity with aerodynamics, lightweight construction, exotic metals, and technologies such as multi camshaft high-revving engines and power-enhancing superchargers,” says Ken Gross, the curator of the exhibition.

Still the most important classic automobile race in the world, the Mille Miglia was the stage for these powerful automobiles with unique designs to make an appearance between Brescia and Rome. And people’s interest in these beauties inevitably lead Italian companies to develop their urban-friendly versions. Some of them are among the still surviving brands today such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Maserati. Stunning with their low-slung aerodynamic designs these automobiles were so high in demand that coach builders like Allemano, Boano, Ghia, Pinin Fa-

PHOTO: DAVID BARBOUR

rina, Touring and Vignale were marketed globally by American, British and Spanish companies.

Curated by Gross, Bellissima! The Italian Automotive Renaissance, 1945–1975 exhibition presents some of the best specimens of the period called Italian Automotive Renaissance not only to automobile lovers but also to those who might be interested to look at an era through automobile designs.

But how about state of the art electric automobiles?

Is it possible to consider them works of art just like the “analogue” classics featured in museums and private collections around the world? In fact an artist’s touch is more than enough to make this a reality. As automobile producers Germans are as good as the Italians (perhaps better in terms of engineering and safety) however when it comes to design and craftsmanship Italians are always one step ahead. The seeds of BMW Art Car were sown when French racing driver and auctioneer Hervé Poulain asked Alexander Calder to paint his BMW 3.0 CSL which he was going to drive at the 1975 edition of Le Mans. The company has produced 17 ‘artwork’ automobiles to date some of which designed by names like Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney and the last one made by Jeff Koons in 2010. As it was announced at this year’s Art Basel two BMW M6 GT3 models designed by Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei and John Baldessari will be produced in the next two years. Developed for motorsports, this new BMW model will be a technological masterpiece but thanks to the touch of the artists it will be treated as a work of art and will be taken to a museum. Speaking of electric automobiles, there is another very special BMW but it will have been destroyed as you read this. Although retired from the art world after his retrospective at New York Guggenheim in 2011 (but then couldn’t help producing a gold-

en toilet) Maurizio Cattelan created the Spaghetti Car for Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival where he participates with his Toilet Paper brand cofounded by Pierpaolo Ferrari (they also have a semi-annual publication with the same name). Cattelan definitely wants this car to be destroyed after September 25, when the festival ends. Spaghetti Car is a piece from Toilet Paper’s Hors Cadre (Out of Context) exhibition at the festival.

It would be unfair to conclude an article on automobiles and art without mentioning the works of Gerry Judah. Judah has been creating giant sculptures for the past 19 years for Goodwood Festival of Speed, a festival that attracts more than 200 thousand visitors every year, and he always puts automobiles on top of these sculptures. Unveiled in last June his latest work was especially stunning in terms of its colossal dimensions and details that attest to an incredible technical prowess. Sitting on a 70 cm wide base the 100 meters wide and 40 meters high structure was commissioned

by BMW to commemorate the company’s centenary in motorsports. The three automobiles on the sculpture, BMW 328 Mille Miglia Roadster, Brabham-BMW BT52 F1 and 1999 Le Mans winner BMW V12 LMR were working automobiles specially brought from the company museum. Unfortunately after the five-day festival, this colossal sculpture was recycled into 77 tons of steel. But Judah will be there next year too with new sculptures. Judah creates these colossal installations upon order by a different brand every year. However there is one permanent sculpture he made for Porsche with three legendary 911 models placed 25 meters high and it can be seen in front of the Porsche museum in Stuttgart. OT

Kaybolmayan değerler için Bizim için varlık, kuşaktan kuşağa aktarılan bir emanettir.

Akbank Private Banking’in uzmanlık ve deneyimiyle, yatırımlarınız ve varlıklarınız nesiller boyunca korunur, değer kazanır.

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

Türkiye’nin en iyi özel bankacılık hizmeti* *EUROMONEY 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016

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CAPSULE

Fashion and art connection Together with Art Partner, Phillips presents the selling exhibition Mert & Marcus: Works 2001 – 2014 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collaboration of photographer duo Mert Alaş and Marcus Piggot. The exhibition will feature 18 photographs selected by the duo. The exhibition will go on display at Phillips’ London headquarters in Mayfair from October 24 to November 3, before travelling to Philips’ Gallery in Saint Germain, Paris, from 9 to 16 November alongside the international art fair Paris Photo. In addition four unique-sized one-off works will be offered in the Photographs auction at Phillips London on November 3.

MERT & MARCUS, PARALLEL LINES, DETAIL

#queofямБcial

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CAPSULE

Open call

JASMINE WAHI & REBECCA JAMPOL, PHOTO: VENTIKO.

PLAY, the video and new media platform of PULSE Miami Beach Contemporary Art Fair issued an open call for the first time, for the fair’s 2016 edition to be organized in December, enabling unrepresented artists to submit their work directly to PLAY curators.

It is not easy for young artists to showcase their work in well-known contemporary art fairs and who knows what art collectors and art audience have been missing in the meantime but at least there are people trying to change that. This year’s PLAY will be curated

by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Jampol who are known with their dedication to make space for young artists.

The duo founded the Gateway Project Spaces in 2012, an art hub that provides studio and exhibition spaces and a multidisciplinary residency program. Stating that they wanted to “poke and prode” the audience in their press statement Wahi and Jampol say, “We aren’t concerned with whether an artist is the ‘biggest name’ in a gallery’s roster, or if he/she/they has a big social media following. Our big motivator is conceptually strong, aesthetically solid, and technically sound video and new media work”.

Müjde Bilgütay: Shouldn’t this be the case in an ideal world, and can we read this in terms of “democratization of art spaces”? Do you think art needs democratization?

Wahi & Jampol: In an ideal world, yes, everything would be readily accessible to any audience, and artists would have equal opportunities to share their work.

Our perspective on the idea of ‘democratization’ is yes, art does need to be democratized- not just for the sake of artists but also for the sake of audiences. It’s our mission to bring strong work out that the public can engage with and enjoy.

MB: Will you employ other criteria than being conceptually strong, aesthetically solid, and technically sound when selecting submitted artworks? Do you have preconceived themes for selected artworks in your mind or feel inclined to certain issues/topics? What will “poke and prod” the audience?

W & J: Once we review all of the submissions we’ll start to identify themes that will shape a more cohesive program. We don’t have any preconceived ideas yet, which is unusual, because typically we curate shows in

the opposite order: in general we put out a specific thematic call and people submit based on that. We’re excited to try out this new way of selecting work!

MB: What was PULSE’s reaction to the open call, what are the pros and cons of letting unrepresented artists in the show?

The PULSE team is as excited as we are for this new venture! The pros are too many to list. The most obvious one is that we get to see a lot of work that we wouldn’t get to see otherwise. This is great for artists who aren’t necessarily represented, or not with galleries that participate in the larger fair. It’s also fantastic for galleries who are looking for new artists to work with, as well other prospective collectors and industry members who are constantly looking at new talent. We also think that it’s great for PULSE because it brings in a brand new audience and expands the reach of the fair.

The only ‘con’ we see is that we’re drowning in submissions - and that’s not a con at all!

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“All creative people have their own predicaments”

ADIFF SMALL TENT JACKET, 2015, FABRIC: ANGELA LUNA

The sentence at the title is what Pırıl Gündüz, an artist and curator who lives in New York told me when I asked her if she had to cope with many difficulties while she and a friend were developing The Hollows town-house and its namesake initiative. And she added: “But if you sincerely want to and maybe get a bit lucky…”

Perhaps the more difficult to start, the more appealing a business is. Although the fact that she had looked for a suitable space for a long time and finally found one seems as pure chance, it is also possible to say “seek and ye shall find”. After all The Hollows can be described as a place that shows success isn’t too hard if you work hard, search, converse and exchange what you’ve got with what you don’t have. First we must clarify the purpose of the place.

The Hollows is in fact a place dedicated to art. Located at Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn the town house is a place where artists can come and stay for a fixed price, with spaces to work and staff to help them promote their work to a specific audience. The Hollows was opened in 2014 and according to Gündüz the existence of such a space in a city like New York is very critical. “Our concept is Live-Work-Exhibit as it is often described by people in New York. Here people often live and work in the same place. In addition we organize exhibitions. We use common spaces as studios and exhibition areas. We transform rooms into galleries for opening receptions and performances.” This seems like something everybody would love to do but creat-

ing the funds for the rent and the housekeeping staff is extremely difficult. Constantly searching for funds may be the answer but this is USA and New York is the country’s most “difficult” city. This is why The Hollows asks for a payment from artists and uses the money to run the place. “Artists staying with us pay much less than any place they can find on the internet. But they get a lot more. We provide the equipment they need to promote their work. We ask for a very small payment but one would wish they didn’t have to pay anything.”

Behind the curtains as far as Pırıl is concerned the project entails a vigorous crusade to make and keep this place a reality in a city like New York where the art scene is the liveliest. A Turkish citizen not only dares to open such a place in New York where she came only in 2011 and at the time knew nothing about, but also she plans to do the same in Turkey. Perhaps achieving her aims partly depends on timing. According to Pırıl Manhattan is still “an important center for sales and contacting collectors”. However New York has long been in the process of transforming less favored or not so popular areas such as Bushwick where The Hollows is located. Who gets what from this urban transformation is open to questioning however there is no doubt that art galleries play a pivotal role in this. In addition, in a time when people tend to leave mainstream in favor of the lesser known and the act of “discovering” is more popular than ever, The Hollows’ function is surely critical. When I asked what was her greatest chal-

lenge she said “At the moment, the work load. Because we are new and since we run on a limited budget we can’t afford a larger team. And some of them can only come once in a week. For the near future, I want to be able to form a good team and work things faster.” This is why The Hollows also asks for a small exhibition fee from artists to include their works into preconceived exhibitions with themes announced at various online platforms. Artists submit their works for exhibitions and Pırıl chooses among them. If she manages to sort things out and form her dream team she will be able to focus more on writing and her curatorial work which she places more attention since 2013. She has a room in The Hollows called “The Curator’s Room” and she curates all the exhibitions there. In addition, she organizes at least one exhibition every year as part of The Hollows’ annual program. One such exhibition will be on view between September 3 and October 30. Entitled Erote, the exhibition will let us contemplate on human body and clothing. In a time when art and fashion are closer than ever and Metropolitan Museum had to prolong its Manus X Machina exhibition until September 5, I think what Erote has to say will be significant. For detailed information and programs, check out: www. hollows.info. OT

www.mehmetefendi.com

From İhap Hulusi to the present‌ We are proud to always support the arts.

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A temple dedicated to kinetic art

FABIAN OEFNER, DISINTEGRATING SERIES, FERRARI 330 P4 (1967)

Running perhaps one of the most creative watch brands in the world Maximilian Büsser exhibits his favorite toys at M.A.D Gallery, a place that evokes the inner-child within everyone. At the moment there are three M.A.D Galleries in the world supporting and promoting artists that produce the most interesting works of mechanical art. Although his creativity have brought him incredible fortune and fame, the fact that he doesn’t want to expand his business in any way and invests in art may sound crazy to you but listen to what this “mad” man has to say...

Oktay Tutuş: Some call you a dreamer some say you were a genius. How would you answer this question: essentially who you are?

Maximilian Büsser: Good grief I am probably the worst person to define myself… I was a kid who used to not fit in (and who suffered a lot from this), and discovered many years later that it is not only ok not to fit in, but who made a life out of it. I was also lucky to have parents with great human values. Human values that I try to abide by in my life and company, hence for example the word “Friends” in MB&F (Maximilian Büsser & Friends) and the fact that we try to help all the artists we curate at our M.A.D. Galleries.

And I was also fortunate to find what I loved in life,

and to battle to get it. Not power, not fame, not money – only creative freedom, mechanical sculptures and being surrounded with great people.

OT: When it comes to M.A.D Gallery, I think it’s a playground or playroom for you, full of gizmos, mechanical wonders and people you like to play with. Is this true? And could you describe how it feels like to have such playrooms across the globe?

(You have opened Taipei, and Dubai franchises of MAD Gallery as well.)

MB: I have always believed that mechanical creations could be art. I wanted to be a car designer since the age of four, and saw those 50’s to 70’s cars as works of art (Something the world is waking up to only now – hence the spiralling prices at auctions). And works of art they were: created by strong minded characters who did not care about what clients would think or react, engineered with incredible artisanship whilst spending insane amounts of money to make their creations beautiful (as much in shape as in detail). Beauty or details which would often not improve the function.

With each M.A.D. Gallery I share that love of mechanical sculptures and kinetic art with each visitor.

And the smile on each of them when they enter for the first time is priceless. Now with three Galleries, we are

sharing more love and more excitement than ever before.

OT: What do you think about future? By future I mean the future itself not in terms of humanity or something like that… How does it seem to you?

And please describe, what you want to do in near future and which direction do you think your brands (MB&F and MAD Gallery) will go.

MB: As David Bowie once said “I don’t know where I am going from here, but I promise it will not be boring”. I love the idea that I don’t know what I will be creating apart for the pieces which are already in the pipeline (which will take us to 2022 approximately).

In the meantime, you should normally see an amazing new creative experiment in 2018… or maybe later.

Time will tell.

The upcoming exhibitions at M.A.D Gallery will be featuring Bandit9’s futuristic motorcycle EVE MK II (only 9 handmade samples) on September 14 and Swiss artist Fabian Oefner’s “Disintegrating II” on October 12. Previously exhibited in Dubai, Oefner’s works look at everyday objects that are to small to be seen by the human eye.

teamLab, Siyah Dalgalar / Black Waves, 2016

borusancontemporary.com

Sadece hafta sonları 10.00–20.00 arası ziyarete açıktır.

Open only on weekends between 10 am-8 pm

teamLab: Sanat ile Fiziksel Mekânın Arasında teamLab: Between Art and Physical Space

KÜRATÖR/CURATOR CHARLES MEREWETHER

05 . 0 3 . 2 0 1 6 –1 6 .1 0 . 2 0 1 6

Wang Sishun, Hakikat / Truth, 23.09.2014

05.03.2016 16.10.2016

Müze Cafe’nin Boğaz’a karşı nefis manzarasında yepyeni lezzetlerimizi tatmayı unutmayın.

Müze Cafe awaits you with its wonderful view of the Bosphorus and its delicacies.

BORUSAN ÇAĞDAŞ SANAT KOLEKSİYONU'NDAN BİR SEÇKİ A SELECTION FROM THE BORUSAN CONTEMPORARY ART COLLECTION

Rumelihisarı Mahallesi Baltalimanı Hisar Caddesi No: 5, Perili Köşk Sarıyer İstanbul Biletler

Güverte Yolculuğu Deck Voyage 05 . 0 3 . 2 0 1 6 –1 6 .1 0 . 2 0 1 6

DEĞERLİ KATKILARI İÇİN TEŞEKKÜR EDERİZ W I T H S P EC I A L T H A N KS TO

KÜRATÖR/CURATOR NECMİ SÖNMEZ

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When a work of art is finished The exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible which could be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until September 4 was looking at a subject that is critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished.

