Global Perspectives and Cultural Hybridity
National Museum of the American Indian
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C., and New York, 2006
People ask me about my next big project, but after the Istanbul Biennial, I don’t have a large project planned. I stress this because it is not necessary to go from project to project and scan the whole globe. Suppose the Biennial was initially intended as a way for Istanbul to “catch up” on the development of visual culture in the United States. In that case, the original European Union and Japan, then that mission has been accomplished. Now, Istanbul can stand on its terms as a crucial fulcrum of social and cultural change, a place that inspires outsiders to new perspectives and extraordinary work. I would like to summarize a few experiences from the past fifteen years and then discuss a few projects from the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (2005), which I believe is relevant in this context. My institution, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, featured Normalization, a series of four exhibitions on the issue of normalization, last year. The theme references not only Turkey’ss transition from a national economy to aneoliberall on,e but also other forms of so-called normalization taking place in Eastern Europe and thedissolutiong of the welfare state. The exhibition posed questions such as: Who gets normalized? What are the processes of normalization? Who benefits from it?
Creating a New Condition
In 1989, I invited Homi Bhabha to Istanbul for a lecture. I asked for the support of the British Council, and they replied by saying that he would not be good enough forTurkey. You can imagine that in those days not only were institutions like the British Council based on packing and traveling art that they found appropriate from their homes to abroad, they were not likely to engage in discussions requested from the locals on the ground. I relate this anecdote to help convey the context of the time, just prior to the watershed events of 1989.
In 1990, I traveled in Germany with a number of artist files. Young and eager, I sought to find venues for artists from Turkey in exhibitions and to increase awareness of their art. I went to the Institut ftir Auslandsbeziehun gen, whose mission was to support this type of endeavor. This federal in stitution helps exhibitions from abroad come to Germany and vice-versa.
They did not let me in the door. No appointment, no nothing, left out side without even a coffee. And so I returned. On the train back from Stuttgart, I had an epiphany—a great feeling. Never, ever export again, I thought. I am just going to go back home and do the homework. I will go home and produce a condition where you know things will eventually turn out right. And this is what I have been doing for the last fourteen years or so like many others from the so-called peripheries of the old and new world. In 1992, we held the 3rd International Istanbul Biennial. Canada was part of this show, with Bruce Ferguson as curator of that section.
Around that time, the Soros Centers, the Open Society Institutes, were founded, mostly for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. A net work called Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) was part of the Open Society initiative there. I was extremely positive about the SCCA net work because this was an occasion, finally, for a regional conversation, a re gion-to-region, horizontal conversation. Actually, it did not happen that way. Many artists wanted to go to New York or to Sao Paulo. I remember there were some seventy artists from the former Eastern Block in San Paulo in 1994. They let me crash in. That was a lost opportunity, but things are much better now. Perhaps most Soros Centers for Contemporary Art closed because they were still carrying in part the former operating habits of official socialism—the old nomenclature! of the Soviet Union—or these places were found to be simply “normalized.” But now the younger artists in Turkey are looking to Kosovo or Beirut. They are not looking to NewYork anymore— in fact, nobody is looking at New York, which is the emptied-out center.
In conversations over the last few days, a lot of fuss was made about using English while we are in Italy at an international conference. It brings to mind a 1993 work by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinovic titled An Artist Who Can not Speak English Is No Artist. Made of acrylic on artificial silk and 140 by 240 centimeters in size, this is a beautiful piece; it is also a banner for the streets and a kind of demonstration. The artwork indicates ambivalence about crit icizing the place one is from as well as the operatives of the ever-globaliz ing art world. English is a common communication interface that we bend, warp, transform, and make our own. The empire may have been extended but at the same time lost its center.
Artists at the 2005 Istanbul Biennial
In the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (2005), we showed a video work by Kosovar artist Jakup Ferri in which he takes Stilinovic’s concept to the extreme by trying to communicate through words he does not know the meaning of. You have to realize that Kosovo is under very special conditions right now. After the breakup of Yugoslavia and eruption of ethnic strife, the UN stepped in and took over control of Kosovo in 2001. Still, it has great institutions, a good school, and a very interesting group of young artists and writers. Ferri makes very short videos about being an artist in Kosovo or being an artist in Eastern Europe. In a work called Save Me, Help Me, he actually displays art as if in the marketplace—he sits down waiting for the European curator or collector who will, he hopes, someday arrive. In a video-performance work titled Three Virgins, Fernri plays an album track in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono display their affection for one an other in an orgasmic counterpoint of whispers and shouts that grows ever more frantic. Hiding like a teenager in his room, hugging cheap computer speakers close to his heart, Ferri tries to insert himself in the main narrtive, saying over and over: “Jakup, Jakup.” It is a memorable piece. In another video work, Ferri puts his parents and sisters in front of the camera in a comic exploration of the artist’s emergence into theWestern art world. Ferri is participating for the first time in an exhibition curated by Rene Block, who has a sense of amazing hospitality and generosity. Ferri’s father begins by expressing gratitude to the curator, but he lets us know that he holds his sons paintings in more esteem than the videos that have been selected for the show. Then the mother takes her turn and warns Jakup against the evils of theWest, as in a video letter. But the whole thing breaks down because one of Jakup’s sisters collapses in tears—she is laughing so hard that she begins to cry.The entire piece is actually a kind of setup. Ferri is in complete apprehension of his position as an artist from the extreme periphery of Europe and by playing the naive role pulls a royal flush on us. The three young women who form the Istanbul-based artist group Oda Projesi worked for the last seven years from a small apartment in a distressed part of town where they transformed the protocols of guest and host, au dience and community, as well as hierarchy. They published a book for the 2005 Istanbul Biennial titled Neighbourhood, room, neighbour, guest? Focusing on people’s relations to their situations and social environments, the book is a symbolic conversation among people who have experienced Oda Projesi yet do not know each other. It is based on questions that Oda Projesi has asked, such as: What kind of changes have you seen in your neighborhood since you came in? Did you do anything to your neighborhood? What does it mean to be a neighbor?What kind of neighbor are you? The questions led to other questions from participants and a conversation. More than 150 people from different walks of life and geographical locations were involved in an interactive network—you would have a nine-year-old in a conversation with an urbanist from Germany. It is an achronological, democratic book in which you can start with any question on any page, and the ques tions and answers will take you in any direction you want to go. The whole story of Oda Projesi indicates that they were always guests. They almost never ever made “exhibitions.” Audience was merely a surplus. You could happily go to the apartment, but you did not necessarily have to go there because things were already taking place with or without you. In effect, there was no community either. I think art can actually help make concrete, palpable change if it persists in this mode.
vasıf kortun 