Adnan Yildiz
30
Nov 09
KAMUSAL HAYALGÜCÜ 2 / KÜLTÜRÜN KÜRESELLEŞMESİ AÇISINDAN BİENALLER BİZİ NASIL DEĞİŞTİRİYOR? KAOS GL ARALIK 2009
ADNAN YILDIZ / KÜLTÜRÜN KÜRESELLEŞMESİ AÇISINDAN BİENALLER BİZİ NASIL DEĞİŞTİRİYOR? (11. İstanbul Bienali üzerinden)
Radikal’deki bienal notlarından çıkardığım en ince Ali Artun eleştirisi, WHW’nin Koç ile kurduğu ilişkinin keskin analiziydi. Artun, dün adı “şiirsel adalet” ya da “küresel savaş çağında iyimserlik” olan bienalin bugün Brecht üzerinden açılan ve “gösteri toplumu” tartışmasına eklenen Neo-Markist diskura geri dönüş vicdanı üzerine kurulu olmasını (Boris Groys’un “Art Power” kitabını referanslayarak) iyi açıklıyordu. Kısaca iş şuraya geliyor, logonun yanında ne olursa olsun, önce logo okunur. Biz“İKSV presents İstanbul Biennial –supported by KOÇ” diye bir künye beklerken, bir bakıyoruz, bizi İstanbul Bienali’ne davet eden Koç Holding. Olmuş. Parayı veren düdüğü çalar. (Hatta izleyicisini bile döver. Buradan Kaan K.’ya da da geçmiş olsun. Bir daha değil bienalle, düdükle bile oynamaz herhalde.) Asıl sorun sosyalist bir tartışmanın sıcak kapitalle açılması mı? Yoksa başlığın, davetin ve halkla ilişkilerin tonu-tasarımı-tasarım hiyerarşisi mi? İKSV’ye ne oldu? Nerede unuttuk yıllardır bienali taşıyan kurumsal geleneği; para her şeyi satın alabilir mi? (bkz. -eş zamanlı olarak- basında Zülfü Livaneli’nin önce Vodafone’a satıp, sonra geri adım attığı “Ey özgürlük” tartışması.)
Artun haklı, küresel olarak logolaşmak için kültüre muhtaç olduğunu ve ‘branding’i kültürle yapmak zorunda olduğunu sonunda geç de olsa kavrayan; alışveriş merkezlerinden sıkılan ve müzelere yönelen yeni-sermayenin bu uğurda yapamayacağı şey yok. Che’den poster yapılır, icabında, Deniz Gezmiş’ten dizi film, Brecht’ten bienal. Durumun yukarı tükürsen bıyık, aşağı tükürsen sakal bir laçkalığı var. Diğer yandan Brecht’i hiç tartışmamak ile Koç logosuyla birlikte tartışmak, buzlu viski ile sek arasında tercih yapmak gibi(?) duyuluyor. WHW express’te yayınlanan röpörtajda, bienalin sermaye ile kurduğu ilişkinin gerçekliğini temel aldıklarını, Hatice’ye değil, Netice’ye bakılması gerektiğini söylüyorlar. Ona lafım yok, bienal yapmayın, sponsor almayın demiyoruz ama sorun tahta revallide kimin tepede kaldığı... Bari açılış partilerini kessek, açılışı zeytin-ekmekle yapıp, sergiyi direk halka açsaydık. Hans-Peter’in işi kavramsal nostaljiden kurtulur, canlanırdı. Diğer taraftan, herşeye rağmen, 80 darbesiyle canlı canlı toprağa gömdüğümüz sol ruhu yeniden sanat tartışmasının içinde bulmak şahane. Yani entellektüel vicdanım iki arada bir derede kaldı. Derken... Şu unutulmamalı ki, her tercih bir kayıptır. Logo ve logonun boyutu da sadece estetik ve grafik değil, aynı zamanda politik bir tercihtir.
Yeni sermaye her yerde böyle, seni gidi fındıkkıran ve yılanı deliğinden çıkaran, Türkiye’de de öyle, yakalarsam muck muck. Asıl küresel olan bu, kriz DE buradan çıkıyor, ekonominin kendini yenileyememesinin nedeninin yeni felsefe üretilmemesi olduğunu artık Bilgi-li-ler bile biliyor. Vampir Kapital. Eline sağlık Lion Yüksel. Yeni-Ekonomi sürekli vampir gibi insanı emiyor, sanatı emiyor, kültürü emiyor; ortaya yeni bir kuşak felsefe yaratamadan, insanı yok ediyor. İnsan ne ile yaşar? Pardon, ama olmadı! İnsan, artık yaşamıyor! Bkz. District 9.
Mekanlara gelince... Tütün Deposu’nun ilk binası kendi içinde tutarlı kurgusu ve batı merkezli sanat tarihini Berlin Duvarı’nın yıkılışından sonra tekrar sorgulayan tavrıyla son derece güçlü. Benim için Akhunov ve Taghizadeh güzel keşifler oldu. Kaşınan, esneyen avangard ise doğru noktada devreye girdi. Bienal çıkışı yandaki kahvede bir çayın ardından –solo sergi nasıl kavramsallaşır sorusuna en güzel filtre cevap olacak sergisi ile- Emre Hüner iyi gider, sergi hemen yan tarafta Rodeo’daydı. Emre Hüner, başka türlü gerçeklik kurgularının arasından yeni bir algı dili kurmuş... Antrepo’daki sergi kurgusu kolay gezilen, içinde rahat edilen, biraz öğretici, yer yer açılan ve içine alan, yer yer kapanan ve donan anlarıyla doğru işliyor. Canan`ìn incelen video dili, Artur’un Demokrasiler'i arasında kalmak, Jumana’nın Nar’ında bin parça olmak, Isola bella’nın büyüsüne kapılmak, Nevin’in (nedense yoğurdunu 9B’nin meselesinden çalan ama) iyi akan videolarını görmek (ve ‘duymak’), Etcétera (Errorista)nın kahvesinde soluklanmak (ah bir de gerçekten işleyen bir bar olsaymış), Trevor Paglen’in Kandilli’den İstanbul’umuzun uydularını belgelediği fotoğrafları gezmek... Ama dönüp dolaşıp aynı yere geleceğim: En güzeli Rum Okulu. Jesse’nin Tütün Deposu’nda ikinci binadaki kötü oyunculuk ve Brecht yapacağım diye göz çıkaran videosunu unutturan ve içimizi açan diğer videosu; hani bir havuzda tınlayan doğu blok çocuk bandosu ile başlayan bu düşüş hepimizi anında ilkokul günlerimize, tören sabahlarına götürmüyor mu? Araya karışan Atatürk’ün el yazıları, Türk Bayrağı, İstiklal Marşı, toz-küf kokusu, camdan görünen bahçe, duvarların rengi... Nilbar’ın foto-romanladığı performatif anları ADETA bir Latife Tekin romanından, özellikle ilk yazdıklarından, mesela Sevgili Arsız Ölüm’den fırlamış gibi; okuldan çıkınca bile hafızada kalıyor. “Türk’üm, doğruyum ve kadınım. Varlığım kendi varlığıma armağan olsun.”
Bienal böyle. IMF toplantısına karşı gösterilerde şehri dağıtan gençleri gösteren akşam haberlerini izlerken, biber gazlı ve panzerli sokaklara tv’den bakarken, Eylül başı asılmış bienal posterleri arka fonda dekorlaşırken, “İnsan neyle yaşar?”sorusu ne kadar DA (DADAİSTÇE) anlamlıydı!?! İnsan neyle yaşar? Ya esnaf? Anarşistler camları kırıyor, diye polisten önce bu gençleri yakalayan, ağzını burnunu kıran esnafa ne demeli? 29 yılda pek bir şey değişmemiş, 80 darbesine giden süreçte de Alevi, Komünist, Kürt... avına çıkarlardı aynı bıyıklar, kurtlar... Bkz. Kanlı Maraş hatta bugünle daha ilişkilisi ve az bilineni Antep olayları.
Böyle bir gündemde, Brecht ve Marx’ın lokalleşerek –yani sadece hayalet olarak değil, bugüne sızarak- geri dönmesi için, bienalin iyi bir müze/galeri sergisinden farklı bir form araması, subversive olması, gündelik olana sızması gerekmez mi? Gençler benden daha acımasız; Marksist dilin neo-liberalleşmesi deyip çıktılar, (bienal için), işin içinden. Sistemle bu kadar barışık olması, küratörlerin dışarıdaki sese (Direnistanbul protestolarına) kulak vereceğine (burası çok ironik, açılışta sahnede Brechtian manifestolar okunurken) hatta Direnistanbul’u sahneye çağıracağına, adı sandalyelerde yazan protokolü cici elbiselerle karşılaması biraz tuhaf değil mi?
Diğer yandan, acı gerçek, insiyatiflerin ruhuna El-Fatiha, hatta e-Fatiha. Damı aktı, kafesi pahalı, koleksiyonu kötü filan diye eleştirdiğimiz müzelerden çıktı asıl iyi sergiler; Sarkis ve Lion Yüksel. Yan etkinlikler, her bienalin içindeki gizli jeneratörler gibidir, elektrikler kesilince devreye girer. Bu seneki galeri-mantarlaşmasının yanında başka bir garnitürün olmaması, sanatçı insiyatiflerin birden senin-aşkın-balondu-söndü olması, ortada-eleştirel-deneysel-
risk-alan-hiçbirşeyin- olmaması-oğlu-olmaması... Uzun lafın kısası: Ne olursa olsun, risksiz ve uslu da olsa, WHW sergisi, önemli birçok tartışmayı tetikledi; solun sanatla ilişkisine yeniden bakmanın aciliyetini anlamamızı sağladı. Bizi, 80 öncesine ışınladı. İstanbul’a, Balkan ve Orta Doğu gibi hep es geçtiğimiz coğrafyalardan, kadın ağırlıklı oluşan iyi bir sergi verdi. Lokalleşme kısmı eksik kaldığından (nerede Halil Berktay, Ömer Laçiner ve Birikim Ruhu ve 61 Anayası'nın tarihselliği?), asıl şimdi İstanbul’un sanat ortamına iş düşüyor. Bienal heyecanını ve enerjisini besleyen küçük damarların kuruması, tek tipleşmesi, sadece pazarlaşması uzun vadede İstanbul’un alehinedir. Galiba asıl, tartışma platformunun/platformlarının yokluğu hissedilmektedir.
Platform’un da.
18
Nov 09
DUTCH/ENGLISH, 11th ISTANBUL BIENNIAL REVIEW by adnan yildiz, Metropolis M, 2009
What Keeps Mankind Alive?
ISTANBUL
11e Istanbul Biënnale / 11 Istanbul Biennial
12 september t/m 8 november
Door Adnan Yildiz
DUTCH VERSION (scroll down for english version)
Het was een ironisch toeval dat de opening van de 11e Istanbul Biënnale, samengesteld door What, How & for Whom (WHW), een curatorencollectief afkomstig uit Zagreb, samenviel met de 29e verjaardag van de staatsgreep in Turkije, die ervoor zorgde dat de linkse politiek, mensenrechten, democratie en vrijheid van meningsuiting jarenlang op een zijspoor werden gezet. De Turkse militaire coup uit 1980 heeft de legende van de linkse beweging niet alleen afgekapt, maar ook gemystificeerd. We zullen nooit te weten komen of de bevrijdende invloed van de Turkse Constitutie uit 1961 echt effect zou hebben gehad op de ontwikkeling van de linkse politiek in Turkije.
In de context van de globale economische crisis, stelt WHW voor in navolging van de geëngageerde theatermaker Bertolt Brecht van de belangrijkste vragen binnen de moderne filosofie te herformuleren: ‘what makes humankind alive?’ De indringende wijze waarop WHW de vraagstellingen van deze biënnale presenteert, verwijzend naar de old school linkse traditie van het socialisme en marxisme, fungeert ook als een pijnlijke catharsis ten aanzien van de geschiedenis van de Turkse democratie. Het organiseren van een biënnale gebaseerd op Brechts bewering dat ‘een crimineel een bourgeois is en vice versa’, in een land waar veel mensen werden gestraft en opgesloten omdat ze vochten voor een betere wereld; waar anderen werden opgepakt louter en alleen omdat ze als anarchisten of communisten te boek stonden; waar intellectuelen moesten vluchten alleen omdat ze over Marx of Lenin praatten, is al controversieel op zichzelf.