ALICE NEEL, JAMES HUNTER BLACK DRAFTEE, 1965, OIL ON CANVAS

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Transforming London in one night

CECILIA BENGOLEA, VIDEO INSTALLATION, ART NIGHT 2016. PHOTO: DAMIAN JAQUES

On the evening of July 2nd last summer, London witnessed an event just like the “Nuit Blanche” events that have been organized in Paris since 2004. The artworks and performances presented at various locations across the city from 5 pm in the evening until 2 am the next morning aimed at taking Londoners and visitors to a different place. We asked the organizers Unlimited Productions what exactly this different place was.

The fact that these young women who came from different European countries to engage in art and story urban storytelling have already secured Phillips and Whitechapel gallery for the next event in 2017 testifies to the potential importance of such events for artowls…

Oktay Tutuş: Can you tell us a little more about “urban storytelling”; what are the main purposes and how do you describe it?

Unlimited Productions: The idea of “urban storytelling” is to create a narrative around the city’s architecture and history through art. With each of our projects, we aim to create cultural experiences that form a story which is embedded in the physical and temporal spaces that make cities what they are.

For example, one of our first project Urban Tales – The Bank was a dialogue between contemporary art and urbanism, exploring an empty 1920’s bank lost in time in the City of London. The event was conceived as a script that progressively unfolded throughout the evening, including performances and artworks by both established and emerging artists. The second chapter of this series, Urban Tales – The Lighthouse, was a contemporary opera involving themes of madness, love, electricity and city lights… It was presented in the only lighthouse of London, a space where scientist Michael Faraday – who contributed to the practical use of electricity - had conducted experiments.

OT: What were you expecting when planning Art Night and are you satisfied with the feedback?

UP: We wanted to bring to London the concept of Nuit Blanche, a free all-night arts festival taking over

little known buildings or public spaces. This started in Paris 12 years ago and was then staged in 30 different cities around the world, but never in London. So we figured it had to happen here – London is the perfect city for events like Art Night – with a vibrant creative scene and room for urban exploration.

We are extremely happy to have managed to make it happen. It was first and foremost a fundraising challenge, then a logistical challenge, as most venues were non traditional art spaces and were of course difficult to use. We are also very proud to have managed to attract around 35,000 people, which is great for a first edition, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback so far. Next year, we will partner with the Whitechapel Gallery to curate the programme, and will explore the East End of London. We hope to be able to open larger spaces and accommodate more people, and to run later in the night!

OT: How hard it is to organize an event like this in London? How did you manage it and can you tell me any good or bad details about the process?

UP: It is very hard overall, and took us over 2 years of preparation: defining the concept, finding and convincing the right partners, fundraising for a free event, recruiting the team, setting up the structure from scratch and basically doing everything for the first time! It was a challenge but everything should be easier for us next year, as we have learned so much from this first edition. What’s really exciting about the process is to be able to bring together a lot of different partners and organisations: we worked with the amazing Art on the Underground (which is part of Transport for London, London’s transport agency), whose team has been putting together art projects in the Tube for 15 years.

With them and Korean artist Koo Jeong A we transformed a disused tube station. We also collaborated with The National Gallery as part of our Learning Programme, and with Somerset House for one Art Night project, for Utopia 2016…

The main challenges were to secure the right venues,

and to present 10 projects running at the same time, in mostly nontraditional art spaces. We didn’t manage to keep projects open later than 2 am, but hope to be able to run all-night next year.

OT: London is going through a transformation like other large metropolises in the world. And you are right at the heart of this transformation, taking property developers who are responsible for this transformation as project sponsors. Convincing the main actors of this transformation to support projects that create awareness about their projects seems contradictory… What is the rationale behind it and how do you manage that?

UP: It is true that London has been attracting large investments from property developers, and it’s clearly changing the landscape and fabric of the city.

Working with property developers in such a fast changing environment is a way for us to keep in touch with London’s transformation, and to allow the general public to actively engage with private spaces through arts. For instance, we worked with a property developer for one of Art Night’s commissions, inviting Danish artist Nina Beier to showcase her work in a luxury apartment, which was one of the most popular projects of the festival. Our second Urban Tales staged a contemporary Opera in London’s only lighthouse and was supported by both the Arts Council of England and a property developer.

We think it is important to work with private companies that are directly shaping London’s architectural landscape to engage in a constructive dialogue about the value of artistic and cultural activities in place-making. As many parts of the city are being created or deeply transformed, it is crucial for us to make sure that culture lies at the very heart of these schemes, otherwise we run the risk of creating pockets of the city that are just soulless.

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Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture Words Louisa Robertson

FRANCIS BACON, STUDIES OF HUMAN BODY, 1970 OIL ON CANVAS, PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY ORDOVAS (C) THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2016

FRANCIS BACON, PORTRAIT OF MICHEL LEIRIS, 1976. OIL ON CANVAS. DONATION LOUISE ET MICHEL LAIRIS, 1984. CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS - MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE/ CENTRE DE CRÉATION INDUSTRIELLE (C) THE ESTATE OF FRANCIS BACON

Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture opened in July at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, it is a retrospective exhibition concentrating on a new angle of Francis Bacon’s work focusing on his relationship with France and Monaco. Bacon spent a lot of time throughout his life in France, notably when he lived in Monaco between 1946 and the early fifties. Not only is Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture the first major event organised under the newly founded Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, inaugurated in Monaco in 2014, it is also curated by Martin Harrison, who is the author of the highly anticipated and newly released Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné.

Harrison conveyed Bacon’s dark mood as viewers enter into a sombre windowless exhibition space, the dramatic lighting makes you feel part of the paintings straight away. The floors are carpeted, with thick purple velour curtains draped around the walls, and doorways inspired by the cages Bacon depicts in his paintings. What is so interesting about Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture is the artworks that have been assembled and how these have been juxtaposed

FRANCIS BACON IN MONACO IN 1981 COPYRIGHT EDDY BATACHE

with other artist’s masterpieces that influenced Bacon.

Notably Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Chaïm Soutine, Fernand Léger and Diego Velázquez.

At the beginning of his career, Bacon started painting like his favourite artists Watercolour, 1929, an example of a work based of Fernand Léger. It is undeniable that Bacon was inspired by Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X, c.1650. Although he avoided ever seeing the original, it is from this painting that he gained the inspiration for his Screaming Popes, a series he worked on for 20 years and once claimed he wished he had never painted. Consequently these have become some of his most recognisable artworks. Head VI, 1949 is the first of this series and it displayed in this exhibition opposite one of Bacon’s version of Velazquez’s famous painting.

Bacon was one of the most engaging figurative painters of the 20th century, strongly inspired by Surrealism and Old Master’s, he was obsessed with grotesque imagery and dedicated a whole series of paintings to the contortions of the human body and limbs. Some of these are presented in this exhibition in a dark room

lit just enough to feel the shapes of the bodies, a Rodin sculpture of a naked woman is placed amongst them giving the viewer a strong comparison of the study of the human body from two very different artists.

Bacon is best known for his original portraitures of distorted faces and figures in which you feel movement. He painted these mainly from photographs and memory of the important people in his life, his friends, and his lovers. His work is very personal and focuses on mortality. Bacon placed heavy emphasis on the role of chance and accident in his work. The evidence of the studio suggests that Bacon was a more deliberate artist than he cared to admit.

Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture is on from 2 July to 4 September 2016 after which it will travel to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from 30 September 2016 to 8 January 2018, this time focusing on the artist’s relationship with Spain. Coincidentally it in Madrid that the artist died in 1992.

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Videologies Ulus Baker, Ege Berensel Commemorating Ulus Baker who passed away in 2007 with respect, we would like to publish the following manifesto he co-wrote with Ege Berensel:

1. Music shall not be used to accompany, support, or empower. No music shall be used. Sounds shall turn into music. No sound should be of assistance to an image; nor an image to a sound. In video, sound is produced with images. In sound film, people do not play with images. We have blocks of certain lengths, and one cannot cut them at his own will to create certain effects… The montage of a sound film cannot be done in the same way as the montage of a film that will be dubbed: Each image has a sound and one must respect this sound. Even when the frame is empty, and the person gets out of the space, it is not possible to cut, because the footsteps are still heard from the “outer-space”. In dubbed movies, it is enough to wait for the foot to get out of the space, in order to cut. Straub’s works are based on the idea of disengagement between sound and image, the “said” and the “shown”… The disengagement of sound and look. It can be said that theatre can achieve this as well; but no; sound says something, yet image shows another; yes to this; but for Straub, sound says something, rises while saying; yes, rises up; the image shows something else and sound goes below the image, yes goes down again to go below; goes below the image; becomes an underground sound…

Here is an underground sound-image from Straub; in the desert, it is obvious that the underground is a graveyard, a million-yearold graveyard… Hence, the cinema of Straub, is the involvement of an ancient nature law, of the international loop of things on to the cinema rather than a disengagement of sound and look from each other: Water-fire-airsoil… Words rising up in the air, then into the underground, below the image… There is no difference between a gun and the explosion coming out of a speaker. We can only speak of a difference if the bullet coming out of the gun hits us. If the gun is an image the bullet stays in the projected world. Sound shall never be produced apart from the images. (Music shall not be used unless created in the movie, or is a part of the images.) Video is the sole medium carrying sound and image ever since from the beginning unlike cinema. Hence sound is stuck to the image. Each item has a sound, each sound an item… Therefore the formula of the video is: sound=image. The length of the sound of an item determines the length of the visual of that image. The construction of sounds (and this is the construction of a kind of music or rhytm) is the construction of images. (Bresson, Straub, Huillet, Deleuze, Guiton, Dogma 95, Paik, esfirshubiana).

2. Video image has nothing in common with film or photography except being a speechless gestalt or proposing the exposure of shapes.

In video, the viewer is on the screen. The image of video is at a lower level informatically. The image of video is not a stable shot. It is in no way photography but constantly displays the images of items described with an external line scanned with a finger. As a result, the appearing plastic line, is not formed by exposure to light but is formed by going into the light, and the appeared image owns the episteme of a sculpture and an icon rather than a picture. Video is a molecular regime, regime of diffusion, accumulation, deterioration, and intensity… The movement is in each direction… Experimental or avant garde cinema (none of these two words is good enough) and video art (this is not a good term either) share a common will: to rid of all possible ways, of three things – the puissance of photographic analogy, the realism of representation, and the regime of faith towards narration. It has been countlessly told: this is what gets these closer to plastic arts and poetry rather than cinema in which they are involved.

“Cinema can tell everything, but can never show everything (…) but image will never earn a documentarian value under the terms of application of cinematographic language to abstraction opportunities” (Andre Bazin). Godard could have given such an answer, or opposition “hence video shows much more than what is says; as a way abstraction of cinema the characteristics of documentary is what keeps it up: VIDEO IS THE ABSTRACTION OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC IMAGE” (McLuhan, Deleuze, Bellour, Bazin, Godard, esfirshubiana) 3. Video art imitates nature. This imitation is not towards the look or material of nature, but towards the structure of its internal time. In video, a movement is not attached to another, images are attached to each other through irrational cuts, this does not present us with an image linearly connected from there to here, but presents us with an image of time. The time that cannot be extended, meaning time that does is not derived from movement. Video is time itself. It is time-image. In time-image, time does not present itself as a logical connection and progress. It presents itself as gaps, differences, cuts, pauses, and repetitions. It is the deterritorialization of image.

Meaning, Videographic image is an image in its singularity. We see an image the way it is. It is not an image placed in a point of view, or an arranged image. The link between images itself becomes an imge through irrational cuts. Time-image is the Idea of video. Video is an event making time-image possible, capable of producing the formation of images. (Paik, Deleuze, Lazzarato, esfirshubiana) 4. Refrain from all of these things that can be told, that can only be said through words… In this language made out of images, the notion of image should totally get lost, the images should fire the idea of image… Because in the continuous duplication obtained by the technical device of cinema all goals turn into lies- even of the reality, the word told to implicate the character of the person speaking to the viewer –the actor- or with the purpose of providing the meaning of the whole, will be unnatural compared to the direct devotion of re-production to reality. This attitude legitimizes it assuming the world is meaningful before the first intentional fraud, the first real distortion.

No one can speak like that, no one can walk like that- yet the movie asserts from the beginning that everyone speaks and walks like that, and the person is stuck in a trap s/he can never save him/herself from: Whatever the concrete meaning is, what give birth to conformism is in general the meaning itself… (Bresson, Woolf, Adorno, esfirshubiana)

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Conversations on art with an upside down tortiose -I-

Like all other historical disciplines, art history is to assume an official identity. As in a great Russian based on a hegemonic mechanism of exclusion and novel, however, this story does not lead to a nihilinclusion.(1) It is governed by the decisions of a ist confrontation/rupture (representing an interdominant external power; and as art requires, culgenerational transition) in Turkey. (7) What we tural premises are the pillars of this construction. call the dual character clearly manifests itself here: Although the paradigm of the exclusion/inclusion while he pursues emancipation, he assumes more mechanism changes with the normative cultural responsibilities (also more attachments and affilielements, the mechanism itself remains the same. ations). Feeling somewhat “guilty” of the nomadic One person is admitted to the canon, whereas two past, Ottoman intellectuals look for continuity and others fall out of favour; an artwork or an artistic roots, rather than a rupture. choice is hailed, whereas others sink into oblivion.

