Art
Istanbul Biennial: the new art of protest
Artists at this year’s Biennial are turning Istanbul’s public spaces into political forums. It’s no coincidence. Many pieces address the mass demonstrations and social unrest in Turkey.
A green ball pounds against a concrete wall – over and over again. It’s a giant wrecking ball that greets visitors at the entrance of this year’s Biennial in Istanbul. With the installation, Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen references the city’s urban transformation. This echoes the sentiments of curator Fulya Erdemci.
Under the event’s slogan, “Mom, am I a barbarian?” the “oppressed and excluded in society” should be picked up through art, said Erdemci.
Public space as a political forum is a focus of this year’s exhibition concept. And there couldn’t be a more current topic.
Mass protests re-ignited
As the initial Biennial tourists strolled through downtown Istanbul, they were surprised with a fresh wave of protests. Teargas and water cannons were even being used against the protesters.
One of the reasons behind the renewed public anger was the death of 22-year-old Ahmet Atakan, who had been killed while demonstrating in the Turkish city of Antakya. Witnesses and relatives of the young man blame the police and say he was hit in the head with a teargas cartridge. Atakan’s death spurred new protests in cities around the country. According to media reports, 40 people were arrested in Istanbul alone, representing a new wave of protests after the previous mass demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.
Ayse Erkmen’s wrecking ball mirrors the changes in Istanbul
It was because of these protests that Fulya Erdemci’s initial exhibit plans were scrapped. For about two years, Istanbul’s public spaces had been slated for the art of the 88 international artists: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, city districts under threat of demolition, endangered natural parks, and all of these places have now suddenly become the focus of national discussion.
For 14 of the projects, Erdemci had applied for permits at Istanbul municipalities and at the Federal Ministry of Culture but never received a reply. The Istanbul municipalities supported the crackdown by police against demonstrators, and they were criticized during the protests as a result.
Curator Fulya Erdemci spontaneously withdrew her applications to five exhibition spaces in public places.
“We don’t want to work with the same authorities who are trying to suppress this peaceful movement, the voice of the people,” Fulya Erdemci said in an expression of solidarity. Her withdrawal sends a strong artistic and political message, she added.
Parks as a political forum
Through the Biennial, international artists can participate in the protests. German artist Christoph Schäfer is one of them. His drawings touch on the importance of parks as political forums. Istanbul’s Gezi Park is an especially good example of politics in public spaces. For hours, students, artists, professors and doctors sat together in Gezi Park to discuss politics – or simply make music.
“As a result, the public debate and the political aspect take on a completely different quality,” Schäfer said.
Christoph Schäfer’s sketches focus on Gezi Park
One of Schäfer’s drawings shows a park in Hamburg. For 15 years, Schäfer has participated in “Park Fiction,” an artistic and socio-political project in a Hamburg park that serves as a prime example of public art. Through their own ideas and drawings, nearby residents have a say in the park’s design. Out of solidarity, the park was renamed overnight to “Gezi Park Fiction.”
“Political movements in other countries could learn a lot from the movement in Istanbul because the protests were done in a smart and clever way,” said the artist.
The Biennial is not a test of “civil disobedience,” as it’s been portrayed in media, said Schäfer, but a reflection of the events in Istanbul. “In the exhibition all the sore points are addressed. But because people today create their own political platforms, the Biennial is no longer the only bright spot,” he added.
For him, the Biennial’s importance has diminished because the people’s anger has already erupted into the street.
Erdem Gündüz, center, initiated the silent protests on Taksim Square
Art of the silent protest
Turkish artist and choreographer Erdem Gündüz can also be found at the Biennial. During the summer protests, Gündüz provided a political platform to demonstrators: He initiated a silent, standing protest on Taksim Square, naming the event “Standing Man.” Hundreds of thousands imitated the move and joined him, standing for hours on the public square. It was a creative alternative to noisy, mass demonstrations. At the Biennial he’s conducting readings on various topics, including about the people in Gezi Park.
“Art isn’t so distant from real life,” said Günüz. “Just like the standing man. Later, people understood that art is important because a man did something like that, and he’s an artist.”
Art against construction plans
Alongside Gezi Park, the financial crisis is an important topic of the exhibition, said Andrea Phillips, co-curator of the Biennial. At the moment it’s especially interesting in Istanbul because the city’s economy is growing. Nevertheless, there are problems with capitalism in Istanbul, added the Brit.
“You only have to look at the housing situation in Turkey,” Phillips said. “This problem also inspired the protests. Many buildings in downtown, also close to the Biennial, will be demolished and replaced by new luxury apartments or shopping centers.”