Deze controverse wordt nog groter als je weet dat de biënnale wordt gesponsord door een van de grootste familiebedrijven uit Turkije, die haar marketingstrategie luister bijzet met de slogan: ‘Koc Holding nodigt je uit voor de Istanbul Biënnale.’ Het dilemma dat ontstaat als gevolg van de discrepantie tussen het statement van de curatoren en de rol van de sponsor is niet alleen interessant binnen de context van Istanbul, maar evenzeer een afspiegeling van de hedendaagse kunstpraktijk die is vastgelopen op de vraag: kan kunst politiek en kritisch zijn, terwijl zij wordt gefinancierd door het bedrijfsleven en haar distributie wordt gereguleerd door de markt?
Zoals in veel snelgroeiende metropolen, heeft ook het nieuwe kapitaal in Istanbul ontdekt dat de cultuurpolitiek een van de beste investeringen is om je positie op de wereldmarkt te verstevigen. In deze situatie waarin het nieuwe kapitaal hongerig is naar succes en bereidwillig om elke kunstorganisatie met internationaal aanzien te ondersteunen voor het vergroten van de naamsbekendheid, is het te berde brengen van het Brechtiaanse, politieke model niet zozeer iets risicovols, maar een noodzakelijkheid. Zeker nu de erfenis van dit (linkse) gedachtegoed al vermarkt wordt in de vorm van Che T-shirts en koffiemokken met het portret van Mao Zedong, om nog maar te zwijgen over de historische cover van Newsweek (februari 2009) met de tekst: ‘We zijn allemaal socialisten’.
Tijdens de persbijeenkomst presenteerde WHW de inhoudelijke en organisatorische structuur van de biënnale als een soort institutionele kritiek die volkomen transparant was over de financiële structuur, het demografische en het sociale profiel van de kunstenaars. Zo’n statement zijn we gewend zijn van kunstenaars maar niet van curatoren, maar het was in deze context de juiste manier om de communicatie met het publiek te openen.
De biënnale vindt plaats op enkele locaties, waaronder Tütun Deposu (Tobacco Warehouse), dat bestaat uit twee tentoonstellingsgebouwen. In het eerste gebouw daagt een lyrische combinatie van de conceptuele werken van Mladen Stilinovic,Vyacheslav Akhunov en Hamlet Hovsepian en het collectief What is to be done?, ons uit de mogelijkheid van een nieuwe avant-garde te overdenken door van andere vormen van verzet te tonen en manieren om de politiek te veresthetiseren. Zoals in de film Chronicles of Perestroika van Dmytri Vilenski waarin het volksverzet in Rusland uit de jaren tachtig in beeld is gebracht. In de volgende ruimte wordt de spanning zichtbaar tussen Cengiz Çekils kranten uit de jaren zeventig, waaruit alle tekst is weggehaald zodat alleen het beeld overbleef, en Jinoos Taghizadehs hologram collages, die Iranese kranten uit de tijd van de revolutie vermengt met beelden uit de westerse kunstgeschiedenis. De kloof tussen deze twee werken wordt opgevuld door het geluid van Taghizadehs video Good Night, waarin Iraanse slaapliedjes uit 1979 te horen zijn. Ook in tijden van oorlog, exploitatie en ellende proberen moeders hun baby’s vrolijk te houden.
De tentoonstelling in het Antrepo gebouw bij de Bosporus heeft een meer didactisch karakter. Er is sprake van een heldere structuur die het publiek makkelijk door de tentoonstelling leidt en die je bij de les houdt, net als je dreigt je aandacht te verliezen. Er zijn enkele werken die de toeschouwer onmiddellijk onderdompelen in hedendaagse, politieke werkelijkheid. Hrair Sarkissians in documentaire stijl gefotografeerde Execution Squares toont stadspleinen in Syrië waar openbare terechtstellingen plaatsvinden. Artur Żmijewski’s film Democracies bestaat uit videobeelden van publieke politieke gebeurtenissen in diverse steden. Ze transformeren de discussie over de openbare ruimte tot een contextueel gevoelige vorm van politieke actie.
De derde locatie van deze editie is de Griekse school (Feriyeköy), die in 2002 werd gesloten door gebrek aan inschrijvingen. Het heeft nu alle trieste kenmerken van een verlaten, stoffig gebouw. De beslissing om de werken te integreren in de context van de school pakt in visueel opzicht erg goed uit. De vrouwelijke psyche in het werk van Nilbar Güneş, Lisi Raskin, Sanja İveković en Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir is een voltreffer die de bezoekers de trappen van de school op laat stormen. Doordat de tentoonstelling hier de persoonlijke momenten uit onze collectieve herinnering weet te raken, wordt ook de sociale kritiek op de hedendaagse maatschappij overtuigender, met als hoogtepunt het werk van Sociéte Realiste en Doa Aly. Vanuit de ramen kijk je over het gras uit, je ruikt de verlaten klaslokalen en ziet de afbeeldingen van Atatürk, de Turkse vlag. Alles in de Griekse school vormt tezamen een real life scenario die de vraag ‘what keeps mankind alive?’ van een ander perspectief voorziet.
De posters van de 11e Istanbul Biënnale werden in de stad geplakt op het moment dat het avondnieuws berichtte over de straatgevechten tussen demonstranten en politie, tijdens de internationale bijeenkomsten van het IMF. Het Brechtiaanse toneel bestond hier uit een echt gevecht waar een aantal ‘acteurs’ ook de prijs voor betaalden. Tegen zo’n de achtergrond zou het juist interessant zijn geweest om echt over een alternatieve vorm van de tentoonstelling na te denken, een subversieve strategie die de hedendaagse politiek binnen zou kunnen dringen. In dat opzicht zou je de biënnale van WHW conservatief kunnen noemen, terwijl de titel veel verwachtingen oproept. Vanwege de compromissen die zijn gesloten kan deze biënnale bekritiseerd worden als een treffend voorbeeld van de neoliberalisering van het marxistische gedachtegoed. Toch is deze biënnale waarin vooral kunstenaars afkomstig uit de periferie, met name de Balkan en het Midden-Oosten, figureren, en die de identiteit van en de discussie over linkse politiek centraal, een goede tentoonstelling. Ze betekent nogal wat in een land waar het nog steeds niet mogelijk is om je een betere wereld voor te stellen zonder hiervoor de prijs te betalen.
Adnan Yildiz is kunstcriticus en curator, Berlijn
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ENGLISH VERSION
Opening on the 29th the anniversary of 1980 coup d'état (12 September), that blocked left-wing politics, human rights, democracy and the freedom of speech for many years in Turkey – as an ironic coincidence, and curated by WHW, 'What, How & for Whom' (WHW) Zagreb-based curator collective, the11th Istanbul Biennial proposes to reconstruct the Brechtian stage of politics and aims to reformulate one of the leading questions of modern philosophy, “What makes humankind alive?” in the context of the global economic crises and İstanbul. Slavoj Žižek’s analogy of positioning The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia as the camouflage for the failure of Prague Spring can be possibly borrowed here for the 1980’s Turkish military coup that didn’t only cut off but also mystified the legend of left-wing movement in Turkey; we will never know if the liberating impact of the Turkish Constitution of 1961 was going to provide any long-term effect on the development left-wing politics in Turkey.
WHW’s performative approach of framing the questions of the biennial (referring to the old school politics; Marxism, socialism and left-wing tradition) has also a cathartic potential and a nostalgic pain for the history of Turkish democracy. Having a biennial, which is based on Brecht’s assertion of ‘a criminal is a bourgeois and vice versa’, in a country where many people were kept imprisoned and punished just because they were fighting for a better world; where some others were hunted just because they were labelled as communists or anarchists; where the intellectuals had to escape or were exiled, just because they were talking about Marx or Lenin already provides a controversial discussion platform. A step further, the controversy might look bigger when the biennial is also sponsored by one of the biggest family business monopolies and its PR strategy is based on the emphasis of “Koç Holding invites you to the Istanbul Biennial”… The dichotomy between the statement of the curators and the role of the sponsor (the visual dominance of the logo) is interesting not only within the İstanbul context, but it also reflects the agenda of today’s contemporary art practice that seems stuck on the question of “can art be political and critical at the same time when its production and organization are financed by private economy, and the circulation is bounded by the market?”
As in many ‘becoming cities’, also in İstanbul, the new capital has already discovered that cultural politics is one of the leading fields for investment and can broaden the borders of control in the global competition of branding. Since the new capital is so hungry for success, and ready to support any kind of global art organization for self-branding, bringing the Brechtian stage of politics or the Marxist discourse to the table is not something risky, but maybe a need, or a demand, when the ghosts are becoming a marketing tool, something like a Che t-shirt or a Mao coffee mug, especially after the historical cover of Newsweek; “We are all socialists…” (February Issue, 2009) In their press meeting and publication, WHW presented the institutional, economical and organizational structure of the biennial as a kind of institutional critique transparently displaying the financial structure, demographic and social profile of the artists and contributors as well as the allocation of the resources. We are used to similar statements of institutional critique from the artists, especially in the context of monster exhibitions; but here starting to communicate with the audience through talking about the backstage (the invisible part of) of a biennial as an institutional critique, coming from the curators and available for the audience (also printed in the guide), seems to be the right move…
Tütün Deposu (Tobacco Warehouse) is composed of two exhibition buildings; and the first one seems to develop a conceptually consistent perspective on the question of WHW, especially focusing on the art historical references from Balkans. The waxing lyrical combination of some conceptualist pieces such as Mladen Stilinovic, Vyacheslav Akhunov, Hamlet Hovsepian and “What is to be done?” challenge us with the possibility of another avant-garde, another avant-gardist art history, other forms of resistance and unique languages of aestheticizing the politics. Especially, Dmytri Vilenski’s “Chronicles of Perestroika” that shows demonstrations from Leningrad, Hovsepian’s short films that record simple human actions such as yawning or itching as gestures of everyday life, and Akhunov’s matchboxes that are full of images from his journals and artist books, together form a critical space that Dostoyevsky’s soul meets Marx’s ghost. In the next door, there is a tension between Cengiz Çekil’s newspapers (from 1970’s) that only show images without their texts and Jinoos Taghizadeh’s hologram collages that transforms the Iranian newspapers from the time of the revolution within the Western art history, and the gap between the histories is filled with the sound of Taghizadeh’s video, “Good Night” playing political lullabies about 1979’s Iran… In the age of wars, exploitation, and misery, mothers always try to keep their babies alive and happy. After listening to Stephen Wright, who is defining today through an ontological crisis, or crises of being, in the video piece from Karen Andreassian, the female saints from Jumana Emil Abboud’s series of drawings smoothly start to fall on you, and you feel the need to re-check Jesse Jonas’s “For Mahogany”, a remake of the final scene from Brecht’s opera.
The installation at the Antrepo building, by the Bosphorus, can be considered more pedagogical or didactic; there is a structured pattern that easily takes the audience inside, sometimes leaves on themselves, several times repeats itself, and gets exciting at the point when you lose your attention, so the pattern is strong but there is no rhythm or music inside... There are certain moments when the audience is immediately integrated into the hot spots of contemporary politics, which brings together mostly the recent contemporary documentary languages. Hrair Sarkissian’s “Execution Squares” that displays images of Syrian city squares, where the capital punishment of civil punishment takes place, and Artur Zmijewski’s “Democracies” that is composed of video footage of public political events from diverse cities transform the discussion of public space - inherited from the ninth İstanbul Biennial- into a contextually sensitive form of political action. The theatricality of Etcétera (Errorista)’s installation includes a performative narration inside, Yılmaz Güney meets Sigmund Freud; you feel like ordering a drink, but there’s no bar, waiter or table service around. Trevor Paglen’s “Celestial Objects” maps the satellites over Istanbul sky, whereas Sharon Hayes decodes the political connotations of love, gender and public space in the Istanbul context. Canan Şenol’s animation of Anatolian tales titled as “Exemplary”, Yüksel Arslan’s ‘artures’, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin’s “Don’t Complain” (even it has been de-contextualized from its original installation, the argument still works due to its oxymoron proposal), Rabih Mroué’s “I, undersigned”, Danica Dakic’s “Isola Bella” and Murtezağolu & Şangar’s “Unemployed Employees” are the pieces that hold the audience in front of them reconstructing a critical stage of politics through their reflexivity and narrative quality.