Sabri Ülgener summarizes the ideals of intelThe principles surrounding a stylistic understandlectuals as follows: “Pioneering cultural transforing and thus forming theoretical grounds function mation, disseminating and popularizing the new, in a way that simultaneously conceals an already exsustaining a new taste and style, influencing the Barış Acar isting exclusion/inclusion mechanism.(2) This way, political and social tendencies of the public.... Dedecisions seem to derive from “naturally grown” signing national and international models, influprinciples, as if they are not made by the soverencing social developments, being politically aceign. These theoretical principles include the use tive.” (8) The intellectual is a social engineer, whose of lines, colour, volume, composition, gestures of contact with the public is external and hierarchical. artists, selection of themes, a growing repertoire of (S)he sympathizes with the public, but (s)he sees religious or secular analogies, and their focus on a it as a sociological object - and thus, tries to corspecific geography and period. Based on the princirect and/or fix it. This intellectual, on the other ples working with the dualities of idea-appearance, hand, is not a bourgeois associated with any mass consubstantiality-separation, archetype-sample, movements. (S)he has not constructed his/her insimilar-dissimilar, the theory manages to overcome dividuality, either. As İlber Ortaylı puts it, “This the issue of changing cultural paradigms; but it susintellectual group was in reality composed of civtains the very mechanism of exclusion/inclusion. il servants living on a state salary.”(9) Sharing the To produce a rational paradigm of counter-powsame destiny with the state, the intellectuals of the er, one needs to re-visit Osman Hamdi’s The Tortoise Trainer - a work oft-quoted era were not interested with the public at all, even when their generation was in a in Turkey’s art historical writing, but almost never tackled from a historiographitransition period. As in the case of Cevdet Paşa, this type of intellectuals engaged cal point of view. Analysing the completely different positions of the tortoises in in self-censoring when they had any conflict with the state, believing in “the wisOsman Hamdi’s painting and the rabbit within J. Beuys’ performance titled Wie dom of the state”.(10) Meşrutiyet (Constitutional Era), in this context, simply man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt ( 1965), I believe we can arrive at some meant that another faction within the administrator group came to power.(11) conclusions with regard to the pathology within the writing of contemporary art Osman Hamdi is both an archaeologist and a museum director; he is both a in Turkey. Although commentaries on Osman Hamdi’s painting are numerous, painter and the director of the Academy of Fine Arts. In other words, his internone seems to have ventured into the tortoises’ perspective - and I find this as est in archaeology brought him into a museum; he painted and became a school a manifestation of that pathology. Comparing it to Beuys’ performance, an art director. This story that illustrates the Ottoman intellectuals of the Tanzimat era historical moment in which the rabbit gained singularity (rather than objectivireminds one of the tragedy of a child who would like to play a game, but is chosen sation), I am hoping to provide a starker contrast.(3) by peers to play the part of the guard. If it had been an authentic effort to invent The Melancholy of Osman Hamdi the very object and subject of a free game, it could have been seen as an emanEach theoretical question regarding art historiography inescapably brings us cipatory structure; the Ottoman case, however, was surrounded by other qualito the Enlightenment and Winckelmann. When the question is related to the art ties. As these qualities governing the game and its rules were pre-figured by the historiography in Turkey, one needs to deal with Tanzimat (Reorganization) as a concept of modernisation within a Westernisation myth, one soon realizes that period and Osman Hamdi as a figure. The pillars of the discipline emerged from assuming neither role in the game will lead to emancipation. The quality of the the discussions of the period and were influenced by the subject positions of the cultural inventory, the architecture of the museum, pictorial perspectives, classes relevant figures. in the academy... They were all based on a fully imported archetype.

Institutions and regulations to have founded what stands today as the memory of art history in Turkey came into being in the Tanzimat era. These official determinants have proved to be valid for art historians’ surface surveys for almost a --Notes: century. Numerous discussions deal with various aspects of Ottoman intellectu1. Here I use the term hegemony in its Gramscian sense, in which a cultural organisation with a loaded ideological background als (most of whom studied abroad and were influenced by the movements there) rule exploited masses by “permanently organized consent”. For a detailed discussion, see Perry Anderson’s article titled “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”. and the Westernisation movement. One needs to note here again that the intense 2. The assumption that one can change the exclusion mechanism when the sovereign’s decisions are exposed is one great misintellectual discussions of the period (which attracts only academicians today) understanding. One should seize that mechanism. initiated art historical research with the attempts to create a cultural inventory.

3. I will try to draw a distinction between singularity and objectivisation at the end of this article.

4. Güler, S. II. Meşrutiyet Ortamı’nda Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti ve Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi (The Society of Issues related to the very nature of art were problematized only when Osmanlı Ottoman Artists and the Journal of the Society of Ottoman Artists during the Second Constitutional Era), İstanbul: Mimar Sinan Ressamlar Cemiyeti (the Society of Ottoman Artists, 1909-1919) was founded Üniversitesi, the Institute of Social Sciences, Unpublished dissertation, 1994, p. 40. Here I am not going to discuss Osman Hamdi’s although this was primarily a pedagogical institution.(4) orientalism. Suffice to name two sources of art historical importance: Aksüğür, İpek. “Osman Hamdi’ye Çağın Zihniyeti ve Estetik Değerleri Açısından Eleştirel Bir Bakış”, Boyut, 21, 1984, p. 6-14. Erzen, Jale Necdet. “Osman Hamdi: Türk Resminde İkonografi A dual character, embodied in Osman Hamdi, is in the heart of this staggerBaşlangıcı”, I. Osman Hamdi Bey Kongresi Bildirileri, İstanbul: Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1992, p. 99-104. ing development process of art history. As a firm believer of Westernisation and 5. Cezar, M. Sanatta Batı’ya Açılış ve Osman Hamdi, İstanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık Vakfı Yayını, an enlightened figure, Osman Hamdi perfectly represents the intellectuals of 1995, p. 196. and p. 209.

6. Ibid., p. 212-217. the Tanzimat era. A student of law in Paris, Osman Hamdi attended painting 7. One can trace this distinction in Andrzej Walicki’s research on the Russian intellectual history during Westernisation moveclasses of Gerome and Boulanger, who were engaged in orientalist research.(5) ments. The main argument of Walicki is that a certain independent public opinion emerged starting with the reign of Katharina the Great (1762-1796). Walicki, Andrzej. A History of Russian Thought– From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Trans. Hilda Upon returning Turkey in 1869, he worked as a civil servant at different levels.

Andrews-Rusiecka), California: Stanford University Press, 1979. For a good article comparing the intellectuals of the Tanzimat In the Ottoman court, Osman Hamdi worked as the vice-director of the Proera and those in Russia during Westernisation movement, see. Belge, Murat. “Osmanlı’da ve Rusya’da Aydınlar”, Türk Aydını ve tocol Office. In 1881 he was first assigned as the director of Müze-i Hümayun Kimlik Sorunu, (Yay. Haz.: Sabahattin Şen), İstanbul: Bağlam Yayınları, 1995, p. 123-132.

8. Halil İnalcık and Mehmet Seyitdanlıoğlu. Tanzimat – Değişim Sürecinde Osmanlı İmparatorluğu (Tanzimat: the Ottoman (the Imperial Museum), and then the next year he assumed the same position in Empire in Transformation), Ankara: Phoenix Yayınevi, 2006, p. 323.

Sanayi-i Nefise Maktebi (the Academy of Fine Arts). Simultaneously he worked 9. İnalcık, 307. Niyazi Berkes points at the mechanisms of attachment-affliation and patronage, developed to train intellecas the Ottoman representative in Düyun-u Umumiye (the Ottoman Public Debt tuals. Replacing the historical systems of devşirme (devshirme, or collection: forced levy of children from Christian subjects) and slave-raising, this system enables the senior officers to train new people who will work under their auspices. Türkiye’de ÇağdaşlaşAdministration).(6) This is a version of a very familiar melodramatic scenario ma, (Yay. Haz.: Ahmet Kuyaş), İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 18. Edition, Ekim 2012, p. 205-206. with a different final scene. It is a story of a talented, enthusiastic young aris10. İnalcık, ibid., p. 286. tocrat, who was not trained to be an artist, and whose family encouraged him 11. İnalcık, ibid., p. 311.

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EXHIBITION

HURİ KİRİŞ, 2016, 250X150 CM

What lurks in the darkness…

Words Müjde Bilgütay Huri Kiriş opens her fourth solo exhibition Disaster Takes Care of Everything on September 6, at ALANİstanbul. Her intense and dramatic works depicting people trying to find their way in darkness underline the undeniable place of painting in Turkish contemporary art.

A striking characteristic of most of your previous work has been tackling with some kind of institution, be it violence in the family, or the state. However, in relation with the title of this exhibition, in this series I felt some kind of total renouncement or a call for destruction…

I based this series on the idea of humankind’s continuous journey and its consequences. I had been thinking a lot about leaving the big city since before

the Gezi protests. To escape, run away or flee into your inner world… After Gezi, the idea of escaping into nature became more widespread among people. So I began to work on that. I came up with a series entitled A Day in Paradise which dealt with how we see nature as a metaphorical paradise, an utopia, and how nonsensical this idea was in reality. We think nature is very beautiful, peaceful and lovely but once we really go into the wild, at the very first moment we will be covered with mud. However not a single animal in the wild is dirty unless it is not sick or dying or wallowed in mud willingly. Humans are not like that, humans get dirty at their very first step in nature. A single bite of an insect can kill you before you even see the lion or the tiger. We create a collage of images we see in nature documentaries, gardens and parks and think this is nature and we could live there happily ever after. Roughly this was the

idea behind the series. In the following days I developed the idea with A Day in Purgatory and A Day in Hell series. A Day in Purgatory touched on the idea of entropy, our state of continuous corrosion. A Day in Hell described the present day. This new set of paintings also deals with the idea of escaping into the wild, running away, the place we were brought by the never ending cycle of properties changing hands and the metaphorical darkness we live in. As you have also noticed, there is that artificial light in the paintings. What is light?

From a theological perspective light is heavenly, it illuminates, shows the reality. Yet here, no matter where we turn our flashlight, we see something eerie in the darkness, perhaps death or murder. The instruments we use to find our way, our technology, even our very existence take us to a path of death. We are not only suicidal but we also kill animals and plants, consume the

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environment and destroy our very existence. It is a very depressed and heavy-hearted set of paintings dealing with this cycle of death… In today’s circumstances it is difficult to be happy and hopeful and depression is widespread. However in this series I am referring to an innate darkness that has been within us since eternity and I guess one needs to come to a certain age, a certain maturity and level of experience in order to face that darkness and try to show it to others. I attended a high school specialized in fine arts education so I have been engaged in arts since a very young age. The first art book I bought with my own will was a book on Caravaggio. Now I analyze myself; there was a book stand with a lot of art books on it, so why did I pick Caravaggio? The reason was darkness… Because generally in paintings there is the darkness that you paint in black and there is the figure in light and what matters is that

figure. However in Caravaggio the story continues into the darkness and Caravaggio makes us wonder what lurks in the darkness. The issue of what lurks in the darkness might be an issue to deal with at this stage we as humanity have reached. Perhaps this wasn’t the fact in the past; during the course of history, the course of humanity’s development and even in the process of our own personal development the things that deserve our scrutiny had been those in the light but now, after having a grasp of them, perhaps it’s time to contemplate on what lies in darkness and naturally artists feel this earlier than others.

In the age of conceptual art, artists make use of various mediums in utterly unexpected ways and painting is somehow looked down upon. What do you think will be the future of painting?

I am not traditional but in love with techniques . As

a professional I love my job. Therefore I have never neglected painting but created installations and exhibited them too. Paint, photography, this and that, these are only instruments for artists. Once you have mastered all, just like an orchestra conductor who somehow hears all the instruments, you can chose whichever you like. The artist is the Voltron at the moment (Voltron is an animated TV series very popular in the 80s in which a team of astronauts come together to pilot a giant robot). Today I may choose to shoot a video if I want to. This is not an issue of capability anymore, this is an issue of preference. For artists like us who read and keep their eyes and ears open, yes, video can be an instrument. Perhaps it should be the instrument, if it is the best way to convey the idea. On the other hand painting will never get boring or cease to exist because it is at the root of everything. Painting is embedded in the genes of art. I am not talking about taking painting as a mission, that some people should continue painting. Everybody acts in line with their own disposition, be who they are. And art is only possible when you be who you really are.

How do young artists stand out among others and establish themselves? How was your experience?

I worked very hard. I was considered a bright student in my class. Since I was coming from a high school specialized in fine arts education my drawing skills were good. This was the only fine arts high school in Turkey, some kind of a pilot project I guess and we had great teachers who thought us well. Therefore I was a bit ahead of my classmates at the university. I was working on oil paintings while they were learning to draw.

Being a bright student and having won a few awards helped me but I found myself in the contemporary art environment. At that time Turkey’s contemporary art scene was at its infancy stage, its principles were not rooted so it was a bit like a slippery slope. Today it is more sturdy. I am a hard working person who reads a lot, therefore I preferred to stay in my shell. Meanwhile art galleries also began to change. In the past the art market looked for ways to exploit young artists. There is a never ending system of exploitation and it will go on forever, we know that. But it was worse and I held myself back. Today the art world depends a lot on social relations and I am not very good at such things.

Today those who are involved in arts should expect to go through difficult times. I did too and perhaps “being an artist” is not a character trait but, especially in a country like ours, one should be persevering, persistent, dedicated. You have to be in love with your work so that you can go on. Because sometimes making a lot of money or becoming very famous can be obstacles.

You may get bored or become lazy. You need a character that is ready to work no matter if it rains or shines.

What is gratification then?

The work itself. For instance Picasso continued painting until the day he died. The guy had millions of dollars and could do whatever he liked. So why didn’t he stop? He could take a break. Why he worked until his last breath?

Artists like Picasso who are at the top of their careers have achieved everything in terms of money and prestige but art is much more appealing than all of them. The goal is not money, fame and all that, these are all side effects.

What you are looking for is the pleasure you get from your work. This never changes. If it did, we wouldn’t see Picasso or Dali working until their last days alive.

MLADEN STILINOVIC, UMJETNIK RADI, 1978, MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA’NIN İZNİYLE

FAREWELL

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Farewell to Mladen

MLADEN STILINOVIC, UMJETNIK RADI, 1978, COURTESY OF MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFIA

Words Ahmet Ergenç

When I was writing this farewell for the Croatian avant-garde artist Mladen Stilinović, who passed away this summer, I thought that the work that summarized his whole art practice was his auto portrait series Artist at Work.

It is worth remembering: In this photography series, Stilinović shoots the artist – himself- in bed, lazing around. However this is a busy laziness rather than a sluggish one; the artist seems to be buried in his own aura, lost in his thoughts, cloistered away from this world. Mladen Stilinović summarizes here the intellectual and philosophical framework dominating his art by presenting this state of inaction, and idleness as the “artist’s working state”: The right to laziness as the fundamental human right.

Mladen also wrote a text entitled The Praise of Laziness explaining this subject matter.

In this text, he states that there is an essential difference between the artists in the East (Iron Curtain, socialist countries), and in the West (capitalist countries): “The artists in the West are not lazy, therefore they do not make art, they are in fact producers of things. Being involved in insignificant things like the production, the promotion, the gallery system, the museum system, the competition system, etc. keeps them away from laziness, therefore art itself. Whereas the artists in the East are lazy and poor because this system of insignificant factors do not exist. They have time to focus on laziness and art.”

Born and lived in an ex-communist country such as Croatia, Mladen showed how a whole capitalist system leaked into art, and turned the artist into a ‘hardworking’ –told libelously- art professional, and called the artists, and in fact the whole of humanity for ‘laziness’.

The subject of laziness is crucial not solely for art but for the whole world. And Mladen who sees laziness as a vital element is not alone in his view. Also known as Marx’s son in law, Paul Lafargue published a booklet entitled The Right to be Lazy in 1880, when the industrial revolution reached a head, and capitalism bared its sharp teeth, and later asserted that the purpose for all revolution is to provide humankind with the laziness they are in need of. According to Lafargue, an anarcho-communist thinker, communists committed the same vital mistake as the capitalists of turning men into machines by canonizing the ethics to work. The worst misdoing of the capitalists was to provide the ‘right to be lazy’ solely to an economic elite, and to tumble the rest of the world down into a cruel production counter. Whereas the socialists, instead of opposing to the working slavery, presented the workers with a model that canonized working and producing. Thus socialists did not exclude capitalism’s evil progressive industry, and in the end, built the same factory prisons for the working class, and instead of destroying the working class, tried to solve the inequality by turning everyone into ‘workers’.

