Catalog Text for
“Neresi? Burası? Turkish Art Today,” The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan, 2003
Istanbul is getting busier every day. For many years, the city had nothing but local artists and artist-organized exhibitions. With the advent of the Istanbul Biennial at the end of the 1980s, the city took great strides in developing relations with the international arts community, and the situation, once dominated by art academies and provincial galleries, began to change.
In the last two years, two new institutions, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, have opened to the public. Proje4L is the city’s biggest museum-quality exhibition institution. Platform has a flexible exhibition space, a library, an extensive archive, and a residency program in the city’s most active art district. The two institutions have pursued an international program and organized conferences and events. Conversely, a new gallery, Galerist, has provided new impetus and healthy competition to the best of the older ones, such as Galeri Nev. The maverick publication art-ist, now printed in Turkish and English, maps the field. The institutions founded in the late 1990s, such as the Borusan Art Gallery and Karsi Sanat, and an artist initiative like the Loft or a hybrid space like mentalklinik, embrace diverse roles.
The economic downturn of the last two years has forced private funders and grant seekers to focus on responsible and sustainable projects, as opposed to the showy one-off events of earlier years. People have sobered up. The end of the support of populist practice could be said to have had a positive effect on contemporary visual culture. Formerly excluded, the contemporary is slowly becoming a partner in the local economy of art.
At the same time, there are sure warning signs for contemporary practices. Corporate initiatives that support well-worn exhibition projects occupy much of the city’s cultural life and satisfy a kitsch sensibility. From the bank galleries of the 1980s through the bank-operated cultural centers of the 1990s, the phase has now moved to the building of museums by banks. While it is quite commendable that financial institutions have been able to compensate for the lack of public support and philanthropy, they have also edged out independent programs, making their existence quite tricky, and cannibalized an all-too-eager media. A much worse case is branding cultural initiatives under corporate identities, such as lifestyle promotion masquerading as art in the press and the wilful evaporation of public speech in favor of orthodoxy.
Consider how contemporary art culture circulates in a megalopolis of over ten million inhabitants. Or is it a city that is many cities disconnected by differences in class, culture, and access? Istanbul remains an ad-hoc city that looks as if it does not claim the contemporary and has too much claim to history. Despite all odds, we must accept that contemporary visual culture operates with an international syntax morphed by local temporality and situatedness. One could be written off as an eager and privileged subject of globalization. Although the art that comes from here may be, at some point, not visibly original, it is replete with contingencies in structure and constructions of significance. Only time will tell if Istanbul’s little miracle will occur not only in semi-public discussion, in artists’ folios, and during the days of the Biennial, but in the everyday.
vasıf kortun 