Like Deniz Palas from 9th İstanbul Biennial and AKM (Atatürk Culture Center) from 10th İstanbul Biennial, the ready-made context of this biennial is the Greek School (Feriyeköy), which was closed down in 2002 due to the lack of students, and now releases all the stories of sadness and the dust of abandonment, through transforming the question of the biennial, “What keeps mankind alive?” into a critical panorama of the Neo-Marxist discourse, referring to the Theory of Reproduction of the Society. The curatorial decisions regarding the integration of the works into the context of the school visibly operate on an efficient level, so the exhibition at the Greek School manifests a critical perspective on how individuals are internalizing the social processes and educational contents by challenging the hidden curriculum. The female psychic rising from the works of Nilbar Güneş, Lisi Raskin, Sanja İvekovic and Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir hit the ground, and besiege the audience on the stairs of the school. Bringing the personal moments of our collective memory to the surface, the exhibition escalates the social critique of contemporary society through education, gender and identity and reaches its peak with Sociéte Realiste and Doa Aly... Looking at the garden through the window; smelling the abandoned classrooms; seeing Ataturk’s handwriting and pictures, Turkish flags and all the other things left from the Greek School provide a real life scenario in order to re-contextualize what keeps humankind live...
The posters from the 11th Istanbul Biennial covered the city when the evening news was broadcasting the street fights between the anti-IMF demonstrators and cops in İstanbul during the international meetings of the IMF. This time, the Brechtian stage was set for a real fight, and some actors paid the cost. By coincidence such a political agenda would be really interesting if it had an alternative form of exhibition making rather than a museum/gallery installation or a subversive strategy that penetrates into the everyday politics. What you see at WHW’s biennial might be considered as conservative, since you expect so much from its title since it whets your appetite, it can be criticized as an example of neo-liberalization of the Marxist language through its compromises and negotiations with new capital. However the exhibition, which is composed of artists coming from the periphery, especially the Balkans and Middle East, works that have a gender issue consciousness, and discussions around left-wing politics is a good one. It also is a big step for a country where it is not still possible to imagine a better world without paying the costs.
14
Sep 09
KAMUSAL HAYALGÜCÜ 1 Kimliklere ait Kelimeler, Zamana dair Bağlamlar KAOSGL, Eylül 2009 “kelimeler”
KAMUSAL HAYALGÜCÜ 1
Kimliklere ait Kelimeler, Zamana dair Bağlamlar
Adnan Yıldız
Bundan kelli, buraya her sayı düzenli yazacağım. Yazılar arasındaki bağlar, bizi birbirimize bağlayan, bizi bir arada tutan, birlikte aynı yaşam alanını paylaş(ama)maktan gelen sorulardan oluşacak. Kamusal hayal gücümüzü kuran cümlelerden, yani eski(meyen)lerin deyimiyle “toplumsal tahayyülden” gelen bahislerden sereceğiz tezgahı. Bu sayının dosyasına eklemlenecek bir bilinç-akışı yazısı yazmak istedim, “sadece kelimeleri kullanarak iletişim mümkün mü, onları bizim-yapmadan(?)” diye sorarak...
Meselemiz: Kelimelerin Gücü
Kreuzberg’in kendine has ortamlarından birinde, Möbel’in bar tezgahının arkasındaki tahtaya –sert bıçak darbeleriyle ve Türkçe kazımış (basso’cu) Yuşi, “ben ibneyim” diye. Beni kelimeler değil bağlamlar ilgilendiriyor, (küçük kasaba okullarında ders çıkışı itilen, dar sokaklarda yolları kesilen, arada sırada sıkıştırılıp dövülen çıt-kırıldım oğlanların çok duyduğu) tıpkı sövmek için kullanılan bir lafın bir bar köşesine kazınmasından ziyade, burada-bu barda-bu lafa sahip çıkılması, artık bu lafın hakaret olarak değil, kimlik olarak algılanmasının ilgilendirdiği gibi. Berlin’de Türkçe. E burada mümkünse neden İstanbul’da mümkün olmasın...Türkçe aynı Türkçe. İki şehir arası uçakla kaç saat ki? Hani küreseldi? Mesafeler daralmıştı? Ya kelimeler?
Kelimeler aynı, bağlamlar değişiyor. Zaten bağlamlar aynı kalsa, kelimeler değişmek zorunda. Yoksa zaman durur; Türkiye, Show TV olur, “her nerede yaşıyor ve yaşatılıyorsa”...
“Dilimin sınırları dünyamın sınırlarıdır" demişti Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dil felsefesine adanan bir acı hayatın özeti gibi. Bir anlamda düşünebilmek için, yaşayabilmek için, nefes alabilmek için önce kelimelerin şifresini bilmek gerekiyor. Bağlamların ve kafaların değişmesi için, belki de bu nedenle, önce ve acilen işe kelimelerden başlamalı.
Ben küçükken, ‘açılım’ bir dershanenin adıydı, sahte deriden çantaların, lastikli klasörlerin üzerinde yazardı kocaman harflerle AÇILIM. Bu açılım nereden başlarsa başlasın ama bir an önce başlasın, yoksa biz bir daha açılmamak üzere kapanacağız –karanlıklara. Tamam önce Kürtler’den başlasın. Ama Ermeniler ve Rum’lar vatanları biliyorlar burayı, istediklerinde imkansız-bürokrasisiz gömülebilsinler; ziyaret için gelenler dini törenlerini yerine getirebilsin. (Aram Tigran’dan... Sümela’ya çıkıp, ayinleri yarıda kesilenlerden... kendi adıma, çaresizliğimden dolayı özür dilerim.) Kadınlar namus cinayetinden ölmesin; geyler, lezbiyenler, travestiler dayak yemesin, ezilmesin, yakılmasın. Avrupa ve Amerika’da eleştiri nasıl “beyaz adamın iktidarını” hedef aldıysa, bizde de “göbekli ve bıyıklı adamın iktidarından” başlasın işe. Boğaz kıyılarında gezen ‘bear’lar alınmasın. Bıyıklı ve göbekli bir takım iktidarların eleştirisi, onların bıyıklarını ve göbeklerini özgürleştirir. Açılım, lafta kalmasın.
Laf! Bazen ne tehlikeli bir sözcük. Her şeyin yalan, her şeyin “ağzımıza çalınan bir parmak bal” olmasını hemen ele veriyor.
Soğuk Stockholm. Açılış öncesi özel bir preview. Bir videosunda, (Kore’de doğan, NY’da yaşayan sanatçı) Kim’i (Sooja) arkadan görmekteyiz, Delhi’de bir bankta oturarak, Yamuna nehrine bakıyor. Nehir akıyor yavaş yavaş, sessizlik ve su. Zaman. Kim, öylece duruyor. Sordum, cevapsız gülümsedi, “neden adı Çamaşırcı Kadın bu videonun?” ve benim sorum sonsuza kadar havada kaldı. Videoya bakmaya devam ettim. Videodaki sessizlik galeriye yayıldıkça, dışarıdan gelen her ses, içeride konuşulan her kelime yok oluveriyor, (gözden değil) ‘kulaktan’ kayboluyordu. Beni kelimelerin (olmayan ama büyük bir ısrarla atfedilen) gücüne ikna eden ne varsa -içimden- çekti gitti. Kim sadece gülümsüyor, kimi andığımı bilmese de, içimden bir şeyin sızlayarak geçtiğini anlayacak kadar hayat bilgisi kuvvetli olduğundan, çevirisiyle ‘süreçlendirmemi’/Türkçe’siyle sindirmemi bekliyordu. Aklıma gelen hemen, Noam Chomsky oldu. Chomsky, bir makalesinde ("What We Know", 2005) “konuşmacıların, içselleştirdikleri dili ya da içsel dili deneyimlerinin akışından seçtiklerini, oluşturduklarını, kurduklarını” söylüyor. Yani, kişisel kurgularla oluşan dil deneyimlerinden bahsediyor ve aslında herkesin kendi iç dili olduğu gibi kendi –iç sözlüğü (de) olduğu noktasına geliveriyoruz birden. Sıkılma hemen bu akademik dalışlardan sevgili okur. Herkesin Türkçe’si, İngilizce’si, Esperanto’su kendine girsin, diyerek başka bir yere zıplamak istiyorum.
Karşınızda, 2009 işiyle Sacha Baron Cohen. Tam da dilden bahsetmişken, Brüno’nun ikna kabiliyetine, performatif zekasına ve küresel etki alanına girmek istiyorum. Hamas ile humusu birbirine -kör bir cesaretle- (kültürel elçiye zeval olmaz) bağlayan, Asyalı fantezilerini adeta ‘içimizde’ patlatan Brüno, aslında bize en çok DA (dadaistçe ve egoistçe) günlük hayata dair basit-leştirici gözlemleriyle ve geri-yansıtmalarıyla vurmakta. Eleştiriler malum, şimdi bu da film mi diye sorarsanız bilmiyorum, o tarafıyla da hiç ilgili değilim ama bence iyi performans. Film de olur, helva da. İpod ile değiştirdiği Afrikalı bebeği, Milano moda haftasında podyuma fırlayan kara mizahıyla ve hazır cevaplarıyla yeni olan mizah dili. Moda şovu sunan ve ünlü olmak için yırtınan -Avusturyalı- Brüno karakteri kurbanlarına sadece “Evet” ya da “Hayır” soruları sorar ama sunduğu opsiyonlar Erdoğrul Özkök Türkçesi’nden daha zengin; Naber? "Vassup" (what’s up) ya da bilmem "Ich don't think so"... Peki bu kısmı biraz filmi izleyenler için olacak, pardon ama İngiliz bir arkadaşım filmin sonundaki sahneyi kastederek, “o canavarları hangi casting bulur, oynatır... O kısım olsa olsa gerçektir...” demişti. Gelse görse, biz Ahmet Yıldız’ı, Ebru’yu, Münevver’i... katledenler ülkesinde ne kadar mutlu, ne kadar mesut bir casting ile yaşamaktayız...
Bunlar, Perez Hilton’un tavan yaptığı günler sevgili okur. Bizim İstanbul-alemimiz kendi Çerez Hilton’unu yaratmış bile, cümle Madipolitan okumakta. Kelimeler de, pozisyonlar da ona göre değişiyor. Koyunun olmadığı yerde keçi olmakla açıklanamayacak bir durum bu, hepimizi ilgilendiren. Adı anılmaz bir arkadaşın referansıyla, “Desperate times make desperate people” demek ya da Bisiklet Hırsızları’nı yeniden izlemek. Ama kelimeler de, seks de, dedikodu da hayatın bir parçası. Her birinin özeli var, geneli var; çürüğü var, hamı var. Zeka, his ve estetik –hep ama hep- şart. Kendi iç-dilini, iç-deneyimini nasıl oluşturuyorsan artık.
Yani, işin özü kelimeler de mideden geliyor. Mesele, mide meselesi.
21
Aug 09
ENG / Good Gangsters in Danish / WE BOTH CAN QUIT TODAY! for Lotte Juul Petersen’s anthology on curating (published in Danish)
GOOD GANGSTERS INTERVIEW EACH OTHER (Summer '08)
WE BOTH CAN QUIT TODAY!
Good Gangsters: Esther Lu & Adnan Yıldız
When we received this invitation from Lotte to partake in her co-edited anthology on curating, we were just recovering from our last show “Good Gangsters in Town”1. It was a sort of peak of our collaboration that had been transformed a lot during the last two years’ experience within the institutional framework of Curatorlab2. For this book, we decided to produce five questions each, and both answer to the total ten, which were produced with personal desire to answer and ask to each other. We also asked Lotte to guess which question was produced by which one of us, and gave a score to her regarding how much she knew us. (She scored six out of ten!) The game of which is who, however, does not remark on anything but Good Gangsters' united humour—how we have come through the process of becoming a bonded collective.
Good Gangsters like to ask questions more than giving answers; they like to reflect themselves more than repeating or reproducing. Good Gangsters means working equally under the same title, sharing the costs and benefits for believing in a better world and creating a critically interesting discussion. This is the first time they interviewed each other.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
*You are welcome to guess which question is produced by which one of us. And later you can score yourself by checking out. Answers could be found in the end of the text.