Lafargue’s call to the working class was: “Working class… shall declare their Right to Be Lazy which is much more holy and noble than the Human Rights; they shall limit themselves to work no more than three hours a day, and be lazy and make a feast for the remaining of the day and night.” In this lazy system, the alienation of the worker would be eliminated, and maybe everyone could be the artist of his/her own life. In fact, Lafargue was following the steps of Marx who once said “Working is a disease” but other Marxists did not fully get that. A similar objection to working was proposed

by Malevich, ‘excluded artist’ in the Soviet Union: “Laziness is the real truth of mankind.” And men do anything to run away from this truth and demonize the lazy.

As an irony of fate, Stilinović died at 69 years old, just like Lafargue with who he was in consensus. Lafargue’s choice was a conscious one. He committed suicide with his wife, Karl Marx’s daughter, Laura Marx, and left a note stating he didn’t want to go over the age of 70, and that the world had become a heavy burden on him. Rejecting the wild world that didn’t recognize the right to laziness was an honor for Lafargue. At the same time, the suicide and the note were an expression of secular dervishism of not asking for too much from this world, of not wanting greedily to live until a hundred years old.

Stilinović had lived a life like a dervish, and defended laziness and the slow flow of life until his death. To prove the importance of laziness and how it was not established in our daily lives, he repeated his Artist at Work series in 2011. This time the artist was sleeping on a stool across his works, hung on the wall of a gallery. This was an open criticism of the gallery system, and maybe a requiem for the ‘art world’ of Croatia that was now a capitalist country.

Mladen Stilinović loved to play with cultural and political codes. He was somehow per-

forming some kind of an ‘intervention art’. The word-slogans he wrote on the streets, museum walls, or billboards turned daily life’s ideological structure upside down like a serious joke. He performed the first of such interventions with the Group of Six Artists collective he was a founding member of. They wrote weird slogans on sidewalks like “Forbidden to Walk on the Sidewalk”, removed the dust of the gallery with a film tape which was dragging on the floor collecting dust, organized simple yet extraordinary ‘action-exhibitions’ by throwing stones that they wrote their names on at the sea. All these art-actions, got Mladen and his team closer to the situationists’ art practice. To make half serious half joke yet striking interventions to daily life, and course of events.

And while doing this, questioning the logic behind art, and removing art from behind the closed doors, ceasing it from being a mythology, and turning it into a form of action.

Although Mladen undertook this playful attitude, he was still an artist who thoroughly thought on what suffering meant in this world, and looking at his scripts on pain, in a way, he was an existentialist ‘writer’ and thinker like Emil Cioran. In his work Pain, he dealt with the pain caused by several governing forms, and the eternal pain, and by creating a dictionary project; he put the word ‘pain’ next to each word in the dictionary.

He created different forms of ‘pain’, engraved in human existence, and therefore in language – political pain, existential pain, daily pain, war pain, economical pain, physical gain, etc.-, and in a world where there is always someone who causes pain to someone else, he invited people to think everything over and over again.

Mladen also had a special interest in the ‘red’ color associated with communists. He wanted to remove the political meaning behind this color, and turn it back into being simply a color. Therefore he produced several works with red in them, and turned a great symbol, and a great cultural code into something ordinary. In one of his ironic works, we observe Stilinović with his red socks shining under his shorts; the name of the work is Flag, probably the ‘red flag’. In that photo, he was like a lazy kid sitting in front of supreme values. In the red series, there is also an auto portrait series: the polaroids shots of himself painting his nails, sometimes his teeth, his cigarette, and sometimes his ears in red. A similar de-coding, reversing the symbols, was done by his Exploitation of the Dead series. He contextualized symbols, and images that he thought were ‘dead’, out of their holy meanings, therefore questioned a nostalgic obsession of the past, and reminded that symbols and images needed to be fluid, and liberating and not dull and oppressive. By spoiling the meaning of the hammer, and the red star, he somehow tried to break the authority around those symbols.

Another color that Mladen liked to think over was white. In his White Absence, he painted the canvas and almost anything in white. “White is the color of silence” he said. When Croatia was under war during the post-Soviet era in the beginning of the 1990’s, he was still looking at the pain of the world, and by painting everything in white, he was focusing in subjects such as death, trauma, and existence, etc. He was consulting the silence of the white in a geography dominated by complex and violent images. He was also under a type of meditation on death because white also evoked post-death. The alarm clocks that he painted in white also pointed to his will to stop time, and to let the world breath. Among all this heavy subjects, he did not default on building conceptual art’s coldblooded shelter by putting a piece of sugar next to the photography of the chair (of course a reference to Joseph Kosuth).

One of Stilinović’s most important characteristics was this: Next to the paintings, photographs, films, and graffitis he also used himself as an ‘art work’ material. In that sense, he was a wicked performance artist who ‘turned himself into art’. Stilinović who mainly analyzed the question of ‘the artist, and what it means to be an artist’ during his art practice, showed how a true artist would be step-by-step with his 69-years-long life: an impenitent intellectual, and impenitent lazy, and impenitent joker, an impenitent intervener, and impenitent avant-garde, and impenitent philosopher-thinker.

Let us quote Blaise Pascal here: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly.” We can apply the same to Stilinović: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit lazily.” In this era where art is turning into professional project fetishism, and the old bohemia is replaced by ‘art professionals’, we need to remember Stilinović’s messy and lazy state. Wherever he passed, let him rest in laziness, and peace. Farewell Mladen.

THE EXHIBITION

Gülsün Karamustafa: Where to, now?

Words Gökcan Demirkazık

“Then suddenly upon me the obscure, the mystic sense of adoration, of completeness that triumphed over chaos.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA, STAR WARS, 1982

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GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA, FALLEN VARIATION OFTHE LAST SUPPER, 1984

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GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA, THE SETTLER TOGETHER, VIDEO STILLS, 2003

Promised Paintings, 1998-2015, had first come as a shock to me. I remember floating through the columned first floor of SALT Beyoğlu, past Mystic Transport’s scattered, conical baskets on wheels (for the exuberant shimmering of satin quilts in them and its arrhythmic distribution in space had disrupted my sense of mechanical locomotion).

The elevator landed me on the fourth floor, face-to-face with Promised Paintings—the works that had inspired the title of Gülsün Karamustafa’s 2013 survey at SALT, A Promised Exhibition, were wondrous and banal, static and mobile, singular and hybrid at the same time. I had seen them reproduced in books and on screens, but only in person did they coolly whisper: “You thought you were going places. Where to, now?”

When I saw them again at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof as part of Karamustafa’s retrospective Chronographia, curated by Melanie Roumiguière, they looked less boisterous and a little weary from having left their hometown. (I had not realized there were only seven there, as opposed to the nine that had been on view at SALT.) I approached them not like an old friend, but like an acquaintance that never upheld his promise of calling: with guilt etched to the creases of my smile. I had appeared before them again with no sense of direction or directed factuality.

Their hanging roughly articulated the outline of an upside-down stick figure with a very thick lower body or the shadow of a heretofore-unknown totem. I came to discriminate the minimalist rigor even more in the four

square paintings of the middle row: The pictorial surface was bisected into equal rectangles—golden or a more ‘secular’ color like turquoise and red (with the priestly exception of purple)—denoting an empty background or the upper torso of a woman. Against this visual restraint, the slight change in the angle of the head spelled out a continuous yet primitive cinematic motion as in a Watteau study aux trois crayons. However, this movement hardly attained a semblance of preciousness, as the woman’s arms, often crossed, migrated all over the canvas from one painting to another in jump-cuts, leaving her fingers pointing in wildly different directions. Even though the works still insisted on asking “where to, now?”, I realized the confusion over where things begin and end beyond the picture plane put me on a tender par with the woman/women depicted. Her/their silhouette(s) owed existence to the migration of forms over hundreds of years in the locality of Istanbul, and, as Deniz Şengel notes in The Fallen Icon for Prayer Rug with Elvis, constituted “the collapse of [the] linear temporality [of the work as a narrative].”

But more importantly for me as a viewer, I understood I should not have been embarrassed. The delicate leveling allowed me and the icons to “make an unsubstantial territory” together.

The making and communication of such “unsubstantial territories,” production of shareable differences through slippage or twinning of iconologies, runs through the

whole of Chronographia, if not Gülsün Karamustafa’s entire oeuvre. To anyone who has seen the SALT survey, Chronograhia crops up as an uncanny twin of A Promised Exhibition, featuring the same, perhaps a little expanded, bodies of work with a few not-always-auspicious exclusions made on account of contextual considerations (especially the linguistically bound My Roses, My Reveries, 1998, and the more playful Ottoman history inspired-works, such as Buy One Get One Free, 1991, and Genealogy, 1994-2013) and a couple of significant additions. The wall colors—red, purple, petroleum blue and charcoal—and thematic juxtapositions that curators of the previous exhibition, Duygu Demir and Merve Elveren had come up with, remain recognizable throughout the show—among them, the vaguely salon-style hanging of leopard-patterned collages, and the togetherness of Prison Paintings, 1972-1978, and Bühne, 1998.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in the frictional cohabitation of Karamustafa’s show and Carl Andre’s touring retrospective, Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 in the Hamburger Bahnhof complex: Karamustafa’s NEW ORIENTATION, 1995, originally commissioned for René Block’s Istanbul Biennial of the same year, connects the two halves of her show like a spine on a narrow balcony overlooking the former train station’s historic hall, which prominently displays some of the largest, most imposing works in Andre’s retrospective, such as 6 Metal Fugue (for Mendeleev), 1995. NEW ORIENTATION appears to have turned its back on Andre, as strate-

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GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA, PANTHER STOOL, 2007

GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA PORTRAIT, PHOTO: MUHSİN AKGÜN

GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA, DOUBLE REALITY, 2013

gically placed (yet somewhat domesticating) fans make its pink and white ribbons billow in the opposite direction, towards the courtyard. On your way to the second half of Karamustafa’s exhibition, your body inevitably comes in fleeting contact with these ribbons, inscribed with the initials of women reported missing in Istanbul and the dates on which their families last saw these women. You go through them, whereas with Andre’s 6 Metal Fugue, you have the option of stepping on the work or not engaging at all—unlike Andre, Karamustafa does not elevate or relegate the viewer to a specific spectatorial position from which one can experience the work; on the contrary, the tangibility of loss and tenderness of remembrance forcibly envelope one to leave the impression that the work, in itself, has changed during and after this encounter.

The ambiguity of sculpted space in many of Gülsün Karamustafa’s hallmark installations evinces her desire to not only contain cultural (de)form(itie)s and their infectiousness, but also to build a denkraum for them to survive in. For instance, the work that has given the Hamburger Bahnhof show its title, Chronographia, 1994, features the framed covers of sixty Radyo Haftası (Radio Week) issues—to every single one of which Karamustafa’s father contributed an essay between 1950 and 1953—framed and arranged in a circle. In the first museum monograph to be published on Karamustafa’s oeuvre on the occasion of this exhibition, the artist states: “These objects described a mid-time – the

middle of time – and were placed in a circle . . . showing . . . a slice of the middle of a century that we were leaving behind.” Other than easing the collective intake of these covers as visual forms with heavy Republican underpinnings, this formation, according to the artist, also appears to keep time intact in space, almost in an invisible jar. The articulation of Karamustafa’s preservationist drive takes a more obscure, and perhaps, esoteric dimension in other works such as Double Reality, 1987/2013, where a male mannequin wearing a pale pink maternity dress—found as such by the artist on the street and bought away—stands in a “two-dimensional space,” inside the iron skeleton of a green cube nested in a red one. The outlined territory does not entail a prohibitive containment, but rather (metaphorically) materializes associative frameworks, i.e. varying, context-driven conceptions of gender in Turkey, that made the found object possible and probable.

Likewise, Shield, 1986/2016 integrates the artist’s own wedding dress to build an outlandish (upright) sarcophagus out of a jumble of fabrics, where the bride can comfortably fit in with a considerable portion of her trousseau. Karamustafa admits herself that this work “perhaps formed the basis of other monuments [to come] at the time of its showing in 1986.” Despite being specially commissioned for this show, the latest among her monuments, Monument for the 21st Century, 2016, sits highly understated and solitary, even in the company of Chronographia. Five boys (or men) in an ac-

robatic formation jump out from what must have been an illustrated 19th-century manual as a thick, slightly smaller than life-size MDF print. This print, in turn, is replicated, as in Double Action Series for Oriental Fantasies, 2000, and copies are fastened to each other with the purpose of creating a modular human tower that can extend higher—not unlike Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column.

However, two curious details haunt this structure: first of all, one of the five figures built into the monument appears to be detached from the rest and falling, and secondly, all of them boast red highlighter-like marks on their waists and mouths. In an interview with Huo Rf, Karamustafa reveals that she “reproduced a little red stain on their clothes to make gags that would prevent them from speaking.” I cannot fathom whether or not she does not want them to speak because the figures know of things to come in the remainder of the century, but this work stands apart from other monuments in Karamustafa’s oeuvre insofar as it does not seem to hint at any overlap of personal and collective memories, except for the all-too-familiar cyclicality of the passage of time. This time, the diagrammatic illegibility of facial expressions, the heightened silences, address the question “Where to, now?” to viewers en masse.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no romance left for the “unsubstantial territories” of the coming century.

Gülsün Karamustafa: Chronographia Hamburger Bahnhof | June 6 – October 23, 2016

1. Note to editor: labeled “3rd” floor on the SALT elevator, but “4th” American floor. For smoothness, I did not want to say “entry-level” for the “first” floor.

2. A journey in itself, the name of the city derives from Istinpoli, Greek for “to the city.”

3. Deniz Şengel, “Düşük İkona: Gülsün Karamustafa’nın Sanatına Retorik Yaklaşım, 1981-1992,” in Merve Elveren, ed., Düşük İkona: Gülsün Karamustafa’nın Sanatına Retorik Yaklaşım, 1981-1992 (Istanbul: SALT, 2016), 42. PDF e-book. Please note that I have taken the liberty of translating the Turkish sentence fragment [lineer hattının parçalanması] into English, as the word “linear” is dropped in the English-language manuscript.

4. “’But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’” Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Penguin, 2000), 10.

5. Gülsün Karamustafa, in Melanie Roumiguière and Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu, eds, Gülsün Karamustafa: Chronographia, (Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2016), 287.

6. Karamustafa, in Huo Rf, “Gülsün Karamustafa ile Söyleşi,” Sanat Dünyamız 153 (August 2016), 62.

7. Karamustafa, in Huo Rf, 56. 8. Karamustafa, in Huo Rf, 59.

DİRİMART DOLAPDERE Irmak Caddesi 1–9 34440 Dolapdere İstanbul info@dirimart.com | www.dirimart.com

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UNLIMITED VISITS 4; Yeldeğirmeni

Çağrı Saray, TUNCA and Mehmet Öğüt’s studio

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Words Nazlı Pektaş Photography Elif Kahveci

It wasn’t hard to predict the amount of pleasure we would get from pursuing the experience of “being” in an artist studio for the sake of our Unlimited Visits portfolio. These visits helped us to convey to our readers this breath taken together by the studios and the artists who live and create within. We felt involved in that breath even for a short period of time. It was essential for us to properly articulate the odour, colour, sound, and light hitting our face as we entered through the door of the playground of the artists.