Serkan Taycan’s photos document many construction projects in Istanbul, helping citizens visualize the changes
Serkan Taycan is one of the artists that address the controversial construction project. The photographer selected a 60-kilometer (37-mile) path, which runs from the north-south axis of the Black Sea to downtown on the Marmara Sea. The path follows the construction plans of Istanbul: the Istanbul Canal as a second Bosphorus River, the third bridge over the Bosphorous, the third airport.
“This greatly affects us residents in Istanbul. With this path, I want to give people the opportunity to experience the transformation,” said Taycan, adding that in five years the path will no longer exist in its current form.
With that, Taycan struck a nerve in the Turkish folk. The demonstrators in Gezi Park have often described the construction plans of the Turkish government as “megalomaniac” and “unnecessary.” Even economic experts criticize the government’s construction plans and say they would rather see an investment in the education and health sectors.
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Istanbul Biennial: Solidarity with Gezi Park protesters
Public space as political forum
Long before the Gezi park protests, the motto of the 13th Biennial in Istanbul, “Mom, am I a barbarian?” had already been determined. When demonstrations broke out, however, many in Istanbul’s art scene took part. The events dominate this year’s Biennial.
Art for the people
Through projects like Serkan Taycan’s path or Ayse Erkmen’s wrecking ball installation, the people of Turkey seem to feel understood. “The people who live in Turkey are having a tough time right now,” said a young, Turkish Biennial visitor. “We are happy that artists are devoting time to current issues in human rights and even economic issues.”
The Biennial doesn’t end until October 20, but its resonance with the visitors is already noticeable.
“These exhibits are being viewed with a closeness that isn’t noticeable at every exhibition,” said German artist Christoph Schäfer.
A Swedish visitor traveled to Istanbul just to see the Biennial and made a comparison: “I’m not actually interested in political art, but I’ve been to many Biennials, even the one in Venice,” he said. “I am surprised at how interesting this one is, especially since political events had overturned plans so spontaneously.”
DW.DE
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BERNARDO RICCI ARMANI
I’m just back home from a Sunday spent around the Istanbul Biennial 2013 (13th Edition). I took the opportunity to visit two venues (the Antrepo, close to the Istanbul Modern, and at the Galata Greek Primary School) and to shoot some photographs.
I found some very interesting pieces, both from local artists and from international ones. I just propose here some shots taken around, without any conceit of having fully covered the exhibition (which is big and located in many different venues). But I recommend everyone (at least, in Istanbul) to dedicate one day to this event, because it is a great opportunity to get the touch of contemporary art.
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Issue 143 November-December 2011 
Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)
Antrepo no. 3 and 5, Istanbul, Turkey
Raymond Pettibon, Selection of works on paper, 2011, Installation view as part of ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’
The curators of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, have deflated the overblown biennial format, tossed out locality as a topic of debate and funnelled an entire biennial – comprising five group shows and 55 solo exhibitions – into two waterside warehouses. Sidelining what they call ‘nostalgic or romantic’ views of the city as a crossroads between East and West (a tendency of earlier editions), they have declared allegiance to ‘aesthetic concerns’: put that art back where it belongs.
Their title, ‘Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)’, plays on the titles of the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres and is echoed in those of the individual group shows, each of which adapts the name of one of his works. This pairing – a neutral signifier plus a parenthetical nod to a field of meaning – crisply announces that meaning is mutable, and that the biennial’s business commences from there. Works by González-Torres himself are absent but for a single wall text in each group show that describes each piece; Hoffmann and Pedrosa suggest that his symbolic role should be thought of no differently than more typical uses of literature, music or political events as curatorial inspiration.
Just how little these group exhibitions depart from their allegedly flexible premises is the biennial’s major disappointment. Each grouping strikes a single note over and over again, swelling into a sort of dogmatic march where guns are bad toys for bad boys, in ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’; homosexuality is about men having sex with men, in ‘Untitled (Ross)’; and more than a dozen art works feature the written page as a means to address the historical record, in ‘Untitled (History)’. Still, the group shows are nuanced by the solo exhibitions that cluster around them in a warren of free-standing white cubes designed by the Tokyo-based architect Ryue Nishizawa. These demonstrate a higher sensitivity to the intersecting politics of geography, gender and media.