1) What's the most interesting and inspiring part of curating to you?
It inspires me. It inspires me to be curious and keen to the subtlety of how human mind functions in relation to what we make the world today, especially extracted by artistic transformation. The interior and the exterior of curating for me somehow work the same as well as in a micro level to perceive the commonly shared humanity, and I think it is a language I’d like to employ to question and position myself in this exchange process and relation. I also believe that curating is a very interesting means to project visions and generate communication in society, and in turn, ideals are transmitted and shared with open critique and tolerance. Of course, this is the more romantic side of it. I could also answer that it often upsets me, since a great part of such endeavour comes along with a big challenge vis-à-vis the general struggles in the infrustrature to negotiate with commercial influence and the often nationalist biased funding systems, and these are fundementally remapping our boundaries.
It possibly opens channels for new forms of human relations. Or let me say it more clearly, maybe like this, it forms new relations between people. You spend time and energy in front of something, which is produced by another human mind, and in order to be engaged into something else you move through your experience. As audience, we all share the same ground and this is the most important moment of our practice.
What I feel myself best quality at doing is much related with my approach, I produce and design interactions, dialogues and conflict resolutions between people considering diverse contexts of culture, code and communication. In that thinking, I propose a very social, political and critical approach and a position in the societies that we live in, so it is always a bit personal in each case, at this point, what we as Good Gangsters, produce -at the end of the day- as a proposal was a website and a fictional name, which owns everything we produce together. Our collaboration is not based on money, but audience…
So, in the end we can still be independently working together. I am inspired by the way we challenge each other and let each other live freely with that choice –whatever it is at the end of the day. I think, what we are learning together is basically how to make an adult choice with a childish hearth and an idealist mind. And we always stay together when the choices are being transformed. I sometimes feel like I am watching the stars in the sky at night from Grand London or Taipei 101 and from a very long distance, I see our collaboration as sharing life and producing good work together. That’s also what I feel good about my job, curating gives you a way of personalizing, interacting and mirroring with your work. It is a freelance form of capitalism giving you a chance to decide your salary, schedule and program. This does not mean being isolated and alienated as a member of post-fordist global society. I think both of us feel the importance of trying to be globally and locally critical…
For instance, as a curator, I decide on my own working schedule, my own salary and my own subject matter! Isn’t this great?
2) Do you think a curator should be critical? What is the connection between curating and producing a critic?
I think at least the curator I want to be is critical. However, there are different materials and forms of performance for curators and critics to apply. The relationship of art and text is conceptualized and exercised with different approaches to meet various purposes, albeit they both could give light on the visibility of an artwork or an exhibition. I do not play on the relationship between the noun and the adjective term; what concerns me most is my practice involved not as a representation of such relationship, but an active dialogue with artists and the public which opens possibilities to engage contemporary culture in diverse productions—thinking, debating, producing discourse, collaborating to fulfill or hollow our questions in social reality.
Practically yes, de facto not always. The feeling of doing something as a must kills your consciousness. You can’t possibly be critical if the form of critic is not independent from the subject of it. You have to be self critical in your approach in order to keep focus, so that’s why you have to be personally engaged into the critic but not personalize it at all.
This is a sort of thin red line: Curating is not a form itself but it is a sort of practice, which is based on eclectic forms of processing the artistic practice. It also involves producing and designing diverse forms of critic. Producing a critic can be also done by other ways, writing and political activism; but when it is curating, its subtlety is rare… Connection is there between the institution and the curator; how you transform the private money into a public discussion; without leaving a place for independently critical.
3) Do you think there are a certain criteria or condition to good curating?
Yes and no. There are a certain criteria to say what is good and bad curating, but I think there shouldn’t be any condition as an excuse for bad curating. One of my personal parameters for good curating is probably also about how a curator use well the given condition and context, since there are always different forms of power and resistance along curatorial practices. I think, how a curator could respond to them and operate outside of the box is critical to good curating.
I like to answer this kind of questions by categorizing or clustering like old school teachers. First you have to cough to sound more convincing... Eheu, eheu...and then explain; there are basically 3 main ways of being a good curator.
- A good curator tries to maintain mostly the same conditions to artists s/he works with. S/he never buys a flight for her/himself when only paying for a bus transfer for the artist she works with or she accepts the conditions of getting fee as a curator when the artists are not in the same show or in the same institutional organization. A good curator builds up a fair economy for the team.
- A good curator tries/is (to be) critical to his or her context. S/he should always-never take any situation personal, especially when it is time to be critical. This is the most difficult part of it; it is very rarely done by anyone. Working with institutions and organizations, s/he could easily turn into a conservative officer who only confirms his boss and say yes to his highest and no to her/his assistants. They only use and abuse their assistants and young people. They like to be the chief. Chief-waiters in big tables. Bringing paintings and decorations to their Apollo-dog-owners and feeling good when given chocolate.
- A good curator opens discussions, which would not be opened without her/his projects. These discussions don’t have to be always popular or correct, but have to be based on observation, and related to the social and political context, and also risk taking in the present. They should be working within the contexts they are designed or produced in but not pretended.
4) What is a failure? What is a success?
Aha—do I have to distinguish between these two to be critical? But I really do not have an answer for this question. To me, it always depends on a specific subject in some certain context to ground this question, or better it remains as a conceptual dialectic.
Failure is the end of success, and the success is the end of failure. Success is not power, but gives power for controlling it as a tool of challenging it. Failure is not losing, but winning over the winner, if you still have your hopes. Being more interested into the process, rather than its product is a must for Good Gangsters.
5) When do you think we need an exhibition? And what does it mean to make an exhibition to you regarding creating a new space?
To me an exhibition is always a specific spacetime continuum. It has its physical dimension, but its mental horizon is perhaps the most critical and mysterious part, and probably it is where our aesthetic experience is constituted and where its impact lays. Whenever the linkages between the social-political circumstance and the insights of an exhibition are well curated, an exhibition could be staged in the public realm to stretch itself, take its visible volume to open conversations and discussions.
We need a show when the discussion is not possible anymore with words; when we need to see the ideas as forms and images. Not as illustrations or representations of ideas but reflections and digestions of them. Not only using ideas as an argument or discussion, but also as a way of producing and processing things. We need a show when we need to adjust ourselves to the reality and remember our dreams.
Let me talk about my “one-and-only” in the history of philosophy about regarding your question: According to Foucault, all spaces exists in a certain relation to each other and to the social structures of power, describing heterotopia as every schism between real and ideal social spaces. Although heterotopia exists in relation to social power, Foucault asserts that heterotopia is a kind of neutral zone beyond the dominion of conventional social structures of power and power relations. In other words, between real social and Utopian space lies heterotopia, a collective of material and conceptual social spaces that gerrymander around the jurisdictions of normal social structures of power.
Foucault was fetishized with the image of space as politics. I also consider his obsession of getting lost at S&M clubs as part of his meta-cognitive process in terms of his writings as production. He was looking for “the space” to think about space. Let’s not forget: Michel Foucault died of AIDS, presumably contracted in the San Francisco S&M clubs which he frequented, in 1984. He had previously described the high points in his life as: 1) his first LSD trip (in 1975, at nearly 50 years of age); 2) getting hit by a car and nearly dying while high on opium (1978); and 3) "sex with strangers."
I don’t have such a colourful sex life and I am boring in bed as a conservative-catholic old lady, but I can tell you what I am looking for when I am making an exhibition: I still believe in the possible presence of heterotopias, and for me making an exhibition also means reflecting heterotopias that you have visioning… An exhibition means a new space, and to me this has to be related to the idea of the fetishization of space, not always as a condition but also as a critic to this idea. People would respond to this as heterotopias are natural and found somewhere in life outside where as exhibitions are made by boring curators, however I would say, no there are not! Exhibitions are always there, with us. They just come out when we need them. So making a show is meeting with anonymous people who come to see your show, isn’t it like sex with strangers?
6) What's good gangsters to you? What do you want to achieve with it?
For me, it is a silent consensus understood by how we could work together as a collective, however, it voices loudly as well to the outer world. It is more like an attitude, chemistry or a sort of belief, or something we can be proud of and laugh about when we get old and walk with a stick. I do not think there is any kind of mission statement about Good Gangsters. Yet, it is neither airy. It is about how two people find collaboration possible and sometimes necessary in cultural production. This is based on certain shared interests, different knowledge and the common passion. In the past two years, we shared the same drive to target various important questions while we encountered different cultural context. There were mostly issues regarding to the globalization influence on the local art scene or individual, because we had found lots of crashes in between values and perceptions in different cultures, institutional setups, social realities, and so forth. We care very much about, in a personal level, how one struggle and survive through these confrontations, and we want to deliver an attitude for it. The Good Gangsters attitude. I can see how this thread of thought has been embedded since our first project ‘I don’t know what else to do with myself’3 to ‘Big Family Business’ and ‘Good Gangsters in Town’.
It was not set up for achievement. We started through a very natural process and because of certain needs. Especially in the beginning, it was meant to be a way of working together under the same title, sharing the ideals, and their costs. We want to create a better way of working together to experience the borders of “ideals” in our mind. We have always believed in (that there are) ideals, different from each other, might be from Kant or Hegel, we can discuss, but they are there with us, as we are in a cave like Plato. I can define myself as a Neo-idealist; I am co-edit a magazine that I share the financial costs with my editor friends and distribute it freely or I pay my ticket to make a show if there is no response from the applications if I really believe that that show must be done for a/some reasons… I don’t work for charity, but I take the risks and costs of my profession when there is a need. This also effects how you decide or move in your career; and my motivation is I want to be a good curator. What does this mean to me? I have already decided to take part in this transformation, in this profession, and in this discussion, I mean, the context that contemporary art practice develops has made me feel good as being part of it, producing in it… I will my best regarding my contribution to this sort of transformation of knowledge and society… This is how I feel good, money or success come and go…
On the other hand, I also feel we make a long way together; we have achieved a lot together. We realized two big projects in our home cities; Istanbul, Stockholm, and Taipei. These shows make a triangle together looping the mobility and the production in each context and transiting to the next one. We transformed the institutional organization that we have met through, Curatorlab1. We first met in Curatorlab as the first generation participants after it changed into a research based curatorial program from an M.A. program. We will be back to Stockholm again, as a part of Manifesta 7, Curatorlab will host a final session, bringing together the Hot Desking2 products.
These projects linked us together as collaborators and friends but also as the members of different cultures and identities. We have experienced the exchange of our cultures into a personal level. We have been based on all of these cities for a while and we have got some observations and experience in relation to how each of us deals with his/her culture. This is a very important step to us, and we both know that this is also very rare in people who work together. Mostly, contemporary art people are very quick and open to consumption of labour and others.
7) How do you engage it with your cultural/social/political perspective and practice? or what drives you into these?
One thing about Good Gangsters is that we are both down-to-earth people, sensitive to the surrounding context, and would like to give respond and kick it off. Our personalities help a lot in sharing the run-and-go discussion, and that’s why our projects and ideas are developed to correspond to the very specific context of the sites. For instance, in “Big Family Business”, we adapted the 10th Istanbul Biennial as this project’s context and subject, and we responded to Hou Hanru’s theme on the local economics versus globalization with a critical discussion based project, which formed an open office in the local textile trading center and focused on the local artistic production while addressing to the social and economic crisises. In the exhibition “Good Gangsters in Town”, we took the position of Taipei Fine Arts Museum to the local curatorial practice development as the counter point of our discussion. In both cases, we have very strong political stances toward the local art scene, even though they could come from our love and hatred toward our personal backgrounds. They are personal and political; everything starts from personal requests and addresses to what we see in the socialpolitical reality.
I think your question is very important regarding media as the 4. Big Power. State (or bureaucracy), army and economy (or money) are ruling the world; and technology as an element of power has to negotiate with those in order to keep the balance of its demand and supply, so when I think about media, press and other sources of information processing today, I first see how it is engaged into the world of power regarding these three big channels; state and army needs media to refund money. So at some micro levels thinking, we repeat the same circles as cultural producers, we need to maintain our existence through money, publicity and production. Andy (Warhol) says, publicity is like eating peanuts, when you ever start eating, you can’t stop at all…
So I think, my curatorial strategy is based on that sort of consciousness. Naturally, my strategy is based on the story of how today’s password society functions; today the global village people control and plan their lives with codes and passwords, even identities and cultures are controlled by numbers and colours, rather than values and loves. This is what I am most interested at questioning.