We realized the fourth edition of our unlimited visits in the Yeldeğirmeni neighborhood. Our visit to the studio of Çağrı Saray, TUNCA, and Mehmet Öğüt revealed to us the possibility of and the sincerity in three artists, also three friends to each sustain their own artistic production side by side through spatial and intellectual sharing. They each had their own way of describing this collocation, yet they were all sincere in essence. To be in the same studio meant “solidarity” for Çağrı; “power” for TUNCA, and “a way to boost the link to reality” for Mehmet. The studio situated in a shop on the ground floor of an old building on İskele Street in Yeldeğirmeni was the neighbour of a spotlight shop, and its backyard a ground for the curious eyes of the building of which it is a part.

Yeldeğirmeni is a neighbourhood where the vibrations of the multicultural environment of the Ottoman Empire and the early Republic period permeated on the walls, stones and the windows of the buildings. Resources state that there were mansions with gardens during the 15th and the 16th century, and that Abdul Hamid I had four windmills done between 1774 and 1789. Hence the name of the neighbourhood comes from the windmills (yel değirmeni) that served to supply the flour demand of the neighbourhood. Today neither those mansions nor the windmills are in place. The second half of the 1800’s witnessed even further migration to the area. Following the fire in 1872 in Kuzguncuk, the Jewish community moved here, which started the construction of apartment buildings. Resources state that this is the neighbourhood where we first encounter these apartment buildings in Istanbul. Today, some of these buildings stand still. The buildings

overlooking the sea on the outskirts of the İskele Street, and buildings from the same era on other streets tie strong knots between yesterday and today.

The Valpreda Building is one of them; dated 1909, situated across the Osmangazi Primary School. Built as a residence for the Italian stonemasons working in the construction of the Haydarpaşa Train Station, it is today known as the Italian building. This Art Nouveau building drawing the attention going up towards Yeldeğirmeni, integrates the past voices, knowledge, and breathes of the street and the neighbourhood into my steps. The wedding dowry of Kadıköy, Yeldeğirmeni is full of other structures hiding sounds, and breaths.

Going past the Valpreda Building, I arrive at my final destination. Çağrı, TUNCA, and Mehmet’s studio, and the others in this neighbourhood, each are here for different reasons. Yeldeğirmeni has been a cocoon for artists for long years thanks to the breath of the past. I may need to open a parenthesis here: while countless districts in Istanbul erase their memories via urban regeneration projects; the gentrification that has been going on in the Karaköy-Tophane region in the past 15 years is showing its initial signs here as well. This studio survives along with others who keep on living with numerous new cafes, squat homes, and graffiti’s, and neighbours. The gentrification process leads to an increase in rents, and the birth of such demand. What I pointed out in parenthesis is rather essential within the context of the historic tissue of Yeldeğirmeni. Yet with the change in this texture, the increased rents and requests of homeowners cause a great problem for the studios wanting to live with their art, the local tradesman, and

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the neighbours. This is because the historical fabric of Yeldeğirmeni is a crucial cocoon for the local neighbours, and their creative energies, and for the artists and designers choosing to live here. At the heart of the city, yet hidden away.

The backyard door opening to the light is open wide. The sun streaming through the windows covered with a large canvas on the façade overlooking the street, pulls my mind away from my steps up from Haydarpaşa, the past, today, and tomorrow with a bright and powerful light. Works, rolls, books on walls, shelves, and mezzanine floors… A tiny kitchen, brewed tea, a long table, drawers… The studio we will soon make a mess of is for now squared away. We’re chatting over tea, and simit. The studio is mostly lit via fluorescent lights except for the light leaking through the later opened backyard door, and the window on the cement wall built by TUNCA himself. Other light resources are always there in place to be used when working. Speaking of cement walls, the cemented fame of militarism is exhibited via TUNCA’s military hat made of cement on a wall made by an artist.

The walls of the studio are nearly full of the artists’ works. Each artist has his own wall. On these walls we observe the old and new works of the artists exhibited together. Memory, as part of different creative practices, is an oasis for many artists personally, or not, directly or indirectly. The artists in this studio reside in various stops in between different layers of memory.

Mehmet Öğüt takes the lives of these people entering his life one way or another in between these layers as a reference for his production. In his video installation named Memories of a Country, he tries to make sense of Turkey via the point of view from the memory Miele A. Swaving, a 74-year-old Dutch woman he accidently met. Mieke’s memory gets in touch with our own. Our past full of irony is hidden between what she tells and what we know. We watched this video from a screen in the studio. The video installation named Arkhe that the artist realized with a wooden table increases the questions in relation to the essence via the tree’s memory.

The table from this project found its place in the studio. Mehmet Öğüt,

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whom we recognize the videos of, documents the moment of birth of the paintings he did with matches within the scope of the Arkhe project upon our request. The trace of fire and smoke melts in to an abstract-sepia view on the paper with a controlled freedom.

Establishing his art politics with a resonance flowing from the individual to the collective, tying strong knots to history in his journal during this movement, we Çağrı Saray’s walls are covered with his works from the Diminishing Time exhibition in April 2015 at the Galata Greek Primary School, and works that have not been met with its viewers just yet. Çağrı’s spaces that get stuck in vibration, give resonance to what’s in his memory, along with the memory of those who lived it, and the memory of the studio. The triptych photography named The Weight of History that was shown at the same exhibition and that was also on the cover of the Diminishing Time exhibition brochure, is on the walls of the studio along with his paintings. Created for the Grey Corridor exhibition, these photographs present Çağrı in front of the Louvre Museum in three different poses. Çağrı tries to resist to the weight of art history flowing from the museum, and building up queues as both an artist from Turkey, and a stranger/tourist; in an exhausted, yet eager, and determined body language or he surrenders.

We also see a small part of the Desire exhibition -which we did not get enough of- where he focused on and photographed the tables of the most important politicians of the 20th century, and even learned to cook their favourite meals, on TUNCA’s walls. While Mussolini likes chicken noodle soup, Khrushchev likes borscht explains TUNCA. We also observe covered paintings in the studio. These are TUNCA’s works that he will show at the next exhibition. Behind the white papers are large drawings he did based on the photographs he took at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp during World War II, following a visit to Poland.

This is both a production studio as an artist’s studio, and an opinion centre where each artist is a viewer for each other. I can even say that number 74 on İskele Street, with works made of diverse genres, and materials, and a door opening to the tiny backyard is breathing. The studio between the entrance door opening to Yeldeğirmeni, and this yard, exhales the breath that it inhales from the neighbourhood to the backyard.

Old posters from previous exhibitions, encyclopaedias that serve as a resource for their production, books, pens, and many more… This is not a huge place. One might even ask how do three artists work here together.

I ask: “I am usually here in the morning time because of my son Cem. Whereas Çağrı and Mehmet come in the afternoon” says TUNCA. Çağrı adds: “We often work voluntarily work together.” “We are above all three good friends” says Mehmet.

Watching the art works around, it is now time to get out to the backyard that summons us. This tiny garden is also an intersection of the backyards of other buildings allowing them to breathe, overlooked by the back balconies of the building I suppose is dated to the 70’s. Plants grown by themselves, the palm tree of the neighbour, an old side table, a sculpture

by TUNCA… A yard as a sole to the sky, giving breath to the studio, taking it apart from the street… I find this common work by the artists who made a door to the yard with the intention that each studio should have its own backyard to be very valuable, for they turned the empty space into a garden.

It is possible to call this studio on number 74, İskele Street, a place reminding faculty studios, where creative energies sustain their production.

Because many artists prefer to work on their own studios upon graduation from fine arts faculties. And this is very natural. Collaboration of this kind is rare. The taste of sharing studios remains back in the faculties. This studio is a calm, and sincere field for the creative visions of three artists taking pleasure in solidarity, and sharing on an axis from the street opening to the backyard.

MEHMET ÖĞÜT, MEMORIES OF A COUNTRY, VIDEO INSTALLATION, VIDEO STILLS

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FEUILLETON

Being queer (3) in the 80’s Words Serdar Soydan

The Turks’ test with AIDS and the ‘M’ case The whole world, not just Turkey, failed the test of HIV/AIDS in terms of the LGBTI existence. The virus and the consequential syndrome was transformed into a weapon of attack towards LGBTI individuals, and made homophobia and transphobia much more visible.

Even now that we know more about HIV/AIDS, it still is making it more visible. Yet the foundation of the reason why Kızılay (The Turkish Red Crescent) is asking the question “Have you been in a sexual relationship with a foreigner or a homosexual?” and why it doesn’t collect blood from those who have been in homosexual relationship, lies within the homophobia born in the beginning of the 80’s when HIV/AIDS first appeared.

The Head of Kızılay declares the reason why they do not collect blood from those individuals as “homosexuals being classified as in AIDS risky groups”.

Going back to the news at the beginning of the 80s when the disease was on the main agenda of the world, called as the ‘plague of this era’ or as ‘the cancer of sex’…. The sine qua non of this news was the emphasis on homosexuality.

The headline of the Cumhuriyet newspaper article dated 3rd of July 1983 was “The Homosexual Blood”. It is specified in the article that at the World Federation of Hemophilia Congress in Stockholm it was requested that homosexuals be forbidden from donating blood.

On another article dated 20th of July 1983, it is underlined that AIDS is mostly encountered at homosexuals, and that in the USA “many citizens did not want to work in the same environment with homosexuals.”

On August of the same year, homosexuals in San

Francisco marched to attract attention to AIDS, and to create further funds for the treatment of the disease.

This meant that homosexuals embraced the illness. Besides according to the US Department of Health and Human Services data, 70 percent of those who caught the disease were homosexuals. Yet the remaining 30 percent were invisible, and the relation of the virus with homosexuality was underlined, and AIDS was spoken of as a homosexual’s disease. What was problematic and homophobic was this attitude yielding further homophobia.

The consequences of such approach were observed in no time. In September of 1983 we learned that all gay men would be examined for AIDS in Sweden. The Swedish doctors advised homosexuals to refrain from going to saunas where they observed swingers. In November of 1984, we learned that a law proposing gays in Australia to be banned from donating blood, and those donating blood to be sentenced to prison and penalty was presented at the parliament. In March of 1985, homophobia turned into physical attacks.

On a news article in Cumhuriyet Newspaper dated 11th of March 1985, we read the following: “Attacks have undergone in London towards homosexuals due to AIDS. The homosexuals in the capital are being attacked in clubs and pubs almost everyday.”

The situation in Turkey In January of 1985, the Minister of Health and Social Services of the time, Mehmet Aydın made the following statement to Yankı magazine: “We have not observed an individual diagnosed with AIDS in 1983 and 1984. Yet our ministry was warned

towards this disease. AIDS is a recently recognized disease in the world. It is a disease appearing when the immune system goes down. As it is said that the disease is mostly observed at homosexuals, the solidity of our customs, traditions, our religion, morality and family structure is to our advantage.”

Aydın’s statement can be summarized as: “Homosexuality does not exist in Turkey, so there will be no AIDS disease either.”

In July of 1985, the transvestites and the transsexuals were relegated to the suburbs of the city in Izmir. The reason was that the rumor of AIDS to appear among homosexuals started to make the news. The Chief of Police in Izmir, and the Public Security Branch Vice President said: “These individuals who are source to any kind of disease are not wanted in Izmir.”

Another article in the Milliyet newspaper dated 13th of August 1985, stated that Veli Gun, who claimed to create a cure for AIDS, was captured as a fake doctor.

Again in August, Istanbul Mayor Bedrettin Dalan raised the bar for homophobia: “AIDS is the wrath of God towards homosexuals. Something similar happened ages ago. Remembered as the Disaster of Lut in history, when many homosexuals had lost their lives. I see the rise in homosexuality as a reflection of the Lut disaster to our days. This is a curse that God has sent to the homosexuals.”

Yakovas, Archbishop of Northern and Southern America, who was in Turkey at the time, gave the following answer when asked about Dalan’s statement: “Do not involve God with AIDS. God is love.” (Cumhuriyet newspaper, 1st of September 1985)

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1. HOMOSEXUALS GATHERING IN SAN FRANCISCO TO STAND OUT FOR AIDS IN 1983 2. MURTEZA ELGIN 3. MURTEZA ELGIN QUITTING THE HOSPITAL WHERE HE WAS ISOLATED 2

During the same time, Prof. Dr. Hüseyin Sipahioğlu, Head of the Foundation for the Protection against AIDS in Turkey, gave a conference in Kayseri entitled “the AIDS Disease, and its Cure”.

Sipahioğlu stated that there were no specialists in Turkey to recognize AIDS, therefore the disease was not diagnosed, and added that the conference was open to all men of science as well as homosexuals and prostitutes. The Sipahioğlu name is notable. Yet, unlike the Minister of Health or other specialist doctors, he claimed that he diagnosed a patient in Turkey with AIDS in the beginning of 1985. In October this number had increased to 5. (Milliyet newspaper, 25th of October 1985).

Before M… Ayhan Özyurt An article dated 14th of August 1985, entitled “AIDS is in Istanbul” stated that a worker who came from Germany diagnosed with AIDS had escaped from the hospital. The mentioned patient was Ayhan Özyurt.

Living in Berlin with his family, also diagnosed there, Özyurt consulted the German Hospital in Istanbul when he came to Turkey to sustain his treatment, and then disappeared four days before. The authorities of the hospital had notified the City Health Administrative. Yet then AIDS was not a disease that had to be reported mandatorily. (In less than a month, on the 10th of September, it became one.) On the same newspaper we observe another article with further details. The Turk with AIDS had run away first from the hospital then from Turkey.

“Born in Gaziantep, living in Western Berlin, one of four children of Bahattin Özyurt, Ayhan Özyurt ap-

pears to have caught the disease in Spain where he went for vacation. The young men diagnosed with AIDS in Germany after suspecting from certain symptoms on his skin when he returned from Spain, also was a drug addict.”

Milliyet newspaper finds Ayhan Özyurt in Germany a day later on the 17th of August. The young man stated: “I will beat this disease. The spots on my skin already started to disappear. They remove another spot with an operation yesterday. I believe I will beat the disease with my willpower. Yes, I am gay but I have not been in a sexual relationship for months.” Özyurt who added that a cancer medicine called Interferon that was not yet on the market was applied to him, told: “The medicine is very expensive. It is tested on me. They are giving it to me for free. I am giving a signature for everyday that I take it. I also signed a promise that I am the sole responsible.” He stated that following the doctors’ warning, he was not involved in a “homosexual relationship”, yet that he was not ashamed of his illness, but that since nobody knew anything about the subject, he told his family that he had skin cancer. Ayhan Özyurt was the first case that knew how to express himself consciously. Yet he could not find himself much space in the media, nor could he make a tremendous impression.