A series of revelatory rooms featuring the work of women artists from the 1920s to the ’70s is the biennial’s major strength. Peruvian Teresa Burga’s cataloguing of her body’s form and functions, Elizabeth Catlett’s mid-century wood-cuts of African-American sharecroppers, and Turkish sculptor Füsun Onur’s canvases and small plaster works, lay the formal ground for a biennial that seeks to counter the bombast of recent mega-exhibitions – not least Hou Hanru’s 2007 Istanbul Biennial – with a quieter programme of photography, works on paper and textiles. (There are almost no videos or large installations, and hardly a hint of the Internet or events of the last decade; next door to the biennial venues, Istanbul Modern’s flashy ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’ is a study in contrasts.) This focus also carries the historical weight of life under authoritarian regimes, a significant issue in Turkey where, over the last decade, efforts to recover the country’s forgotten 20th-century artists have multiplied. Geta Brătescu’s ‘Vestigii’ (Vestiges, 1978), patches of layered fabric scraps hovering between abstraction and figuration, came out of her experiences working in rural Communist Romania. Yıldız Moran Arun’s black and white photographs of 1950s Anatolia – villagers, camels, a horse-drawn cart parading film posters through a village – provide little-seen images of Cold War-era Turkey, where a booming film industry played a major role in international relations.
‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’, in which the few women artists included produce domesticated testimonies to violence largely perpetrated by men, makes for a surprising shift from the deft selections and thoughtful gender politics of many of the solo shows. Rózsa Polgár and Ella Littwitz present a blanket and a sheet riddled with bullet holes, respectively; Jazmín López films violent child’s play. Iconic photojournalism (Mathew Brady’s American Civil War images, Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, Weegee’s New York homicides) sits uneasily alongside Raymond Pettibon’s drawings, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Mat Collishaw’s emblematic Bullet Hole (1988). The fact that this is one of the only rooms in which American and British artists dominate already signals the difficulty of treating ‘gun violence’ as an invariable concept in contexts with wildly different political and legislative histories. In this sense, ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’ hews close to the curatorial strategy used by Hoffmann in his trilogy of illustrative exhibitions about canonical American novels at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco (2008–11). Here, a range of art works are forced to conform to a narrative pattern where ‘death by gun’ aborts the action, but we are denied anything further, including responsibility.
‘Untitled (Abstraction)’ pushes a programme of injecting Modernist abstraction with life. In a winning grouping, a series of photographs taken from the interior of a glass box with a black line around its centre,‘Drawing with the Camera – Circle in the Square’ (1970), by the little-known Hungarian conceptualist Dóra Maurer, is matched with Edward Krasinski’s signature line of bluetape (1981); Alexander Gutke’s Singularity (2010), a 16mm film spooled between the corners of the space, frames the ensemble. Grids of fruit, hair, faces and ants are the less felicitous results of a literalizing impulse that unites all of the five group exhibitions.(Though this emphasis on clarity also produces wonderfully lucid exhibition texts.) The writtenpage is redacted, shredded, photographed, stamped and rolled into pearls in ‘Untitled (History)’, strangely blind to the alternative ways that history is written today (from WikiLeaks to Twitter), or to the potential of an exhibition to interrogate specifically visual (rather than textual) strategies of chronicling events. In ‘Untitled (Passport)’, maps are rotated, voided, cut up, redrawn and woven into rugs, often by Palestinians. But American artists – including Tom Burr, Collier Schorr and Colter Jacobsen – get the lease on AIDS and gay sex, with a strong representation in ‘Untitled (Ross)’, where a promising interpretation of González-Torres’s 1991 candy pour (a portrait of his late partner Ross Laycock) gets lost in a slew of beds and bodies. From this room, Kutluğ Ataman’s jarse (Jersey, 2011) – an altered military health report that catalogues his long-standing interest in men – was a major preoccupation for the Turkish media, building on the momentum of the coach of Turkish football team Trabzonspor’s recent denunciation of Ataman’s 2004 work Küba as ‘terrorist propaganda’. The mainstream newspaper Hürriyet listed jarse as a ‘must-see’, alongside an advisory for local school teachers to sign up for a biennial educators’ conference. Turkey has been relatively at ease with alternative sexualities for some time, and it’s disappointing to see an opportunity missed to push public discussion into more complicated territory.
In the solo shows, photography abets a number of projects that claim happy participation in the cult of bygone a look. Simryn Gill’s entropic photographs of abandoned housing near Kuala Lumpur; Akram Zaatari’s recovered Beirut studio portraits; and Jonathas de Andrade’s and Marwa Arsanios’s snapshot-based investigations of tropical Modernism continue a genre that romanticizes histories of Modernism ‘at the margins’. Often these say more about the anxieties of current generations – distant enough to appreciate enduring relics, fraught by their impending disappearance – than the ultimate aim of all this preservation. Another strain of work melds craft, humour and stark political messages. Pieces by the Ardmore Ceramic Art Studio, a South African collective, are partially produced by all of its members, carrying the marks of many hands’ work in the service of a community: their narrative texts and bright animated figures are geared towards HIV/AIDS awareness (and is one of the only examples in the biennial of social practice).