My over-all intention and imagination is dedicated to that; I am not always breaking the rules; but I am trying to challenge these rules and regulations, passwords and codes, which make people unhappy and imprisoned, and propose new ones for freedom and love. I think, I am engaged into my society but I am also connecting it to another one. For instance, the cities such as Istanbul, Taipei, and Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen and etc. These are the cities where we worked in a professional sense, so I can say we have a sort of professional relationship with them regarding their context and art scene. That makes a network! This is my engagement with Good Gangsters . We founded a base for getting connected to the world, not only consuming but also proposing a possible form of collaboration and labour; sharing a ground for ethical and personal values.
8) What is the importance of artistic research and what are your strategies of using it when producing a curatorial approach/statement?
I think this is a natural process that a curator gradually and eventually learns more about their practices from artists who they admire are also their working partners. Artistic research is a wild term that goes across various disciplines in creative ways, and therefore is the most incomprehensible discipline itself. I’d like to take account of what Brad Haseman calls ‘practice-led research’ or ‘performative research’ instead to address the need for the research paradigms beyond that of quantitative and qualitative research in curatorial practices, which in turn appropriates itself to carry social, political and cultural quests.
Art is not a sort of academic discipline or science or an educational practice. It can be used for/within education or science and it can also be a part of them, whereas it can also transform them into itself. Art includes research and the right to make research. On the other hand, art is also a sort of research practice, which produces research based works and processes and as you know from art historians without its research and process, no artwork has a value.
We are working with artistic practice and in order to understand artists’ practice, first we have to support artistic research. We have to provide the conditions and ground for research and critic. From a curatorial point of view, this is our responsibility!
My basic strategy is to understand artistic research and to support it to the level of its final production, sometimes as a form, sometimes as a presentation, sometimes a social interaction or a value. Some curators fail into the trap of analyzing artistic practice as an element of society or human; this is neither science nor education. This is life. Art needs to be -live.
9) 'Performativity' is one of the focuses in good gangsters, and it breaks through some lines across artistic practice. How do you apply this concept, and what do you see within this practice?
Continued from the previously mentioned term performative research, I think when such methodology is applied, it becomes an attitude, an everyday practice, a self-awareness and self-critique. That’s what performativity is about in Good Gangsters, since it is inseperation from the process of research and the production of such performance.
Performative curating or performing curating? Which one of them sounds more relevant to me? In both ways, you are producing some amount of interaction and communication with others but only in one of them, you are paid as a curator! This can be left as a puzzle here, but I think, I can’t stand it as a concept anymore. You know, in general, people abuse words; this is how they make themselves big in other’s eyes, they do it by using ‘bass’ words or passwords. I perform because I curate. Curating is an eclectic form of processing artistic knowledge with curatorial knowledge. “To curate” is a sort word that you can’t define without the word itself, as an oxymoron. I curate because I perform curating.
10) Who is a curator?
If I believe Beuys’ famous slogan ‘everyone is an artist’, then I also believe everyone has his/her turn to be a curator.
A curator is the one who curates! As I have told you before, I think, curating is such a subject matter that you can’t define (it) without using the word itself. If you do, for instance let’s define is as; a curator is the one who makes exhibitions and generates art collections. Then you risk its potential criticality and transformative impact; you risk excluding something such as producing critic or processing artistic practice or basically its DNA, which is the core of it, so better to include it then excluding. A curator is the one who curates...
WHO ASKED WHICH QUESTIONS?
1) Esther 2) Adnan 3) Esther 4) Adnan 5) Adnan 6) Esther 7) Esther 8) Adnan 9) Esther10) Adnan
Answers: Blue- Esther / Black- Adnan
2) Curatorlab is a (Stockholm based traveling) curatorial research program at Konstfack, and Hot-Desking is one of the Curatorlab projects as part of the exhibition "TheRest is Now" by Raqs Media Collective, Manifesta 7.
image: Sabah Gazetesi arşiv.
29
Jul 09
Tam Erkmen’e göre havuz problemi (radikal, 29.07.09)
Tam Ayşe Erkmen'e göre havuz problemi
Adnan YıldızFREIBURG - 1827 yılında kurulan Freiburg Kunstverein, Almanya’nın en eski (ilk kuşak ‘kunstverein’ ) sergi salonlarından biri. 1950’lere kadar klasik modernizmi kuran sanatçılara odaklanan bu sanat kurumu, daha sonra dönemin önde gelen güncel çalışmalarına ve tartışmalarına yer vermiş. Şimdilerde Caroline Käding’in direktörlüğünde dinamik bir programa sahip. Ağustos ayının ilk haftasına kadar ise Türkiye’nin en önemli güncel sanat üreticilerinden Ayşe Erkmen’in ‘Mavimtrak’ olarak Türkçeleştireceğim, ‘Bluish’ adlı solo sergisine ev sahipliği yapıyor.
‘Mavimtrak’ insanın kalbini hemen çalan görkemli cam tavanıyla eşşiz bir tarihi binada gerçekleşiyor. Freiburg Kunstverein, 1930’larda yüzme havuzu olarak yapılmış ve uzun yıllar halka açık bir havuz olarak hizmet vermiş bu tarihi binaya 1997 yılında taşınmış. 9 metre yüksekliğinde, 400 m2’lik alanda, izleyiciye açık iki kattan oluşan binanın en can alıcı yanlarından biri mimarisinde mevcut olan ve ziyaretçisini hemen içine alan ferahlık hissi, alan-hacmi. İçine aldığı her işi yutacak kadar kıskanç, güzelliğine düşkün ve doyumsuz, ama ona dokunulunca bir o kadar cömert olabilen, kalbini açabilen, tutkulu bir mimari ruha sahip. Yani tam da Ayşe Erkmen’e göre bir mekân, tam da ona göre bir problem-miş. Havuz problemi.
Mekânın ruhu
Zira Erkmen, pratiğiyle mekânların ruhuna dokunan, matematiğini bilen, bulmacasını çözen bir duyarlılıkla çalışır. Mekânların gramerini iyi oturtarak, sadece fiziksel referanslara değil, mekânların dinamik fizikselliğine de işaret eder; böylelikle mimari şifrenin arkasındaki siyasi, sosyal, tarihi ve kültürel kodlara ulaşır. Onları görünür kılar, bizimle paylaşır. Özellikle mekâna özgü üretilen işleriyle, ki bunu uzamsal (spatial) mekân anlayışı ile ürettiği bazı videolarında da görmek mümkün, izleyicide tuhaf bir aydınlanma hissi bırakır; bu his, orada olmanın ve mekânın fizikselliğini paylaşmanın getirdiği, görmeye ve bakmaya dair siyasi ve tarihi ipuçları veren bir kavrayıştır.
Şiirsel değildir, ama şiirin içindeki saydamlıktan beslenir. Güzeldir, ama sadece estetik temsile dayalı bir yapıya oturtulamaz. O nedenle de ‘site-specificity’ (mekâna özgücülük) tartışmasının en bunalttığı anlarda belirerek, problematiği tek taraflı algılardan kurtarır; meseleyi sanat felsefesinin temel sorularına getirir. Bir mekânın yaratılmasında ve algılanmasında, hafızanın, zamanın ve alegorinin rollerini yeniden sorgular ve (bir unutulmaz Radiohead şarkısındaki gibi) sorar; her şey yerli yerinde -mi?
‘Mavimtrak’ içinde iki tanesi Freiburg Kunstverein için üretilmiş, üç tane Ayşe Erkmen işi barındırıyor. Bunlardan en göz alıcısı, bakmaya doyamacağınız, havada asılı duran bir yerleştirme. Masmavi. Tavandan gelen ışığın değişen renklerine göre -gün içinde- tonu açılan, koyulaşan bir mavilik. Bize mekânın eski bir havuzdan bozma olduğunu hatırlatan; uçurtma ve hafif yelken malzemesinden üretilmiş, üzerinde bastığımız zeminin altında duran havuzun ölçüsünün iki katı, haliyle de o ‘tarihi’ havuzu yeniden üreten bir matematikle havada beliren yeni bir havuz. Mavi renkteki malzemesiyle su, ölçeğiyle havuz ama havadan yükselen, tavandan sarkan, mekâna gökyüzünü getiren bir çekim. Gökçekimi. Bizi yerçekiminden kurtaran, yukarı doğru çeken, esrik bir özgürlük ve anlık bir ferahlık hissi veren, son derece fiziksel bir anıt. Havada asılı duran bir havuz problemi.
Çocukluğun uçurtmaları
Aynı anda bütün kapılar açıldığında içeriye ne kadar izleyici kaç dakikada dolar? Kaç tanesi ne kadar süre ile yukarı bakar, bakmaya devam eder ve yeni sorular üretir? Hangisi hâlâ çocukluğunun uçurtmalarına ve hayallerine sadık, hangisi en son ne zaman çimlere sırtüstü uzanıp gökyüzüne baktı? Bu mavi yerleştirmenin Freiburg’un havasıyla suyuyla da barışık, şehrin bağlamıyla da ilişkili bir dili var. Alman ‘Alman’ bir şehir olmayan Freiburg, İsviçre ve Fransa sınırında olmasının sonucu kültürel olarak melez bir atmosfere sahip; biraz turistik, sayfiyemsi, rahat bir şehir; şehri kesen kanallarıyla zaten ‘sulu’ hatta ıslak bir alan.
Kunstverein’ın hemen önünden akan suyu mekânın içinde devam ettiren bu yerleştirme yalnız değil. Ona, hemen yanıbaşında Freiburg versiyonu olarak üretilmiş bir Ayşe Erkmen videosu eşlik etmekte; bir genç kız şaçını kurulamakta. Loop.
Özgürleşme mücadelesi
Geçtiğimiz sene Berlin/Hamburger Bahnhof’ta gerçekleşen kapsamlı solo sergisinde de gördüğümüz bir projeksiyon ise üst katta yer alıyor; çeşitli coğrafi iklimlerden alınmış ikonik-ironik manzara resimleri dijital bir yükleme sürecini anımsatan bir dille (anbean) yavaş yavaş, kesit kesit açılıyor. Üst kattan bakıldığında içi boş bir deniz yatağına dönüşen bizim ‘mavimtrak’ yerleştirmenin arkasına geçiveriyor. Bizi zamanın suya dair izlerinde, hafıza-tarihinde ve akışında dolaştırarak, bu sergide yeni anlamlar kazanıyor. Mekânın mimari tarihi/tarihi hikayesi, evsensel bir dekora dönüşüveriyor, kendi mekânını yaratarak Freiburg’tan dünyaya açılıyor... Umut hiç bitmez ama ya birgün su biterse?
Karaman’da doğan, Freiburg’da yaşayan teyzem, sergi programı içindeki konuşmamdan sonra ona küçük bir tur veren Caroline ile sosyalleşirken -mavi yerleştirmeyi işaret ederek- Almanca şöyle bir şeyler diyor; “Hep baskı altında geçen genç kızlığımı hatırladım, özgürleşmek için verdiğim çabayı...” Ben de onu dinlerken, Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun ‘Ölmeye Yatmak’ını hatırlıyorum. Ayşe Erkmen haklı. Özgürlüğün rengi mavi, nam-ı diğer gökçekimi.
18
Jul 09
kaos GL, Temmuz 2009, “Ütopya” / Ütopyanın yeniden inşası…
ÜTOPYANIN YENİDEN İNŞASI, MILK ve queer-ELEŞTİREL DÜŞÜNCE
Adnan Yıldız
Kaos GL’nin Umut’u, benden ütopyaya dair bir yazı istediğinde, tuhaf bir içgüdüyle hemen son iki senedir tuttuğum defterlere; sergi hazırlama notlarıma baktım: meğer son iki senedir umuda ve geleceğe ne kadar odaklanmışım? Zira işimi bilenler için tekrara gelecek ama bilmeyenlere hemen not atayım, Antonio Negri’nin en güçlü siyasi önermelerinden biri olan “umudun yeniden inşası” üzerinden giden iki ayrı sergi üzerine çalıştığım bir dönemdeyim. İki serginin küratöryel araştırmasında da umudun fiziksel bir algı ve dürtü olarak izleyiciye geçmesi stratejisini güttüm, sergi formunu bir sunumdan ziyade fiziksel bir deneyim alanı olarak konumlayarak, yaratıcılık ve hayalgücü üzerinde yeni kontrol mekanizmaları yaratmaya çalışıyorum; yeni kanaat, tutum ve ikna kanallaları açarak, izleyiciye bir cümlelik çimdik atmak istiyorum: “UMUDU YENİDEN KURALIM!”