M… What put AIDS on the headlines, and the country’s main agenda was thanks to Murtaza Elgin. The news first appeared in Hurriyet newspaper on the 2nd of November 1985. The article “Here’s the Turk with AIDS” made a big impression. The subject of the article was

Murtaza Elgin, also served as a recognized musician, vocalist to Ibrahim Tatlıses, a famous arabesque singer. The person who diagnosed him and announced to the media was no one but the aforementioned Hüseyin Sipahioğlu. Yet there was a problem: Sipahioğlu had directly announced the diagnose of his patient to the Hurriyet newspaper. Murtaza Elgin had learned his disease from the news. Two of Elgin’s pictures were used in the article. Although his eyes were censored, his initials and further details about his music career were written in the article. What the doctor and the newspaper did was unethical. They had both violated the patient’s rights. On the interview he gave to the newspaper, Sipahioğlu also spoke about Elgin’s sexual orientation, while he was married.

- Is your patient a homosexual and could he be of danger right now?

- This is my and other Turkish and foreign scientists’ worst fear. Of course he can be. Even further than a possibility, the relatives of those he was in relationship with are all in a danger zone. We need to convince this person, start the treatment, and put in under control as soon as possible. Plus, it is a must to examine the people he was in close relationship with.

The patient is a homosexual.

After the 2nd of November 1985, people read everyday almost for a month the devastation of an individual’s life, because he was HIV positive. What Murtaza Elgin went through was the peak of homophobia and HIVphobia. His pictures were all over the place. A narrow black tape barely covering his eyes… Yet all his relationships, his friendships are exposed one by one. Be-

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sides after the 4th of November, there will be no need for this either, because he will be in every newspaper, his name openly written, face and whole life story uncovered. No one cared about what Murtaza Elgin went through, how his psychology was affected… for his life was ruined by the greed of the media. Hasn’t anyone said: “What are you doing? We’re talking of a human here… However fatal, contagious his illness is, you do not have the right to do this!” Even if someone said so, this statement, protection, approach has not found itself a spot in the newspapers.

It is somewhat a murder. It becomes all about ‘Murti’. Article series, columns about AIDS become more visible. Murti was isolated, hidden, caught; he ran away, denied, accepted, cried, shouted….

Soon after good news follow. An informatory book on the subject was published in İzmir at the end of November, conferences, discussions are organized about AIDS. On the 25th of November, Istanbul independent deputy Yılmaz Hastürk, asks the Ministry of Health

whether they intend to start a war campaign against AIDS. On the 10th of November, a police officer, Zafer Akkan, in Edirne first kills his wife Nimet Akkan and then commits suicide in fear that they caught the disease.

Their bloods were collected, and their three children inspected. Murtaza Elgin blamed Hüsetin Sipahioğlu for the death of Akkan and his wife: “The delusion of a doctor caused a disaster in Edirne.” (Milliyet newspaper, 11th of November 1985) Murtaza Elgin was soon forgotten. Until the 14th of June 1992… When Murti’s death appears in newspapers. The headlines were horrible: “Murti with AIDS dies”, “Last Breath of Murti”, “Murti will be bleached”, “Imam with a Mask for Murti”, “Murti in a Well of Lime”.

The following seven years have not helped for the ignorance of the Turkish public, state, and the Turkish media as a reflection. Only Harika Avcı and Nigar Uluerer attend his funeral. Many famous singers with

whom he shared his stage are unseen. Yet we also see promising examples like the column of Orhan Bursalı at the Cumhuriyet newspaper on the 3rd of December 1992.

“We must first learn not to exclude AIDS and tients with AIDS from the society. Even the intellectuals of the society could not get over from seeing AIDS as a ‘homo fact’. There are doctors not touching patients with AIDS. The mentality that isolates the disease, and the patients, will only speed up the epidemic. Our media acts like a gunman. The way the Murteza Elgin news were given is to be ashamed of, and people were applauding those who whitewashed and cemented the dead! Isn’t the isolation of patients in this way a form of racism?”

How about today… From 1992 until 2016, for all those years, how far have we gone about HIV/AIDS? Who knows…

LESS IS MORE 25 yıldır tasarımda "az"ın gücüne inanıyor, ev & ofis için mobilya ve aydınlatmanın modern klasiklerini showroomlarımızda sizler ile buluşturuyoruz.

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PERFORMANCE

Spectating the atmospheric inbetweenness: Peeping Tom Words Mehmet Kerem Özel

PROLOG A décor built in the emptiness of the stage space; a room defined by its floor and two perpendicular walls.

There are numerous doors and a window on the walls.

One or two people sitting on the chairs in the empty spaces left in two sides of the décor on the stage. Some of the spotlights are placed in these areas and made a part of the atmosphere that was created on the stage: the ones that watch ‘the scene on the stage’ and we, the audience, who watch both.

When we first encounter this stage under a darkish light when the curtain is raised, a light coming on and off from the pee hole of the door facing us is visibly seen; as if there is someone behind the door and looking at us from the hole. As one moves, the light coming behind her/him goes off and reappears, just like when you look at the neighbor’s door when you are outside in the stair landing and think that there is no one home if there is light from the hole, but if there is a movement in the light you feel you are watched. This is the same strange situation, the same awkward feeling!

Just like the name of the company who creates these works is ‘peeping tom’ which means “watching/peeking” in slang, this work starts with a mise-en-scène that fully fits into their name.

I. It is impossible for a spectator who comes to theater to see a play categorized as ‘dance’ or ‘dance theater’, to define what goes on the stage as dance or dance theatre. The works contain parts with dance and also certain characteristics of dance theatre too. However, it seems

that, for its creators, rather than dance choreographies, it is more important to design choreography to create a certain atmosphere on the stage. Yes, ‘atmosphere’!

An atmosphere having the qualities that no one ever thought to create on stage before.

Their inspiration is not a secret of course, especially David Lynch cinema and all the things that those films evoke: a mysterious, weird, surreal and nightmare-like atmosphere. Also recognized elements of B movies of horror. As for the content, it can be associated with Ingmar Bergman cinema: digging the problems in human relations, especially those in the family (between woman-man, parent-child, mother-son, father-son) in such a way to hurt the parties. In terms of stage aesthetic constituted of theatrical situations and fragmented structure Pina Bausch; in terms of the fluidity of choreographic language Alain Platel and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui could be mentioned as muses. So, for whom am I doing this long introduction, whom am I talking about? They are two choreographer-dancers, Gabriela Carrizo and Franck Chartier, the founders of Belgium based dance theater company Peeping Tom. Carrizo and Chartier met while they were working in Les ballets C de la B for the famous Belgian choreographer and orthopedic therapist Alain Platel. In 2000 they founded their own company and gained recognition in Europe especially with the trilogy consisting of Le jardin (2001) – Le salon (2004) – Le sous sol (2007).

In addition to rewards they received with the trilogy, they continued to receive rewards successively and

furthermore indulge into new collaborations with famous dance or theatre companies. Their last work Vader (2014) received the first prize of the category ‘Best International Dance Production of 2014’ by the jury of the Premios de la Critica Barcelona, while their previous work 32 rue Vandenbranden (2009) won in the category ‘Best New Dance Production’ a Olivier Award in 2015 in London. In May 2015 they produced a work named The Land with the players of Munich Residenztheater, which is one of the prestigious theater companies of Germany. The missing door which was created

by Carrizo in 2013 under the umbrella of Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT) 1 which is one of the most important dance groups not only of The Nederlands but also of the world and, the new work of Chartier which he created with the same company were included in the program of 2015-16 season to be performed successively the same night. The lost room has recently been nominated for The Netherlands’ most prestigious dance award, the Zwanen (Swans) as ‘Most Impressive Production in 2016’, which will be announced in coming October during the Festival of the Dutch Dance in Maastricht. It should also be noticed that such an internationally known company like NDT which has lots of world premieres choreographed by such talented artists like its intendants Paul Lightfood and Sol León, and also like Crystal Pite, Gai Behar, Sharon Eyal and Marco Goecke in its programs every season, hasn’t been nominated in Zwanen for years.

Peeping Tom has been named after Michael Powell’s

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The works of Peeping create disturbed characters who come to life in spooky atmospheres, deal with hidden oddities in the in-between places of reality and surreality sometimes by emphasizing them or analyzing them in depth, and surprise and entertain the audience with unprecedented situations, emotions and materials.

1960 famous cult film. The film Peeping Tom which is about tension, murder and mostly ‘peeping’ must have inspired Carrizo and Chartier in creating spooky mediums. Of course being -in a sense- ‘peeped’ by the audience is one of the most important tools affecting the mise-en-scène of the duo. They create disturbed characters who come to life in spooky atmospheres; they deal with hidden oddities in the in-between places of reality and surrealism, sometimes by emphasizing them or analyzing them in depth; they surprise and entertain the audience with situations, emotions and materials which are hard to come together.

The dancers of Peeping Tom hold a very special place among dance companies in terms of the use of human body. The movements developed by Carrizo and Chartier, who are dancers and performed in their early pieces as well, through their personal capabilities, have no boundaries in terms of the shapes the body takes like complete convulsion; inversion of the limbs of the body as if they are not connected to each other; twisting the arms and bewildering angles of feet especially through the tricks with wrists.

The cast of the works that Carrizo and Chartier stage with their company involves approximately 6-7 people; if they collaborate with other companies they could use a larger cast. One other thing is that not all of these performers are dancers; there are actors and singers among them. Another characteristic of their company is that there is no age limit for the performers, which include the ones at the age of 80 and the

PEEPING TOM, 32 RUE VANDENBRANDEN, PHOTO: HERMAN SORGELOOS

ones who are very young. In these approaches Carrizo and Chartier could have been inspired by Pina Bausch who was one of the first choreographers who worked with not only dancers but also actors and musicians, and who also stretched the attitude on age limit.

INTERMEZZO In the program titled Start Again by NDT 1, there is no ‘break’ between 30-minute The missing door of Carrizo and 40-minute The lost room of Chartier as the rule of thumb in this kind of programs presenting two or three works in one night, is to give one. Two works were subjected to a different procedure; they were connected to each other without giving a break with the most creative ‘transition’ mise-en-scène I have ever seen.

Both works are set in a room, which, although looks like each other in terms of their dimensions, differ in terms of wall and flooring materials and furniture.

After Carrizo’s The missing door was completed, the curtain falls, however it quickly opens again. When it gets open, we see that the dancers begin to change the stage. As a spotlight which sweeps the stage like a loose cannon falls on dancers, that dancer stops and salutes the audience and gets applauded. Even after the salutation of seven dancers that overlap with the light, the procedure of changing the scene continues.

Stage-change in front of the audience, without concealment and technicians appearing during the performance as if there is no audience on the ‘other side’ of the stage, are especially ordinary in Pina Bausch’s oeuvre.

This, most probably inspired by Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, is one of Bausch’s hallmarks. However, the difference in Carrizo and Chartier’s mise-en-scène is that the décor was changed by the dancers in their costumes rather than the stage personnel. Those who roll the carpet that complement the floor of the previous work and unravel the carpet of the next work; those who remove the walls of the previous work and carry them backstage and install the walls for the next one; those who carry stage accessories and furniture to the stage are the dancers.

Another unprecedented choice of mise-en-scène is that Chartier’s The lost room doesn’t start immediately after the décor is installed. In the new décor, which looks like a hotel room, two dancers who is dressed up one as housekeeper and the other as a personnel manager checks the stage design. When the manager leaves the stage, the housekeeper takes out a drink from the fridge, picks a magazine from the table, sits on the bed and starts to enjoy herself. When the manager suddenly comes back to the room, the housekeeper hastily pulls herself together, checks the rooms once more, neatens the bed on which she sat and leaves the stage.

Just at that time the lights are dimmed, we hear the music, which started the first work -that of Carrizo’sagain. Light percolates from the peeping hole of one of the doors like blinking. When stage lights are turned on again, we understand that the new work actually starts: the door is opened and one of the protagonists enters inside.

THE MISSING DOOR, PHOTO: GABRIELA CARRIZO

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Carrizo and Chartier prefer to build an atmospheric whole which doesn’t lack humor and irony, where however an intensive spookiness, a weird uneasiness, and a melancholic loneliness prevails, out of loosely woven fragments that allow the audience to make up their own stories out of it through ‘peeping’.

By using the dancers not only as the protagonists but also as supporting characters and especially as stage technicians; by dividing the stage space into two: the part with the décor and the part outside of it; and by designing this transition mise-en-scène with a perfectly prepared choreography; Carrizo and Chartier astound, as the phrase goes, they perplex the audience in this indecisive world where they invite the audience.

II. In works of Peeping Tom: who is dead, who is alive, who is a djinn; who is good, who is evil; are the events expressed in a linear line or in zigzags; are the situations a reality, a dream or a nightmare; are the situations ‘happening’ in this world or in after-death; what kind of relationships are there between the protagonists; who is related to who; are the youth and the senility of the same protagonist played on the stage at the same time; why are the protagonists this much weird and disturbed; everything on the stage seems surreal, so why then the actors call each other by their real names?

Carrizo and Chartier doesn’t give any answer to these questions; they let everything ambiguous.

The works of Peeping Tom are full of those who disappear and show up behind the doors; those who curl up their bodies like an elastic ghost that came out from cartoons; those who bend their arms, hands, feet and limbs; those who ‘float’ in the air in a superhuman way;

PEEPING TOM, A LOUER, PHOTO: HERMAN SORGELOOS

those who can be here and there at the same time; those who disappear in the bed or in a couch; those who -if not lost- shrunk in the couch; those who come out of the bed; those who get lost in a side table of a bed.

The doors open and close by themselves; a woman comes out of the man sitting on the couch; a man and pieces of paper scatter into the door which is opened by the wind; a built-in cabinet appears behind when the door, which had just opened to a hollow space, is reopened; cabinets that keep lots of people who were stuck in them and fall out when its doors are opened; appliques that move along the walls on their own, wiping cloths escaping from the hands of their users; the figure in the painting on the wall comes to life; men which are in black suits and on four legs disperse behind the couches like cockroaches; a pregnant not-so-young women sooths the baby with the head of an adult who is crying under -yes, under- the caravan in the snow, and pushes it back to the snow; a young couple gets off the caravan, it seems that the woman wants to leave the man but she cannot, they entangle to each other, hit each other and then cuddle each other, they are the two halves of a part but they cannot fit together; a middle-aged lady whose profession in real life is a mezzo-soprano singer, performs Bellini’s Casta diva and after a while Pink Floyd’s Shine on you crazy diamond alive at the same level of mastery. In the works of Peeping Tom none of

these are found odd.