Hoffmann and Pedrosa have deliberately put a full-stop after the last half-decade of the Istanbul Biennial’s history. (The only accompanying event was a conference in November 2010 that convened former curators, resulting in the publication Remembering Istanbul.) Following Charles Esche and Vasıf Kortun’s 2005 edition, ‘Istanbul’, recent iterations have gradually seeped from the city’s historical core into its old apartment buildings, abandoned factories and busy commercial districts, tracing a partial history of Istanbul’s modernization along the way. Although Hoffmann and Pedrosa have adopted the museum’s guise and discarded the habitual euphemistic ‘engagement’ with the city itself, they haven’t pressured the biennial format beyond recognition. Rather, they have made use of its sheer volume and international pull to enact some tried and true agendas, recovering unknowns and diagnosing shared impulses. Unlike many former curators, they have the luxury of an established international viewership and a local audience educated at the biennial itself – last week, for the first time, I overheard it called ‘mainstream’.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
©Galerie Barbara Weiss/Galeri Mana
‘bangbangbang’ (2013) by Ayse Erkmen
When a country is in the throes of political crisis, what position should its cultural guardians take? To ignore the situation smacks of fiddling while Rome burns. To embrace it is to risk myriad ignominies.
Fulya Erdemci, the curator of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, chose the latter option. Her exhibition, entitled Mom, Am I a Barbarian?, took as its theme the role of public space in art and society. To encourage a rapport with Istanbul’s population, the Biennial would be free of charge and there would be displays in public spaces.
As such, it could not be more relevant to a city that has been rocked by civil protest all summer. Triggered by the government’s plans to develop areas such as Gezi Park that are dear to the city’s collective heart, the demonstrations ballooned into a discontent provoked by fears among secular Turks that the ruling AK party wished to Islamicise their culture. The government responded with tear gas and water cannons. Hundred of people were injured and several killed.
Erdemci and her team supported the protesters (her catalogue essay exalts “this feeling of incredible solidarity and joy”). Nevertheless, by the time the Biennial opened last week, questions that provoke controversy during peaceful times – who do you choose? whose money do you take? where do you install? – had became loaded with more tension than one exhibition could comfortably bear.
In truth, Erdemci made an effort to confront the complex systems of power that underpin the urban transformation that has radically altered Istanbul’s infrastructure. This spring, she instigated a public lecture programme with the aim of examining how “publicness can be reclaimed as an artistic and political tool in the context of global financial imperialism and local social fracture”.
Of course, without “global financial imperialism” the contemporary art world would struggle to keep its show on the road. Nowhere is this more true than in Istanbul, where the collecting habits of a handful of wealthy dynasties has fuelled an explosion in the art market that means the city hosts two contemporary art fairs (which have been battling it out in the courts), several hundred galleries and a clutch of privately owned museums. Inevitably, it is often the same families whose conglomerates profit from the modernisation of the city.
©Servet Dilber
‘Material Inconstancy’ (2012) by Héctor Zamora
The Biennial does not escape association. Its chief sponsor is the Vehbi Koç Foundation, the cultural arm of one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, Koç Holding. In truth Koç, which is ardently secular, has recently had government contracts cancelled and its rapport with the ruling AK party is fraught with tension.
Nevertheless, during the Biennial’s public programme, artists angered by the Koç connection disrupted a performance and filmed Erdemci’s reaction. Erdemci called the police and threatened to sue the film-maker, actions for which she later apologised.
Yet there is a sense that the Biennial’s reputation as a guardian of freedom has been compromised. Turkey under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done some appalling things but, during the Biennial’s opening week, it grated to hear rousing speeches about the artistic struggle for free expression at parties held in Istanbul’s most opulent homes, where the inhabitants enjoy wealth consolidated over decades of the brutal military-backed rule that preceded Erdogan’s victory.
Furthermore, this summer, film-maker and artist Kutlug Ataman alleged that art advisers to Omer Koç, one of Istanbul’s most important collectors and a vice-chairman of Koç Holding, had threatened to withdraw their patronage of his work because of a TV interview in which, in their opinion, he was insufficiently critical of Erdogan’s government. Koç instantly issued a denial.