Umut’un istediği yazıyı yazarken, bu notların üzerinden geçmek istedim. Özellikle altını çizmek istediğim bir soru var, cevabım yok, ama soruyu birlikte formüle edeceğiz. Bugün neden (özellikle kuşak olarak) önümüze bir model koyarak ütopya üretemediğimize ama ısrarla literatürdeki ütopyaları tekrar ürettiğimize gelmek istedim. Soru bu: Neden sürekli eski ütopyaları temize çekmekteyiz?
Buraya, bu noktaya gelirken, en çok etkilendiğim isimler elbette yetmişlerdeki bilimkurgu geleneğini kuran gelenekten; hele hele hele 2008’deki ölümünün ardından, hele 90 yaşını kutladığı doğumgününün videosundan kalan gülüşüyle Sir Arthur Charles Clarke... “Gökyüzünden Sesler” kitabında zamana dair kurduğu kurgusal alt yapıda, insanın zamanı nasıl algıladığı ve biçimlendirdiği üzerine konuşurken, ilham dolu dilini ikna edici bir biçimde kıvırarak, hep tekrar ediyor: “mümkün olanın sınırları ancak mümkün görünmeyen şeyler denendiğinde belli olur, bir süre için, o şartta, durumda, zamanda...” Soruya vereceğim ilk cevabım bu alıntıdan hareketle: Bugün risk almayı ve deneme-yanılma metodunu desteklemeyen bir sisteme boğulduk, hemen başarı istiyoruz, hemen ünlü-zengin-mutlu olmanın peşindeyiz ve hepimiz kaybetmekten korkuyoruz.
Diğer yandan Yona Friedman, Archigram, Superstudio ve Archizoom gibi mimari referanslar, hele Peter Cook aurasıyla –Oslo’da- kısa bir karşılaşma anı, beni mekansal düşünme yönünde çok besledi. Milano’da yeni yapılan Boccini Üniversitesi binasını gezerken, Roma’da Colosseum’un yeni tamamlanmış restorasyonu sonrası turist kafilelerini ağırlayan hüzünlü haline bakarken, Venedik’te D. Birnbaum’un küratörlüğünde açılan bienali gezerken de aktı bilinç: Bütün bunlardan sonra, “ütopyayı” bir kavramdan ziyade, bir açı ve görüş olarak yazmanın daha etkili bir yol olduğunu düşünüyorum. Ütopyanın eleştirel düşünce açısından nasıl pozisyonlandığını ve aslında sadece edebi ve kavramsal bir şema olmadığını da yinelemek gerek. Zira mimari olarak daha net okunan bir yansıması var ütopyanın, modalaştıkça ve stilize oldukça içindeki agresif ve saldırgan siyasi dil ölüyor; bir janr’a dönüşüyor. Bunu en çok ve en net biçimde mimaride gördük, biraz da sinemada. Kubrick, Godard ve Tarkovsky... Ya da distopya dersek, Jarman, Fassbinder, Haneke... Ütopya’nın sonuç itibariyle ürün olarak elbette bir model yaratması gerek, sonunda bir dünya olarak önerilmesi için, içinde bütün bir gerçeklik kurgusu barındırması şart. Ama kritik olan, üretilen modelin sistemle nerede, nasıl, ne zaman karşılacağı.
Peter Lang, bir söyleşide Pelin Tan’ın sorusuna (1960’lardaki radikal eleştirinin, “ütopya”nın modernist tarifine karşı bir şey olduğunu düşünüyor musunuz? Bugün radikal eleştiriyi nasıl tanımlarsınız?) şu cevabı veriyor:
“...50’lerin sonuna doğru gitgide daha gözle görülür hale gelmeye başlayan modernizmin ve onun sosyal modellerinin çöküşü, radikaller tartışmaya başlamasalardı daha trajik olabilirdi. Büyük İtalyan tarihçi ve teorisyen Manfredo Tafuri, radikal manifesto ile alay etmiştir. Ancak toplumun esas işlevsizliğine, onun yüzsüz kapitalist yapısına direkt olarak bağlanmaktan kaçınmıştır. Bu çok talihsiz bir durum olurdu, çünkü radikal hareket, bu sistemin kuyusunu kazan az sayıda etkili araçlardan birisini üretmiştir. Bugün Marksist söylemin olmadığı bir dünyayı kabul etmemiz ve serbest piyasa kapitalizmine sıkı sıkıya bağlanmamız, her zamanki ütopya modellerinin kullanılmasına engel oluyor. Ayrıca şunu da biliyoruz ki, yeni eleştirmenler çok gelişmişler ve ilk alternatif modelleri, son dönem mimarlık yaratıcılığına malzeme olarak sunuyorlar...”
Tafuri’ye geri dönmek önemli bir tavır, hele ki bu retro-referansı Fütürizm’in 100. Yılını kutlayan İtalya sanatının kucağına düştüğüm bir anda yeniden gözden geçirdim. O nedenle okura fütürizm ve faşizm arasındaki tehlikeli ve gergin ilişkinin de unutulmaması gerektiğini hatırlatmak istiyorum. (bkz. F.T. Marinetti’nin hüzünlü hikayesi) Fütürist Manifesto’nun faşist İtalyan siyasetçilerinin ağzını nasıl sulandırdığını düşününce, bugün ütopyanın yeniden üretilmesindeki ısrarı daha iyi anlayabiliriz. Yeni bir ütopya yok, ama ütopya artık bir ihtiyaç, bir pastiş, bir retro-effect! Tekno gibi, graffiti gibi, 1 Mayıs gibi bir partileme imkanı. Bir kavramsallaşma yolu. Köprüden önce son çıkış!
Geriye bakınca geleceğin ölümünden bahsetmenin burada etkili olacağını düşünüyorum; artık gelecek bir kavga meselesi değil, bir organizasyon şeması, bir plan-program tahtası. Biz gelecekten ziyade kısa vadeli ve kendimizle ilgili planlar peşindeyiz. Ama o kadar da boktan değil durumlar, mesela Gus Van Sant’ın Milk’i, 2000’lerin sonu itibarıyla sadece bir film değil, aslında bir sanatsal müdahale idi. Siyasi olarak tavır alan bir eleştirinin tarihsel ve dökümanter dillerle birleşerek, bir kimlik mücadelesi olarak hikayelenmesinin hala ve hala işlediğini gösterdi. Bir anlamda devrim hala ve hala mümkün, daha güzel bir dünya her zaman hayal edilebilir, dünya hala ve hala değişebilir -dedi.
Yazacak çok şey var, söylenecek çok şey var ama burada şununla bitirmeli:
Bir tek gelecekten söz etmektense, geleceklerden söz etmek gerek.
9
Jul 09
Dünya(lar) Venedik’te buluştu, 09/07/2009, Radikal
Radikal, 09/07/2009
ADNAN YILDIZ (Radikal yazıları Arşivi)
53. Venedik Bienali, İsveçli Daniel Birnbaum küratörlüğünde kasım sonuna kadar ziyarete açık kalacak ve illa ki değişecek şekilde açıldı. Birnbaum, ‘Dünyalar Yaratmak’ başlığıyla gerçekleştirdiği bienal sergisi için sanat felsefesinden gelen akademik birikimini ve sanatçıya-stüdyoya yakın tavrını temel alarak ilerlemiş. Arsenal ve Giardini’deki iki sergide yer alan sanatçıların işleri arasındaki bağlantılar, Birnbaum’un sanatı tarifindeki temel motivasyonunu açmak isteyen nüanslar, bağlantılar üzerine kurulu. Arsenal sergisi, karanlık bir jestle, artık bizimle olmayan ve pratiğinin ölümsüzlüğüne adanan bir Lygia Page yerleştirmesi ile başlıyor. İzleyicinin birden içine düştüğü bu imgesel dehliz, serginin devamında kendini belli eden bir yaklaşımı müjdeliyor. Formun ve resimsel imgenin mekânla olan sanat tarihsel ilişkisine kavramsalcı bir gelenekle geri dönen bu yaklaşım, sergi içinde birçok kere deşifre oluyor; özellikle işler kendi mekanlarını yaratırken, izleyiciye fiziksel bir deneyim alanı yaratmaktansa, kendi auralarından geri yansıyor.
Bence Arsenal’deki en heyecan verici alanları Yona Friedman, Thomas Bayrle ve Jan Hafstrom gibi artık kendi bağlamlarında okumaları kalıplaşmış eski tüfekler kuruyor. Bu isimlerin bir anlamda bir yüzey sergisi olarak genişleyerek açılan Arsenal’deki yerleştirmede ortaya çıkmaları Arsenal’in artık kanıksanmış sergi formunu hemen kırıyor.
Önemli duraklar
Yerel deneyimleri mimari çözümlerle global bir harita gibi işaretleyen Marjetica Portc, kavramsal olarak bina yapısını soyan çizim ve yerleştirmeleriyle Anya Zholud, yerleştirmesiyle Cassevetes sahnesini yeniden kuran Karen Cytter ve felsefi bir içeriği bir form anlayışı olarak üreten Falke Pisano sergi içinde bazı önemli duraklar. Açılış haftasındaysa, hayat boyu başarı ödülünü John Baldessari ile paylaşan Yoko Ono’nun uzun kuyruklara yol açan performansı, yeniden üretilen ulusal kimlikler üzerinden güncellenen sanatçı pozisyonları odaklı Liam Gillick ve Ahmet Öğüt konuşması ve yerleştirmesindeki dev aynaları kıran Michelangelo Pistoletto aksiyonu Arsenal’in hafızasına kayıt oldu.
Arsenal’deki en güçlü cümleyi kuran ise hiç kuşkusuz Tirdad Zolghadr oldu; küratörü olduğu (bu sene ilk kez bir pavyon olarak sergi üreten) Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri sergisi Venedik Bienali’nin bir dünya fuarı olarak işleyen global ilişkiler ağına yaptığı eleştirel göndermelerle ve -radikal değişimlerle dönüşen- ortaya koyduğu yeni Arap dünyası panoramasıyla herkesi hemen içine aldı. İtalya Pavyonu’nun merakla beklediğim ve (100’üncü yılı vesilesiyle) F. T. Marinetti’nin manifestosuna adanan yeni-fütürist sergisi beni çok tatmin etmedi.
Giardini ise Arsenal’den daha çok malzemeyi, elektiriği ve heyecanı barındıran bir programa sahip. Politik doğrucu bir manevrayla 40 yıllık İtalyan Pavyonu Bienal Binası olarak yeniden isimlendirilmiş. Birnbaum küratörlüğünde, Giardini’deki ana sergide Arsenal’daki gibi kontrollü davranamamış; işler mekâna dağılırken aralarındaki ‘mantıksal’ bağları korumuş ama kendi alanlarında fazla yalnızlaşmış, sergi bütün olarak çok işlememiş. Kavramsal bir açıyla film malzemesi üzerine giden Rosa Barba, genç yetenek ödülü alan Nathalie Djurberg, imajın doğasına ilişkin mükemmel imza ve hikâye buluşmaları yaratan Philippe Parreno, Bacon’a ‘selam çakan’ inanılmaz güzellikteki resimleriyle Pietro Roccosalva ve arşivci dili anıtlaştıran Simon Starling sergiden hemen öne çıkan isimler. En üst katta bu sene ilk kez Venedik’e gelen ve enerjisiyle hepimizi kendine hayran bırakan Wolfgang Tilmans fotoğrafik imajı adeta bir mabete çevirdi.