Carrizo and Chartier prefer to narrate stories, which don’t reveal themselves easily, loosely woven with vast emptiness; in fact there isn’t mostly even a clear-cut story. Their works include fragments that allow the audience to make up their own stories through ‘peeping’, and of course an atmospheric whole consisting of those fragments. This is such a dark atmosphere that doesn’t lack humor and irony, where however an intensive spookiness, a weird uneasiness, and a melancholic loneliness prevails.

EPILOG While watching a work of Peeping Tom as a spectator, you enter in a world, in an atmosphere, which you don’t easily encounter on stage. In the course of time that world absorbs you; you spent time there, you get lost, you get shivers and you are astounded. So much that, when it is over, you don’t even want to get out of your seat feeling awestruck. Often madly applauses and most of the audience who sink in their seats and don’t want to get up when the lights are on, indicate that you aren’t the only one feeling that way.

Peeping Tom deserves to be peeked!

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VISUAL ARTS

Fiona Banner and the bastard words Words Elif Bereketli

Fiona Banner is an artist who has been questioning the possibilities and limitations of language in various ways. The most crucial concept of her art is visualizing words and textualizing visuals. It was a part of this concept that she registered herself as a book in the British Library.

The power, the limitations and the plasticity of language bastardize the words, whilst liberating them for the very same reason.

FIONA BANNER , PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A PUBLICATION (ISBN 0-9548366-7-7) 2009

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FİONA BANNER, EVERY WORD UNMADE, 2007

1997. We are in an artist studio in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood, going through its most striking gentrification years back then. Just having finished her prestigious art education, the artist is incessantly and repetitively watching six Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War. She is examining every single detail in the movies; memorizing them, noting them down. She is ambitiously preparing for something.

Ten years later. It must be winter, or perhaps springtime. We are in the same studio. This time, the artist is accompanied by her guest: British actress Samantha Morton. Morton is posing nude for the artist. Her skin, the colour of a bruised peach.* Eyes like jewels.* The artist is working with the same enthusiasm behind the canvas. After working across from the nude model for long hours, the artist, Fiona Banner ends up with…

Guess what? A text of 965 words, 6316 characters. A text all in capital letters, called Mirror! Banner does not come up with a visual work, just like everyone else (possibly including Samantha Morton) would have imagined! Every move, every vibration in Morton’s body is reflected in the text. You might want to ask, then,

what came of the six Vietnam movies she watched meticulously in 1997? A brick-like book of 1000 pages called The Nam, in which she penned down every scene, every image, every detail in those movies! *** Why is this artist striving to transform the visual spheres, her departure points, into worlds made up of words? Later, Banner is going to turn her text Mirror into a performance in a gallery. In other words, in a gallery, in front of many people, Morton is going to reenact a text that took its inspiration from her and which she previously has not seen. Perhaps an incredible hint about Banner’s works lies in this performance. One wonders, what is the difference between what was seen in the Shoreditch studio that day, and what will be observed at the performance in the Whitechapel Gallery?

Is Morton’s skin really the colour of a bruised peach?

Are her eyes like jewels? What kind of differences and discrepancies do people see? What colour is Morton’s skin for them; or what do her eyes remind them of?

Or, watching Morton again, what does Banner think about the text she wrote? Even more questions could

be raised: How can words unfold images? Do two different people see the same thing(s) when they look at the same apple, for example? How can I make sure that the recipient of my words understand what exactly I am talking about? Searching a possible answer for these endless questions does not interest Banner much.

What is more appealing for Banner is the charm of wondering about these questions. “Personally I am as frustrated by language, as I am liberated by it. Exploring that is a motivation” she says.** Part of the Young British Artists group and a former Turner Prize nominee, Fiona Banner would create similar works in the following years. She will watch a porn movie and pen down every single detail she observes on a pink billboard. Or, she will stage the screenplay of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness written by Orson Welles, reversing all questions that characterize her work. She will create humongous sculptures of dots, she will frame punctuation marks, she will shape texts in bird or door forms or she will write a copyright page for a book; going somewhat outside of the norms. She will emboss a bound book, all pages blank, with simply the

FIONA BANNER, THE NAM, 1997

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terms Face, Spine and Back on their retrospective surfaces. She will frame the alphabet one by one. She will write the ISBN number of a book on a gravestone… Of course she will also produce other types of works, such as exhibiting fighter jets, or building a huge church bell in public. However, the x-factor of her work will always remain her concern with the playfulness between language, words and communication. The Bastard Word is a good example. Writing “The Bastard Word” on a gallery wall in enormous neon letters, she was perhaps giving the most neon message of her art: The words are bastards, which frustrate as much as liberate us. The power, the limitations and the plasticity of language bastardize the words, whilst liberating them for the very same reason. ***

“I’m working with language both outside of the literary/poetry tradition and outside of that conceptual art tradition … which desires immediate gratification” says Banner. She does not write any of her texts to be read. British novelist Geoff Dyer noted this years ago.

When Fiona Banner handed her book The Nam over to Dyer “just to have a look”, Dyer returned it saying that he does not think Banner wrote that text to be read, therefore he would prefer refusing to read it. Fiona’s works are artistic texts. Or are they, perhaps, artworks in a textual format which usually take the words as the subject matter and question language itself (therefore the power relations and language games)? Of course it is helpful to note again that the format is not always textual; it changes. Actually, at one point, her quest for format reached such a peak that she got herself regis-

tered as a book. Yes, Fiona Banner is also a book officially registered in British publishing records. Let’s try to adopt Fiona’s perspective for a second and think: If there was a book in which Fiona was the protagonist and if this book merely told the story of this 41-yearold British woman, how would the artist Fiona Banner visualize it? Perhaps she was thinking this way, or conceivably, thinking that every human being is also a book that could/would/may be written. Then she had her ISBN number tattooed on her back and registered herself as a book. Maybe it is meant to be a self portrait.

Maybe it is meant to be a present-day Dostoyevsky novel. But more than anything, it is meant to be a textual performance that signifies the playful nature of the words, that frustrate as much as liberate. *Taken from Mirror, by Fiona Banner.

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PREVIEW

I love you Taner Ceylan sets out his new I Love You series at London’s S2 gallery between September 22 and November 4. The series is made up of six paintings the artist produced in 2015 and 2016. Questioning the relationship between pleasure and pain by looking at the Baroque depictions of Christ, the paintings have been unexpected and surprising even for the artist himself who says he began working on the series without a plan. Below you will read some excerpts from the long conversation we had on concepts like submission, consent to pain and being human which eventually lead us to the turbulent times the world is passing through and art’s place in it.

Pleasure and pain Everything began when I saw Pedro de Mena’s wooden sculpture Christ as the Man of Sorrows he made in 1673. I found out that what I saw was a photograph of a sculpture at a Renaissance exhibition and there was such a tradition in early Renaissance period. They used to make very realistic wooden Christ sculptures.

There was something deeply moving in that sculpture. The pain and voluntary suffering. It was almost like he finds pleasure in pain. Look at how his hands are positioned, as if saying “come, tie me”; his half open lips, his eyes almost saying “some more”… Is God the one he totally surrenders? Yes, of course, but it seems that he also surrenders to the one who inflicts pain upon him.

Then, by pure coincidence, I watched a boxing match.

It is not something I particularly enjoy but in relation to my previous Boxer, I find the facial expressions really interesting. While watching the match I paused for just one second and yelled, “what is this?” That resigned look on his face was exactly the obverse of my previous boxer! Here he stops just for a second to take a breath and says “I surrender now, I am willing to go beyond.”

And while I am working on these paintings bombs explode around the world, people die and we watch. We cannot do anything. We also surrender. We don’t know

what will happen next. We don’t know what will happen to us. Praying is a good thing but we are too exhausted even for that.

This (Color of the Rose) is also one of those scenes; he has whipped and has been whipped. He suffers but that Renaissance charm of his hands is very aesthetic. By reflecting the body on the surface I transformed it into an object. As if he was a beautiful pink object on the table…

But in fact he is not an object, he is about to bleed. Just like the S&M scenes in sexual practice, he had himself whipped. A master and servant relationship that Mapplethorpe photographed a lot; like the dilemma of who gets the most pleasure, the one who inflicts pain or the one who suffers the pain? But there is consent. And this is our situation… All around the world.

Christ and the self-portrait While thinking about how to end the series, the idea of painting a self-portrait came about. Because as I was painting I was looking at Velazquez a lot, searching for paintings of Christ on the cross; what can I add on to them, how can I paint my own Christ… Dali made his Christ for instance; he literally took it to the top, by painting crosses high above looking down upon everything. This is what I could come up with (shows Levitation). Not Jesus Christ per se but a reference to him... Is he on the crucifix, does he ascend or descend?

And while I am painting all these, I am constantly struggling. I am killing Dalí, I am killing Vélazquez, I am trying to make a mark in art history. I am killing my beloved; I am grappling with my beloved. This is why I named this exhibition I Love You. The last painting of the series, my self-portrait is also called I Love You. This is how I concluded.

This is the depiction of a split-second within that entire struggle. The picture of a moment. Perhaps a couple of seconds after the whole thing, the victim lies on the ground, I run my eye over him and say “I am done with

you” but I don’t know what will happen next. Is he still striving for instance?

Living in Turkey Perhaps you don’t put into words and literally say things to yourself but your soul sees everything and the paintbrush never lies. If we were to talk today, it would and should not say that I don’t have much hope.

Everything has to be OK, and everything will be OK. Because there is no other way. The gallery that represents me tells me to go live in New York. Live in London… But when I go there, I stay for three weeks or a month and then I have to come back. My blood, my flesh is not compatible with the country. Even if you get the red carpet treatment you are a wanderer, a migrant.

This is your land. I love my land.

We should not forget this: Freedom is not something conditional or circumstantial. I would not feel freer than this if I were in Amsterdam or New York. I would lock myself in a hotel room with Twitter in my hand, looking up what happens in Turkey… Even if you are there, you are in fact here. And the same goes the other way. You feel free or you don’t. Your works may be political or not. But we should not forget that art itself is political. Even if you only paint flowers and butterflies, your mere existence outside the system is political. It is political because you say “I do what I love and what I want”. Therefore artists who are honest to them will continue their work.

Aesthetics and universality I describe art as something that is able to regenerate itself on any ground regardless of its content. Perhaps a little too utopian but this is how I see it. If someone living in Japan, someone living in New York, in Turkey or in Africa looks at the same artwork and feels similar things, this is a valid standpoint to me. An artist must keep his distance with borders, nations, nationalism and many other things for that matter. One of my

TANER CEYLAN, LEVITATION, 2016, OIL ON CANVAS, 210X150 CM

Words Müjde Bilgütay

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TANER CEYLAN WITH HIS PAINTING NAMED I LOVE YOU, OIL ON CANVAS, 140X200 CM

And while I am painting all these, I am constantly struggling. I am killing Dalí, I am killing Vélazquez, I am trying to make a mark in art history.

paintings might one day be hanged on a wall in Mars, why not? Look at Gerhard Richter’s landscapes and abstracts… Who can deny them? Similarly, when you look at Delvaux or Vermeer or a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph, do you see anything local? When you look at Nan Goldin’s work do you see human drama or local elements? That’s the whole issue.

There are some invariable states of being human and I try to capture them. But of course the circumstances they live in have an impact on people, especially sensitive people. Goya lost his mind for a reason. Guernica was made for a reason. It is difficult to detach yourself.

But this is the greatest of all traps for me. Perhaps the worst trap an artist can fall into is the happiness and

pain that surrounds him. Because art has its own independent path, it follows a route. And it should. Because, look, these circumstances will change, won’t they? They have always changed.

Therefore you need works that are independent of the circumstances, works that will be significant even after everything changes. Aesthetic and plastic values are extremely important. Referring to Guernica again, when you look at the painting you see the rhythm, the figures, the balance of light and dark, the grandeur, the internal movement of the painting… Looking at these, the subject matter is the least of your worries. It is left way at the back of everything. When you work out the dynamics of art, you can fit anything in it. For instance I would

love to live in a David Hockney painting. Wouldn’t it be great? Being in David Hockney’s atmosphere, in a world he created would be wonderful. This is what I’m talking about. Essentially what Hockney created was a room and everything that comes in to that room takes on the room’s light and colors. It is important to see what kind of an atmosphere it is or which elements it is made up of.

Don’t give in to the subject matter, use it.

S2, Paul Kasmin Gallery and international presence We’d been talking with S2 for 3 years to organize an exhibition. Also we’ve been working with Paul Kasmin Gallery for 3 years. You know I have always been in a very positive relationship with Sotheby’s auction house, we broke records, my name was mentioned together

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with their name a lot. On the other hand my relationship with Paul Kasmin has been an open and constructive one, so we evaluated the offer coming from S2 together and decided to do it. In that sense the support of Paul Kasmin Gallery as my new representative is important. In the meantime they brought Fru Thorlstrup from Haunch of Venison as the director of S2 and I really love her. Her persistence and belief was also important in this exhibition. But we didn’t plan any themes or anything beforehand.

They were surprised when they saw the paintings but after all, they know who they are working with. This series was intended particularly for London. Perhaps it might be a little difficult to exhibit in New York for

instance. They are more conservative in terms of eroticism or nudes. These paintings are meant for London.

I have an artist’s ego, a powerful ego, I don’t deny it.

I want to be seen abroad, I want to be in the greatest exhibitions and museums of the world. Who will help me do that? Let’s be honest. I was receiving serious offers from abroad and I thought I had to be out there, even if it’s the cheapest gallery in New York, because the chances of being seen by a curator working at MoMA for instance are higher. Even if it were a no name gallery, he would see me on the window as he walks from work to home, sipping his coffee. But luckily I am now represented by a very good gallery (Paul Kasmin). And it has proven to be a very vise choice. Because as an artist I

demand service. Look, you work on a painting for three months and when you sell it you cut the price in two and give one half to the gallery. In return, you expect service. Hanging paintings on the wall… I can hang my paintings all around İstanbul if I want to and I can sell them myself. But if you are the one who does the selling, you have to give me some serious services in return. I throw my heart and soul into a work with a tiny hair pencil in my hand and in return I expect what I deserve.

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TANER CEYLAN, RESIGNATION, 2015, OIL ON CANVAS, 140X200 CM

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Art has its own independent path, it follows a route. And it should. Because, look, these circumstances will change, won’t they? They have always changed

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CHINA

China, 1453 and urban transformation vision Words Müjde Bilgütay

WEST BUND WALKING TRAIL

I’ve given up following the state of affairs in the country for some time (very depressing) however my own agenda continues to be shaken up by the hail of news coming from China. Such news may come through in an article or an exhibition or directly from friends saying “I was in Shanghai the other day, the Chinese have nailed it!” The issue is urban transformation and in fact it is not something very far from our own agenda.