Erdemci defends her sponsorship with Koç as “a device, a mechanism. [It’s like] you have a smartphone but maybe a child worker made them.”
Also problematic is her decision to abandon the plan to display art in public areas. “What does it mean to take permission from the same people who are suppressing [us]? This way, we are pointing out presence through absence,” is how she defended it to me. Yet the result is that her artists are now sheltered in the privately financed, non-profit cocoons of Arter and Salt, which are owned by the Vehbi Koç Foundation and banking dynasty Garanti respectively.
©Pilot Gallery
‘Wonderland’ (2013) by Halil Altindere
Inevitably, such a freighted back story threatens to crush the work itself. The Biennial’s main venue, the waterfront warehouse Antrepo, was particularly disappointing. The building is earmarked for demolition, a fate that should have made it ripe for a poignant swansong. But from the opening exhibit, a wrecking ball swinging against its façade that is the offering of Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen, a lack of imagination blighted the display. An uneasy cavern, Antrepo drowned the majority of work.
Art that blurs boundaries with social documentary can thrill but here the sheer number of complex, text-based projects rendered much of it flat, cold and overly analytical. From Gezi Park to Lima, New Jersey, Palestine and São Paulo, many pieces took the spectator on a world tour of urban change and its attendant social injustices. Yet the disconnected nature of the stories left the spectator bewildered rather than moved. Many artists deserved better. Consider, for example, the journey of the stone hand cast by Dutch duo Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis. The sculpture was inspired by the demolition, on the prime minister’s orders, of a statue in Kars, a city on Turkey’s Armenian border, that had been erected as a peace monument. Osterholt and Uitentuis wheeled their hand about Kars in a barrow, asking people for their opinions on the scandal, and casting their hands. These hands were installed on the site of the demolished sculpture, where they were instantly removed by police.
©Galerie Laurent Godin
‘Lamento’ (2007) by Gonzalo Lebrija
Also memorable was “Intensive Care” by Rietveld Landscape, a Dutch studio that had originally intended to install its work, a light that responds to human presence, in the Atatürk Cultural Centre in Taksim. Deprived of that chance, Rietveld simply scaled down its model and put it in a pitch-black space within Antrepo. After the cacophony of ideas outside, the quiet, poetic provocation of that flashing square stilled the mind and opened the imagination. Very different yet sharing the same potent immediacy was Halil Altindere’s film, Wonderland (2013), of Roma hip-hoppers voicing their lyrical fury at the destruction of their Istanbul neighbourhood.
Fortunately, the ratio of artists capable of conjuring poetry out of socio-politics increased at the show held in the Galata Greek Primary School.
Here, the outstanding piece was “I am the dog that was always here” (2013) by Berlin-based artist Annika Eriksson, a video of stray dogs exiled to the outskirts of Istanbul accompanied by a prophetic narrative – “They lived there and came and disappeared and now they are back”, “I can’t remember if those buildings are being constructed or taken down” – which captured the helplessness in the face of dispassionate power that has animated so much of modern Turkey’s history.
Artists who obliquely approached Erdemci’s theme mined deeper depths than their more literal peers. Elmgreen and Dragset, unable to realise a more ambitious public project, returned to a 2003 performance whereby young men sat at school desks writing their private diaries. To come upon these grave, silent scribes in a darkened room was to remember that without ethical public authority, private freedom is doomed. Upstairs, Argentine duo Martin Cordiano and Tomás Espina had recreated the replica of an immigrant’s apartment down to the Balzac novel on the table, the poster of Che Guevara and the crumpled National Geographic map on the wall. A clutch of broken objects – spectacles, crockery – betrayed the psychic fragmentation that is the price of exile.
©Servet Dilber
‘Monument to Humanity – Helping Hands’ (2011/2013) by Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis
Occasionally, a work breaks all the rules and triumphs anyway. The must-see of this exhibition was “Networks of Dispossession” on the top floor of the Greek school. A project by a collective of Istanbul artists led by Burak Arikan, it used a digital mapping programme to reveal the network of connections between state power and the business and media conglomerates – including Eczacibasi Holding, sponsors of the IKSV foundation that organises the Biennial – that are its partners in the development of the city.
These arid graphics brought to mind a line by the radical American poet Adrienne Rich, whose despair at the depredations wrought by capitalism on society drew her towards Marxist theoretics. “All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not.” Art’s battle to speak truth to power yet put bread on her makers’ tables is as old as civilisation. In Istanbul this year, it feels bloodier than ever.
Culture Night Los Angeles 