Gözler Hollanda’daydı
Giardini’deki pavyonlar arasından öne çıkanlar konusunda eğitimli gözler hemen Hollanda Pavyonu-Fiona Tan’ın sergisinde; Almanya Pavyonu’nda Alman bir sanatçıyı görmeyi bekleyenleri şaşırtan Liam Gillick’in formun içindeki siyasi bağlamı deşen sesli-kedili mutfak yerleştirmesinde, Shaun Gladwell’in motosiklet üstünde yavaşlayan Avustralya’sında ve Steve Mc Queeen sinema salonuna dönüşen İngiltere’sinde birleşecektir. Mc Queen iştah kabartıp, etkili bir ‘spectacle’ yarattı; film seanslarına bilet kapmak için sabahtan önünde uzun kuyruklar oluşturan ‘izleyiciler’ bienalgezerden sinefile dönüştü. Dominique Gonzales-Foerster ‘in Giardini’de ana sergideki filminde başını masaya koyarak, ‘artık ne yapabileceğini’ bilmediğini itiraf etmesi ve bienal tarihiyle hesaplaşması, ıssız bir zamanında Giardini’de kamerasını dolaştıran ve aç köpeklere odaklanan Steve Mc Queen ile karşılıklı iyi çalıştı.
Partisiyle, Danimarka Kraliyet Ailesi’nin katılımıyla paparazzileşen açılışıyla, eşantiyonlarıyla Danimarka ve Kuzey Ülkeleri Pavyonu sergisi en çok konuşulanlardan biriydi. I. Dragset ve M. Elmgreen (too nineties!) 90’lardan gelen bir tavırla, genç ve klasik isimlerden oluşan sağlam bir ‘queer’ koleksiyon yaratarak sordu: Para nelere kadir, neleri satın alabiliyor, kimleri tavlıyor; tasarım, sanat, kraliçe, çıplak oğlanlar ve havuzda bir ölü!
Balkanlar’dan güçlü işler
Alçakgönüllü ama kavramsal olarak güçlü yerleştirmeler yine Balkanlardan geldi; Romanya’nın video labirenti ve Çek ve Slovak Cumhuriyet’inin bahçeyi devam ettiren (blokları yıkan) ‘loop’ kavramsalcılığı son derece sağlam kurgulardı. Şehre dağılan pavyonlardan mansiyon ödülünü Dragset ve Elmgreen ile paylaşan, Singapur’un sinema tarihi hafızasını güncelleyen Ming Wong sergisi ve Filistin Pavyonu hem işler hem de atmosfer açısından mekânlarında güzel işledi.
Venedik Bienali’ni geriye sarınca, bugünkü sanat üretimine ve tartışmasına dair bazı noktaları korkmadan masaya getirebilirim. Birnbaum sergisi, yıllardır formun geri döneceğini muştulayan sanat tarihçileri olumladı. Ama formun geri dönüşü görkemsiz, kavramsallaşmadan, yenisiz ve bir koşul olarak, ‘kutlanmadan’, dönemsel bir geçiş olarak kabullenildi. Özellikle öne çıkan bazı işlerde, imajın dijital teknoloji devrimiyle hızla dolaşması ve sirküle edilmesiyle değişen görsel dünyaya yönelik bir tavır hemen okunuyordu. Fiona Tan, Shaun Gladwell, Mc Queen, Öğüt ve birçoğu imajı yavaşlatarak, dondurarak ve kırarak izleyiciye ve dünyaya kısa bir mesaj çekti: (slow down) ‘yavaşlayalım.’ Çılgın partilerin yerini krize duyarlı minik kokteyller ve yayın odaklı üretimler almıştı ki, son yıllarda giderek prodüksiyon fetişine odaklanan güncel sanat üreticileri bu alçakgönüllü jestlerle tazelendi. İşin içinde ne kadar para olduğundan çok bütçelerin, zamanın ve tartışmaların nasıl kullanıldığının daha önemli olduğu noktasında birleşildi. Birnbaum, çok heyecanlı ve ilginç bir gösteri sergisi yapmadı, ama her fırsatta vurguladığı ‘kesilen bütçesiyle’ ayakları üzerine basan (down to earth) bir buluşma sağladı.
1
Jul 09
ENG,The Politics of the Stage or The Stage of Politics/The Seductiveness of the Interval, the catalogue for the Romanian Pavilion,53.Venice Biennial
The Politics of the Stage or The Stage of Politics
By Adnan Yıldız
On stage, I am in the dark.
Maria Callas
Local Stories
An image of a bust from my early childhood memories is still vivid. It rested on a pedestal in a small park in my hometown, Karaman, in Middle Anatolia. When I used to walk home from school, it was an inevitable stop, a sort of stage for childhood fantasies and a hidden place for questioning the political borders of a psychosocial territory. The bust represented a local historical figure, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey, who was the second ruler of the beylik (feudal province) of Karamanoğlu, and on the pedestal of that bust was inscribed his famous proclamation of 13 May 1277: “This day henceforth, in the dervish convent, in the council, in the palace, in the parliament and in public places, no language other than Turkish shall be permitted.” Since the text was inscribed only in Turkish, I was greatly concerned for those who do not speak Turkish, curiously questioning the logic behind the text: If you don’t speak Turkish, and if it is not permitted to speak any other language than Turkish here, how then would you know this, given that this information is communicated to you only in Turkish? I always felt a kind of thrill as a child when I heard people around me speaking those other languages. How would they have been punished for their transgression?
For me, that park was a perfect example of a conceptual stage that requires neither an actor nor a director. It was an installation that performed continuously within everyday reality. It was an imaginative stage that I had discovered; and it fictionalised itself every morning with another story. The silence in the park was enough for me to fantasise about situations which would somehow challenge the context of the declaration. Sometimes I would imagine people there, around the park, speaking other languages, although this might now sound like a Benetton campaign from the 90s, but back then it was more than just a childhood fantasy. It was the instinctive, natural response of a young child, of a pure mind, to the political atmosphere of Turkey in the 80s. Unspeakable pressure and a high level of control within the public space were the cost, the collectively footed bill called “transitional democracy”; it meant never feeling safe and if you were outside on the street late at night – you might have been taken for a terrorist or an anarchist. To spend time alone in that park in front of that bust was inspiring for me in order understand where I was living, whatever happened here, to understand what was going on…
This situation reminds of the writings of Soviet exile Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that the “carnivalesque” brings a kind of liberation to the lower class, insofar as “it is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates.” In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin refers to the “carnivalesque” in literature as a kind of activity or situation that takes place in the carnival, whereby the social hierarchies of everyday life -- their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths -- are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. In a carnival, a fool can be a wise man or a king appear as a beggar; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell). The bust was the centre of the carnival, and around it there were all the people with their costumes; the uniforms, gestures, and attitudes of everyday life in the city. On the other hand, today, the feeling of that atmosphere in the park sounds like it was a Brecthian stage. Regarding the politics of stage theatrics, German director, Bertolt Brecht dreamt of a theatre which alienated the audience, criticising the class conflict and oppression of its time. The term Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt) is metaphorically depicted as a hammer, which fights against corruption. In the Brechtian theatre, the audience is invited to experience a form of fiction that shockingly reflects on truth and reality. “To see one’s mother as a man’s wife one needs a V-Effekt: this is provided, for example, when one acquires a stepfather. If one sees one’s form-master hounded by the bailiffs a V-Effekt occurs: one is jerked out of a relationship in which the form-master seems big into one where he seems small.” (cit. John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht).
That declaration might have operated as a V-Effekt for me since I used to see it every day, knowing that there were many other languages spoken around me, and also possibilities of hosting people who spoke languages other than Turkish in the city… The presence of that declaration in the public space was only one of the million stories about how public imagination is manipulated and controlled in Turkey. It was a fiction out of an engagement with history and politics; even if they do not speak our language, they are not allowed to speak any other language. Then who were they? With whom did the declaration communicate, and from whom was it protecting our language and culture? In fact, the answer was not so far away from me. It couldn’t be the tourists; for example – as part of the hidden curriculum – at elementary school, it was always repeated that tourists bring foreign currency to the country, so we like them, and when they are around, we behave ourselves… And we were also encouraged to learn a second or third language in the school, therefore it couldn’t be English or German, so what was the language that should not be publicly spoken? At that time, there was a Kurdish labourer who helped my father in his business, called Celal. Furthermore, I observed that when I sometimes tuned in to the Kurdish-speaking radio channel to invite him for a tea break, he would kindly turn the sound off if any other people were around… Now, I know why. I started to learn who they were; they were the people who lived together with us; our friends, neighbours and relatives. There was no cultural antagonism between people, cultures or languages; it was a set made by some actors who worked for the state in the state, and it is always the innocent people who always suffer, get hurt or killed.
Later, they replaced the bust with a monumental statue, now holding a ferman (edict) on which the same text from the declaration is inscribed, again only in Turkish. In addition to Mehmet Bey’s declaration, there is also another statement on the front of the pedestal now; and this time it is from Ataturk, (1881-1938) the founder of the Republic, saying, “Turkish Citizens who are successfully capable of protecting the high level of their national independence should also emancipate the Turkish language from the invasion of foreign languages.” Maybe the transformation of that declaration from a thirteenth-century case into a Cold War weapon was not only a representation of a closed system, but also a reflection of how culture, identity and language have been officially staged in our country. The declaration has been handed down from the thirteenth century, and it had nothing to do with the national identity of its time, since nationalism is conceptually an invention of the modern age. Mehmet Bey’s intention was probably to provide a sort of uniformity and centralisation in Central Anatolia against Persian dominance. But the micro-politics behind the mentality that keeps the statue with that statement in the public space relates to other concerns and still exists in that context. Regarding the omnipresent position of Kemal Ataturk, it is not so strange for me to see his words connected to a statement from the thirteenth century. He was misinterpreted and exploited by almost all of the political movements in the country, and everyone has borrowed a sentence from him to validate their own political identity. In 2007, during the 10th Istanbul Biennial, some academicians started a campaign to inculpate the curator of the show, Hou Hanru, for his references to the sociological reading of late modernism in Turkey. Hanru was referring to a valid contextual framework which is still taboo in this country. The recent design of the statue, now including a sentence from Ataturk, is not a coincidence. It is the destiny of every argument in this country…
Using history as an element of manipulation, and culture as a stage for control, the Turkish army, the bureaucratic elite and the bourgeoisie have exploited the cultural and historical aspects of the country, creating a fictional past and a designed national identity. After the military coups, especially after the one in 1980, there a post-Cold War process was also staged in Turkey, the same as in many other places around the world, black-listing any other/minor language, identity or culture as a potential enemy of the state/nation/country. For instance, for many years it was an issue of human rights and democracy; before August 2002, the Turkish governments placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and the broadcast media. Since last year, Kurdish parents have been allowed to give their children Kurdish names, Kurdish teachers to hold classes on the Kurdish language, and Kurdish broadcasters to set up their own television station. This year, the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) launched an exclusive Kurdish-language television station in an undoubtedly historical step that reflects the changing attitude of the state toward its Kurdish citizens. Many people interpreted this step as an important change in the state’s approach toward Kurdish citizens, but some others, as an investment by the Islamic government in Kurdish votes before election day. Is this also a stage of politics?
News flash: A Kurdish singer who had been working for a television show at this recently launched Kurdish speaking channel of TRT resigned several days ago, complaining about the social pressure inside the institution, and stating that she had even been censored by the channel several times. Is the stage really changing, or is it just changing another décor on its surface?
So what about the audience?
Global Affairs
National borders, militarist-territorial strategies and Cold War politics have also been undergoing a post-Fordist transformation in the last decades. In short, contemporary forms of capitalism have been undergoing massive changes in the previous decades as a result of digitalisation, mobility and internationalism, introducing new forms of self-organisation and everyday politics. Apart from national economic borders and the international territorial consensus that has controlled the markets, their value and accessibility, since the beginning of the twentieth century, there are currently new virtual societies and communities that share, exchange, shape and circulate information, knowledge, experience and products such as e-bay or Youtube. For example, the shift in the form of encyclopaedias, considered the traditional form of information production since the Enlightenment, to today’s open sources, such as Wikipedia, produces a reflexive and collective process for the exchange of information.
One may also conclude that the conditions of image production have been democratised, making it much easier and cheaper to exchange images, thanks to new technological developments, digitalisation and the Internet. Nevertheless, human imagination and critical creativity continue to be manipulated and controlled by the codes and systems of the State, Army and media-reproducing mediocracy. Western Europe and North America are expanding the borders of public control and capitalising on the channels of information processing for the sake of security, as opposed to increasing demands for free information, education and knowledge by many activists and intellectuals. India, China, and Russia are, in this case, the rising stars, yet their repressive policies of censorship are notorious. On the other hand, U.S. President Barack Obama is the first elected president to have campaigned with a CNN debate, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, using the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents. In his article What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream? Noam Chomsky, whose work has analysed the forms of this media transformation and produced an extensive, critical discourse on anti-globalisation, writes: "What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don't like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system. What has it to do with our consumer behavior?”