The exhibition Zài Xing Tu Mù. Sixteen Chinese Museums, Fifteen Chinese Architects which was opened at the Aedes Architectural Forum in Berlin at the end of August, reflects on the role museums as motors of progress within the socio-political and cultural landscape in China today (ends in October 13). Art institutions have been the agents of urban transformation across the world but when talking about China, the scale of the issue becomes enormous (the sheer number of new museums, galleries and fairs is jaw dropping.) The exhibition focuses on the “museum boom” that has taken hold of China for some time and its impact on the society and urban public spaces. The exhibition is significant in the sense that it questions how museums shape the political and cultural landscape of China with their physical and curatorial positioning, brings up notions like identity, cultural heritage and locality, and more importantly, in a time when the art market is bubbling but the public support for art institutions is scarce, it

draws attention to the influence of private patrons on the culture and art scene.

Xuhui Riverside or the West Bund is the newest and hottest “art district” of Shanghai. Of course cities are not empty canvases and approaching urban transformation like a Bob Ross* painting ( “Let’s make an art district here and put a nice little contemporary art museum there”) is open to questioning. As Chinese artist Zhou Tiehai, an important actor in the realization of West Bund project said, “usually an art zone is started spontaneously by artists themselves.” However beyond being a venture to increase the value of surrounding business centers and houses to be built, the transformation of West Bund is a preconceived part of a larger plan on how Shanghai should position herself in the world. From this standpoint, questions about identity, cultural heritage, the city’s original texture and the dominance of big capital (and its worldview) in cultural landscape gain even more significance. On the other hand it is also possible to say “let’s build a mall here and some high-rise residences there” and settle with it like we do.

Shanghai and İstanbul have a lot in common. Both cities want to become centers of gravity within their greater regions, “heavy weight” metropolises where the world capital rolls in, both are laden with history, both have been very important ports and trade centers for

centuries, both are very crowded, cosmopolitan and chaotic. Therefore while watching the transformation of West Bund, an 11.5 kilometers long old industrial district at the banks of the Huangpu River, I can’t help but wonder what will be the destiny of İstanbul’s Maslak Atatürk Automobile Industry District for instance.

Perhaps it was this reference to industrial districts to be developed but, while thinking about who should I talk to on West Bund, I was haunted by the image of Ali Ağaoğlu the king of all contractors, on his prancing white horse in the commercial of his Maslak 1453 project. (T24 columnist Cengiz Özdemir had written a delicious piece about the conquest iconography in that commercial.) So I said “right to the eye of the dragon!” and decided to talk directly with the West Bund Development Group, the contracting company. The “dragon” in question here is a government venture cooperating with private sector. Not something very fashionable in liberal terms we love so much but it seems that the (social) state’s hand and budget was deemed inevitable in order to duly realize a project like West Bund.

Scheduled to finalize in 2018, the project is implemented within the framework of a 2011 decree of the Ninth Party Congress of Xuhui District which foresees the reorganization of 11.5 kilometers long shoreline as a “culture corridor” while developing the inner areas as

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VİEW OF WEST BUND FROM XUHUI RIVER

office and housing complexes. Within this context, the Oriental DreamWorks was established in 2012. It was the one of the largest China-foreign cultural project invested in Shanghai’s history. The Long Museum and the Yuz Museum signed contract the same year as the first global art institutions joining in.

Hosting the private collection of Mr. Budi Tek, a Chinese-Indonesian businessman and an important art collector, the Yuz Museum opened in 2014 in an old airplane hangar renovated by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. The striking glass covered atrium of the museum boasts a Maurizio Cattelan installation while the permanent exhibition features innovative artworks that could fit only inside a hangar, such as Xu Bing’s Tobacco Project and Freedom by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Since its opening the museum has been able to maintain its momentum with striking exhibitions and an exciting program such as the Giacometti retrospective which was organized in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation in March and the upcoming Picasso exhibition in conjunction with the Picasso Museum in Paris. Hosting the private collection of nearly 2000 pieces of Chinese collectors Wang Wei and her husband (a former taxi driver who became a billionaire financier) Liu Yiqian, the Long Museum also opened the same year. (The couple made history by purchasing a Ming era porcelain cup for $36 million in a Hong

Kong auction in April 2014 and a 600 years old silk tapestry for $45 million a few months later.) Located on an old coal wharf at the riverfront offered by the Xuhui district government the museum building is designed

by Shanghai architecture firm Atelier Deshaus.

When I asked why they bothered to develop an art district instead of building luxury malls and skyscrapers everywhere, the Deputy Director of West Bund Development Group Anda Chen answered with the starch of a social state public institution: “To position the West Bund as culture-oriented is a result of correctly estimating and following the social economic trends.

Art market is one of the representative industries of the cultural industry. In recent years, China’s art market has seen an unusual fast development. And Shanghai is a significant player in the global art market. As the public gradually nurture the tastes for culture and art and their consumption power comes to a higher level, a culture-oriented development concept is indeed a rational decision.”

In order to pursue and maintain this rational decision however, the public needs a spur to be drawn to the new district. With this in mind, the first West Bund Music Festival was launched in 2012, followed by West Bund Architecture and Contemporary Art Biennale in 2013 and West Bund Art and Design Exhibition in 2014 under the direction of Chinese artist artist Zhou

Tiehai (who is known with his Camel Joe portraits).

But perhaps one of the most critical turning points (after the joining in of Long and Yuz museums) in the establishment of West Bund as an arts hub has been the opening of a new bonded art warehouse two years ago, allowing collectors and museums to store art tax-free and take pieces out for up to six months at a time for exhibitions. The warehouse, called Le Freeport West Bund, has been a game-changer for Zhou Tiehai’s West Bund Art & Design Fair, which has attracted a number of top international galleries since its inception, including White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery and Ota Fine Arts. The fair now looks likely to emerge as a successor to the SH Contemporary, once Shanghai’s premier art fair, which has struggled with mismanagement and customs issues since it began in 2007 and had to be cancelled in 2015. With the opening of Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Liu Heung Shing’s Shanghai Center of Photography (SCoP), the first museum in the city focusing solely on photography and the West Bund Culture & Art Pilot Zone, West Bund seems to have taken off. Let’s wish the same for our development projects. * Bob Ross (d. 1995) was an American painter, art instructor, and television host. He was best known as the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States, and also aired in Canada, Latin America and Europe.

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READING

On contemporary art in the 90s Words Merve Ünsal

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Galip investigates the disappearance of his wife Rüya in Celal’s columns published on Milliyet newspaper, as well as their then ambiguous relationship. He seeks to find the projection of real life in the words on the pages, and on people’s faces. Perhaps, reality is much more real than representation. The state of researching and seeking truth in representation always stands by the side of my mind when I interview the producers of the 90s. If were are not comfortable where we are right now, would it be possible to find the source of this discomfort in some missed opportunities in the 90s?

What could the non-established infrastructures tell us about the established ones? What kind of hints could failures or discontinued utopias be carrying about the current situation?

We might be of the same opinion that contemporary art in Turkey gained a remarkable acceleration since the 90s. There are established structures: galleries, institutions, and collections (it is even possible to talk about ‘public’ collections; see The Collection of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, published with the initiative of Abdullah Gül, sent out to businessmen, yet impossible to be found in bookstores). On the other side, looking at the works in the 90s, it seems like the political, and social ‘vital’ collaborations are facing extinction along with this institutionalization.

Dealing with contemporary art in Turkey, or producing contemporary art, when you look around and try to understand the slippery ground, the institutional and personal censorships, and you start to probe the ordinariness of the exhibitions and the agendas, the hints take you straight back to the 90s. This shall also be perceived as a field research beyond being a historical, and linear study of statement.

As is the case in all spatial, and temporal junctions, to make statements about the 90s, is to attempt a not so proper historiography by bringing the affinities, the relationships, the interactions, and grudge together. Most of the creative of the 90s are today still alive; some are active in education or art institutions or in galleries. Is it possible to talk about things that have not completed their loop, that have not ended, that are not used up? In a country where the contemporary is marked by precarious political conditions, is it possible to achieve historiography in a way associated with the daily life, even if around a periphery such as contemporary art?

If we start by accepting these impossibilities, it is possible to deter that a horizontal energy lies at the base of the 90s. Sezgin Boynik, in a text where he mentions Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin’s, suggests that we need to return back to conceptual methods ever present in art itself instead of sociology’s cognitive practices. “If art is the transformation (an analysis) of the improvised dynamics of the social, is it possible to talk about the contemporariness of art once these dynamics are altered?” Just like Marx had underlined, when the dynamics causing art to become disappear, would art still

carry a meaning?

Looking at Lars Bang Larsen’s The Long Nineties, the nostalgia of ‘unlimited criticism and productivity’ interrupted by rapid institutionalization, carries hints about the Turkey of the 90s. According to Larsen, there are two things that happened in the last ten years: First, the social dimension of art came into prominence (this can be described as socialness, participant, and collective production); secondly, the alterations in the art market, and the methods of circulation had people in different engagement levels socialize in a dynamic way.

Larsen’s argument is that this tight socialization is a pre-condition in the rapid institutionalization. Right here, he reminds us Foucault’s description of neoliberalism: “The sociological government; in this model, the economic, rather than the social and the cultural, is motivated for competition, and commerce.” We may come to the following conclusion: The practices trying to make ties with the social in the 90s, and the art infrastructure stepping forward, are centerely tied to each other and not just structurally.

After having deciphered the questions in my mind, I would like to start to mention of DAGS, short for Disiplinlerarası Genç Sanatçılar Derneği* (Interdisciplinary Young Artists Foundation), one of the significant entities of the 90s. Founded in 1996, DAGS is an artists’ organization that was active for two years, and had about 100 members at some point in its timeline.

Behind the foundation, lies the reflection on what could artists do when they gather up together. Opening up a different track for young artists, –which can maybe be characterized as a parent perspective- although became problematic with time because it retrained a conductive system to be formed in between generations; it still is a ‘well-intentioned’ approach. Initiated by the academician-artist majority at the Plastic Arts Foundation in order to encourage the following generation, the formation receives more and more members in time by being in contact with those artists they perceive to be close.

Embodied –in a manner of speaking- by a space collectively rented on the top floor of Rumeli Han, this state of being side-by-side, of communication was at the forefront. The question that this youth collective established in an area with no institutional infrastructure, asked was what could happen when production was to happen when they all came together. The production medium of this experience-oriented organization founded with no theoretical infrastructure by artists mostly trained in fine arts was performance. Especially concentrated on performance in the public space, DAGS tried to create a place on the street, to reflect on production with the street. Trying to raise funds to build up the frame for its activities, DAGS adopted a ‘hands-on’ production percept by translating the texts of thinkers, and art historians such as Rosalind Krauss, Susan Sontag, etc. in Turkish.

A point that needs to be underlined here is that the relationship with the street is not fictionalized with an

ideological reason. Its distinction from the stage arts being the lack of audience in the street performances is significant for DAGS. The transparent boundary between ‘accidentally’ watching, or being a part of, and the realization of a performance as an event, is more meaningful when one thinks of DAGS’s intricate relationship with the Fine Arts Academies.

The participation of a majority of the members to the meetings, the active working conditions of the board members, the fact that more than 1000 people has seen the DAGS exhibition at the Ataturk Culture Center – considering the communication methods of the time- are signs that a certain acceleration was attained. Seen our already hesitant relationship with the street further poignantly losing quality following Gezi, and the silence before the storm that never arrives in urban squares where paranoia reigns, under the light of the political and social conditions of the 90s, it is an organization reminding us that when artists get together, they can execute a range of motion. Getting to a point where we are get used to and further are thankful to an approach exhibiting mostly photographs, and plastic objects at the 2013 Istanbul Biennial, and identifying the indoor spaces as public solely by removing the entrance fee, the fact that at the time, every week there was a group artists meeting up is like cold water hitting on our faces. What we really need is maybe to envisage creating a space where we can research what artists can do with artists, for artists, and the transforming potential of the relationship between art and the street, and the daily life; it is the right time to re-think about an independent association where artists can create themselves production spaces via horizontal organization, and they can support each other. *Founded in 1996, by the majority of the Plastic Arts Foundations’ younger team, during the period of Hüsamettin Koçan, DAGS is perhaps the first and the only artist organization founded by the young.

Working for the foundation for two years, the team later produced projects under the name of Interdisciplinary Young Artists Initiative. Along with Alican Yaraş (President of the 1st period), Nadi Güler, Fulya Köseoğlu, Hakan Onur, Mürteza Fidan, Didem Dayı, Genco Gülan as founding members, Elif Çelebi, İnsel İnal (President of the 2nd period), Gaye Yazıcıtunç, Arcan Kıral, Murat Işık, Funda Peşken, Halil Altındere, Vahıt Tuna were among the other names who were active. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Perforance Days (AKM, Darphane, and Babillion), Manat Exhibition, and certain workshops were organized, Genç Etkinlik exhibitions were supported, certain art readings were performed open to public, and translations of certain articles were published in the printed brochures. Working as a NGO, the foundation was invited at the period’s Artists’ Congress, and signed a memorandum as one of the components. (http://disiplinlerarasigencsanatcilardernegi.blogspot.com.tr)

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FAIRS

Worldwide fairs While everyone is plannig this winter’s travel destinations, we compiled for you a selection of art, design and antique fairs all over the world and made a calendar. Number of all kind of fairs is increasing, even TEFAF - one of the oldest and finest art fairs of the world - is preparing for its first New York edition this year... For our upcoming issue we are preparing a dossier for you about this matter. Why we need so much fair and what are the rules of the big competition in order to attract more people on the global platform?

9 - 11 September 2016

Cosmoscow (Moscow)

10 - 18 September 2016

Bienale des Antiquaires (Paris)

22 - 28 September 2016

Expo Chicago

3 - 9 October 2016

The Pavilion of Arts and Design (London)

6 - 9 October 2016

Frieze (London)

6 - 9 October 2016

Frieze Masters (London)

20 - 23 October 2016

Fiac (Paris)

21 - 26 October 2016

TEFAF (New York)

3 - 6 November 2016

Ci (Istanbul)

4 - 6 November 2016

Artissima (Torino)

10 -13 November 2016 30 November - 4 December 2016

Paris Photo Design Miami

1 - 4 December 2016

Nada Miami Beach

11 - 15 January 2017

LA Art Show

12 - 15 January 2017

Art Stage Singapore

26 - 29 January 2017

Art Los Angeles Contemporary

27 - 30 January 2017

Arte Fiera Bologna

2 - 5 February 2017

India Art Fair (New Delhi)

8 - 12 February 2017

Zona Maco (Mexico City)

16 - 20 February 2017

Brussels Art Fair

1 - 5 March 2017

The Art Show (New York)

2 - 5 March 2017

The Armory Show (New York)

5 - 18 March 2017

Art Dubai

10 - 17 March 2017

TEFAF (Maastricht)

22 - 27 March 2017

Salon du Dessin Paris

31 March - 2 April 2017 6 - 9 April 2017 26 - 29 April 2017

Miart Milano SP Arte (Sao Paulo) Art Cologne

5 - 7 May 2017

Frieze (New York)

5 - 7 May 2017

Nada (New York)

13 - 18 June 2017

Design Miami Basel

13 - 18 June 2017

Liste (Basel)

29 June - 5 July 2017

Masterpiece (London)

TAR H E KAR I A M A Ş L Ş AL R İ S L