This reminds me of a recently produced art piece. Filmed at a real television studio in Berlin, Canadian artist Lynne Marsh’s Camera Opera is made up of a series of choreographed movements from different cameras around an anchorwoman, creating a Brechtian stage for the viewer as a performative critic of mass media broadcasts. In organised harmony, the operators circle around the studio, focus on the anchorwoman and pan out to expose the set, equipment, lighting, audience seating and each other. The performance is based on the Strauss waltzes that navigate the operators’ movements. What we see is how the television studio is organised through and by means of camera views, and how the set may become a performative space based on a series of codified relations. Engaging the Brechtian techniques of alienation, Marsh turns the cameras on themselves, denying their traditional role of relaying information and exposing their participation in the manipulation of what the viewer is presented with. As a conceptual entity, the stage exists in everyday reality, and it is transformed into the forms of everyday communication, exchange and visibility again and again. Like everything else, the stage is also televised, digitalised, virtualised today. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture in terms of how contemporary image politics evolve: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” and “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
The evolution of contemporary image politics, the position of the audience, and the conceptualisation of the stage are closely linked to the phenomenon of globalisation, multiculturalism, and the continuously changing model of post-Fordist society. According to Slavoj Žižek, the only universal hegemony is global capitalism; without opposition, all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. Even progressive multiculturalism, in the form of radical, (deconstructive) particularism, has been taken over by global power, as analysed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. This was wholly visible during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, in the spectacle of the 2008 Olympic Games Opening ceremonies in Beijing, etc. Related to this point, Berlin-Singapore-based artist Ming Wong’s practice has to be briefly mentioned here as an artistic gesture. He duplicates a scene from the movie, Welcome Mr. Marshall! a Spanish comedy film from 1953, directed by Luis García Berlanga and considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema. It is about a small town in Castile, Villar del Río, which warmly welcomes some visiting American diplomats by disguising their town and themselves in Andalusian style, in order to display the side of Spanish culture with which the visiting American officials will be most accustomed, in the hopes of benefitting under the Marshall Plan. Wong reinterprets or reconstructs a speech given to the town to boost their morale and encourage them to undergo the cultural transformation, replacing America and Americans with China and Chinese. Neither America nor China, it is called Empire as a global form of capital control and oppressive power. Nevertheless, there is always hope. In his book Time for Revolution Antonio Negri proposes a term, the “reconstruction of hope,” in order to posit the questions “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions with a socio-cognitive approach: “In the bio-political postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But… probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope.”
Global Exchange
In one of the common interpretations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who is described by Ophelia as "th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form" (Act III, Scene 1, lines 148-9), the character of Hamlet is mostly defined as a reflection of the reactions of all the other characters in the play, and especially the audience. Some critics such as Stephen Booth, William Empson et al. have further investigated the analogous relationship between Hamlet, the play, and its audience. For instance, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude interprets her son’s actions as the result of her “o’erhasty marriage,” while Polonius, most obviously, misreads his own expectations into Hamlet’s actions (“Still harping on my daughter!”), though many other characters in the play participate in analogous behaviour.
Let’s go back to that park, and imagine that Brecthian atmosphere or “carnivalesque” mise en scène here again in the age of global war. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the statue in that park has functioned as a mirror for its audiences, or passers-by; a public stage for its citizens whispering what they think, how they think, and in fact what they are afraid of. Perhaps the impact of the statue on the citizens is like the way in which public performances by Harry Houdini, who was a legendary magician, escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer, were perceived by his audience: “It is not really happening, that’s why it is so real…”
Perhaps the citizens who have kept their silence for years and never confronted the logic behind the monument might never guess how the story is going to end. As far as we know from George Orwell’s fiction, Animal Farm there is a line that will remind us of the old story: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others…”
P.S. 1 This text has been written using the research notes for the exhibition project There Is No Audience, an Exhibition about Public Imagination (22 May-31 August 2009, Montehermoso, Spain), which was a selected proposal for the 2009 Curator Grant from the 370 applications sent to the open call.
P.S. 2 Turkey has been shaken by the news a few days later I finished this text. 44 people were murdered in Zangirt (Bilge) Village of Merdîn (Mardin) province by government paramilitary forces, village guards (korucular) on 5 May 2009. The attackers used heavy weapons. 1200 rounds were fired. The weapons belonged to the state, so did the bullets. Before its name was changed to Bilge as part of the assimilation policies of the Turkish state, the village was used to be known as "Zanqırt" in Kurdish.
image: The public monument, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey, Karaman
www.seductiveness-of-interval.ro
11
Jun 09
ENG, TIME-CHALLENGER
Time-Challenger by Adnan Yıldız
Time-Challenger was born as an exhibition proposal for the open call of the Curator Curator project, which is a collaborative organization between Enough Room for Space from Rotterdam and HISK, a post-graduate program currently located in Ghent. The original proposal was based on the idea of opening a space-time for a discussion of how artistic reconstruction has been operating today through diverse conceptual approaches and contextual references in relation to current image politics. Recently, there have been numerous exhibition projects addressing artistic re-enactments, remakes, reproductions, and reinterpretations …Time-Challenger takes into consideration the art historical and analytical framework of these projects while taking a different direction by connecting the discussion to Antonio Negri’s concept of the “reconstruction of hope.” Just after the proposal was selected by Enough Room for Space, I did a research visit to the exhibition space and engaged in discussion with the residents of the studios and post-graduate students there during the Open Studio Week. Finally, the proposal has been crystallized by these discussions and aspects of the artistic production at HISK and has now turned into an exhibition about critical reconstruction. The term “critical reconstruction” is borrowed from Gary Wolf (Venture Kapital, Wired Magazine, 1998) who writes about the reconstruction of Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coincidentally, or perhaps as a sign of Zeitgeist, this proposal was completed in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the site of much of the most dynamic reconstruction in Berlin since 1989.
Time-Challenger was born as an exhibition proposal for the open call of the Curator Curator project, which is a collaborative organization between Enough Room for Space from Rotterdam and HISK, a post-graduate program currently located in Ghent. The original proposal was based on the idea of opening a space-time for a discussion of how artistic reconstruction has been operating today through diverse conceptual approaches and contextual references in relation to current image politics. Recently, there have been numerous exhibition projects addressing artistic re-enactments, remakes, reproductions, and reinterpretations …Time-Challenger takes into consideration the art historical and analytical framework of these projects while taking a different direction by connecting the discussion to Antonio Negri’s concept of the “reconstruction of hope.” Just after the proposal was selected by Enough Room for Space, I did a research visit to the exhibition space and engaged in discussion with the residents of the studios and post-graduate students there during the Open Studio Week. Finally, the proposal has been crystallized by these discussions and aspects of the artistic production at HISK and has now turned into an exhibition about critical reconstruction. The term “critical reconstruction” is borrowed from Gary Wolf (Venture Kapital, Wired Magazine, 1998) who writes about the reconstruction of Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coincidentally, or perhaps as a sign of Zeitgeist, this proposal was completed in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the site of much of the most dynamic reconstruction in Berlin since 1989.
In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Marina Abramovic acts out select historical performance artworks from 1970’s artists (such as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys etc.) including two of her own. The series of performances at Guggenheim Museum (New York) sharpened the tendency of questioning the timing of re-enactments, remakes and reinterpretations etc. in the art world. In an interview in the New York Times in early November, 2005, Abramovic explained the impetus for her most recent performances, stating that she “felt a strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced [her] as an artist. ‘There’s nobody to keep the history straight ... I feel almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it.’ And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.”
Many artists today have been using similar approaches and strategies of reinterpreting ar t history as well as transforming world history and culture. Rather than framing the discussion as a form of artistic production through an art historical perspective, Time-Challenger aims to deal with the timing of these productions to relate these tendencies to the repositioning of contemporary politics, image culture and digital-visual capital. As an exhibition about critical reconstruction, Time-Challenger reformulates the critique as an open-ended process of personalizing the situation, performing artistic know into a synthesis of many perspectives. To make things public, there always needs to be a personal position. The process of making things public in contemporary art practice not only brings together art works but also makes dialogues visible in order to create a physical experience for potential interactions.
To deal with the monsterous experience of global capital, Antonio Negri proposes the term “reconstruction of hope” in his Time for Revolution (2005): “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions through reconstructing hope: “In the biopolitical postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But ... probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope (or better, as in Alma Venus, dystopia) have been laid. (144-45).” Time-Challenger shares a common conceptual ground with the exhibition project, There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination (22.05.09-30.08.09, Montehermoso, Spain) and focuses on the same terms on a different level.* Here, Time-Challenger is more interested in the possibility of reformulating the discussion of artistic reconstruction in relation to the political atmosphere of our time and integrating the strategy of reconstructing hope into the process.
Through rethinking modernism, Time-Challenger will display some artistic reconstructions that challenge pre-given definitions and realities of our past and present time — related the problematic of timing. In the exhibition, Gökçen Cabadan displays paintings that depict contemporary visions of family and health and transform the ready-made images at an abstract level of reconstructive criticality. Developing a conceptual identity and an expressive quality, Viron Vert’s drawings and collages include elements of history and culture through personal memories and attachments. Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s video A Turkish Doctor: Ömer Ayhan ironically fictionalizes a success story reflecting the power of the media over content via an evening news program. Romeo Gongora’s Prison is composed of monologues from four prisoners and establishes a critical dialogue on society and models of justice (punitive/rehabilitative). By using a level of abstraction through ready-made images and painting, André Catalão’s installation is a reflection of the artist’s cultural memory. Olof Dreijer’s sound installation is composed of animal sounds and provides a fictional space through reconstructing the perception of nature and the elements of evolution.
As an unforgettable gesture, Felix Gmelin’s Farbtest II, Die Rote Fahne, Colour Test II, The Red Flag is composed of the original shot and the remake of Gerd Conradt’s tracking shot of students running through the streets of West Berlin from 1968. Gmelin’s father had been one of those waving the flag, and the two-channel video loop directly reflects on Negri’s point. Lauren von Gogh conceptualizes a personal story, and reconstructs an everyday experience for the audience in order to create a social critique. Susanne Kriemann’s publications presented on a table include different strategies of recontextualizing the form of images; they are unique examples of experimenting on the format of publication and reading images. Makode Linde’s silk screen prints stimulate a contemporary critique of the history of culture and identity: logos from global sport industry delicately installed into the illustrative portraits of African figures remind us of the exploitation of labour. Christodoulos Panayiotou works with archives and personal memories of sound and image, recreating new dimensions in the perceptive levels of the audience through his installation. Borrowing the images from the world of exploration and discovery (in this instance, National Geographic) Rinus Van de Velde performs his artistic research through his charcoal drawings. There is also a video interview with Ulus Baker by Aras Özgün, What is an opinion? presented in the exhibition that opens a channel to the audience regarding the social process behind the construction of any opinion.
This discussion will be linked to the question: “how does any form of artistic reconstruction develop a level of criticality through its production process, and how does this criticality embody a public challenge?” within the framework of the exhibition, which is designed on the basis of Paul Virilio’s strategic methodology: “Play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more.” (from the interview with Paul Virilio by Jérôme Sans).
by Adnan Yıldız
* Like Time-Challenger the proposal for the exhibition There Is No Audience was also produced for an open call. That one was selected from 370 proposals, sent from 35 countries as Montehermoso 2009 Curator Grant.
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EXHIBITION AT THE HISK (CHARLES DE KERCHOVELAAN 187A, 9000 GHENT, BELGIUM) OPEN FROM THURSDAY TO SUNDAY, FROM 14:00 UNTIL 18:00
SUPPORTED BY THE FLEMISH COMMUNITY IN THE FRAMEWORK OF CURATOR CURATOR, A PROJECT INITIATED BY MAARTEN VANDEN EYNDE AND MAAIKE GOUWENBERG (WWW.ENOUGHROOMFORSPACE.ORG )
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE HISH / HIGHER INSTITUTE FOR FINE ARTS (WWW.HISK.EDU)
