Art Places, Rome, 2006
DD: How you see the development of the art scene since the beginning of the ‘90s when, as a curator of 3rd biennial, you tried to interconnect Istanbul and other cities and cultural contexts in the Balkan / Mediterranean region. Would you say that since then a system of contemporary art has been established in Turkey? Is there a chain of inter-relationships between all those elements that constitutes the system of art: museums and state institutions for contemporary art – private galleries – curators / art critics – artists – media – public – collectors and is there connection and interaction between them?
V.K.: There is no system because neo-liberalization destroyed it, and the new economic processes developed very early. To make the picture clear, we should say that there is not much support for contemporary culture on the governmental level since the main priority is the conservation of antiquities and historical heritage. Regarding engagement, the state is almost out of the picture.
The main support comes from private sources, which equals mostly to banks and some other institutions. There is also some funding coming from Western institutions; even if it is not so much, it has been increasing lately. The fact that main support for contemporary culture comes solely from private sources generates a very competitive business culture situation, which is quite unhealthy. It amounts to a lack of collaboration between different parts of the sector. The problem is getting even worse because privates are creating large institutions like the Istanbul Modern, a private museum for contemporary art, which is the first of this kind, and others followed. Due to this, the scene becomes more spectacular. Istanbul is a driving engine of the country with strong tourism output, and these two aspects – tourism and globalization – need spectacle. These new private institutions are not interested in supporting emergent art and emergencies but in helping only those cultural products that can be marketed readily. This creates a considerable gap between where art gets made and where it gets presented. Therefore, artistic and creative communities are suffering radically. There are still very few places that show and share contemporary art.
Turkey also has a very domestic, tame, and conservative culture. Due to those reasons rooted in our mentality, artists very rarely start with their initiatives and artist-organized institutions. Even if they have existed for more than two decades, private support is still quite shy, and it demands very moderated political statements. All this is actually creating a very politically neutral art context.
DD: After a period spent in US, in the end of the ‘90s you decided to return to Istanbul and to found a new space for the contemporary art: Platform Garanti. What are the programmatic coordinates of this space and how is it sustained?
V.K.: Platform Garanti operates with the responsibility and accountability of a public institution with core private support. We also receive public money from outside. When the institution was founded in 2001, the mission was to produce a new context and not follow the herd. It has an exhibition space, a library and documentation center, and a residency program. We also collaborate with other institutions and host projects. The three parts of the institution are distinct but under the same policy. The exhibition space has a very diverse public since it is right in the city’s center. In a way, we do not suffer from a lack of finance or an audience. In 5 years we had more than 500.000 visitors. So, our problem with the audience is one of excess. For this reason, it is hard to connect the exhibition to our other activities. The documentation center and the library are some of our most significant contributions to the city because we retain a memory that is, in effect, a comprehensive database for students, curators, and scholars. We also keep updated archives of artists from Turkey, the diaspora, and other regional countries. We want to remain a regional institution with strong connections to the south-east Mediterranean and south-east Europe. The residency program is increasingly oriented towards these regions and the Caucasus, even though we retain strong links to West European countries.
Platform’s only mission is to deal with the new proposals. As per the exhibitions, we changed the program every year: in the first year, we curated most of the shows. In contrast, a year later, we had an “institutional hospitality” project, which meant that we would invite institutions to take over our programs. In 2005, it was “Normalisation.
DD: What is the reception of the contemporary art in Turkey? How do you see that public respond to the activity of Platform? Also how venues like Istanbul biennial communicate to the local public and how do foreign artists establish communication with city and it’s public?
V.K.: For Platform, it is hard to say since the public is so excessive that it is hard to judge the “sustainability” of the reception. I can perceive that on the institutional level, our model succeeded since some more classical institutions have been adopting similar ways to ours. The public is a core group of artists, young curators, and the contemporary art community for the other programs. But let me say that Turkey, like many different places, is extremely xenophobic. When we have a local issue, the audience will pack it in; if not, it drops radically.
Regarding the biennial and its reception, well, it depends on the curator. The last biennial went very well in terms of the response of the local public. The exhibition created its own discussion spaces. We were very happy with how the public acquired the exhibition and “worked” with it as a tool. Of course, the public’s significant response corresponds to the event’s significance: The Biennial is the only historical event of historical importance.
For foreign artists, it is one the easiest cities to interact with and merge into if you are open and have an approach that is not prejudgemental.
DD: What are objective conditions of work for the emerging artists in Turkey and what are the ways for them to gain visibility? Also, are they interested in living and working within local cultural milieu or it’s more important for them to leave Turkey and integrate to the international art scene?
V.K.: An increasing number of artists from Western Europe come to live in Istanbul, and at the same time, there is an exodus for which the artists here cannot be blamed. The background is increasing populism, everyday violence, the decline in the EU process, and the violent resurgence of the Kurdish separatist movement after years of zero progress offered by the state. Then, there is a lack of critical discourse, horrific quality of newspaper reviews, indifferent institutions of art, and the domestication of artists by private galleries and institutions. Places like Platform are rare. The artists of interest here show mostly abroad, anyhow. I think that many artists have resigned themselves or fully recognized that the conditions that they have waited for so long may never arrive, even if their practice may be so specifically rooted here.
On the other hand, Istanbul is still a comfortable city, so as an artist, you can always get by. Most artists don’t live solely from their work but with something else on the side. It is of note that younger artists are more interested in going to Cairo, Beirut, or Belgrade than Basel or Amsterdam.
DD: Oda Projesi is an example of (the) artist’s interest in dealing with local context – are there similar initiatives and what could you tell me about them. This kind of work with local community was quite appreciated within the edition of Istanbul Biennial that you and Charles Esche curated.
V.K.: Oda Projesi received much attention because it created a non-representational model and broke down the duality of community and audience. Whatever we expect an artist group or an initiative to be was not satisfied. We were not interested in them making an exhibition or documentation for us. We invited them to the Biennial in the form of a publication they had in planning. The other initiatives, quite a few now in Istanbul, are like alternative artist initiatives that we know from many different places, which is fine. Still, you need contexts like Oda that throw open, unpredictable questions. Last year, Oda lost its space and neighborhood due to gentrification, and they have been relatively dormant. I doubt they can pursue a similar course in the future.
DD: How do you see relationship of Turkey and Mediterranean area in general in relation to Europe or West in general in the terms of contemporary art and culture of course? You were talking about “irreconcilabilities” – could you tell me more on what you mean with that?
V.K.: This is an Italian question, I watch with great bemusement how Italy and France and to a much lesser degree, Spain lay a claim to leadership of the Mediterranean in culture. The South-East Mediterranean region has recently evoked much interest from West European institutions. But this interest is framed within “geographical” exhibitions or “exhibitions of belief.” We seem to be obfuscating the serious issues here. This is such a provisional moment that I do not feel strong enough to comment on it. We met in June to start this interview. When I returned to tidy it up, the situation in Iraq got much worse. Israel invaded Lebanon and destroyed the whole infrastructure in the West Bank, and the Pope mouthed off hatred of Islam. How I would answer you now and how I would have answered you three months ago could not be the same.
DD: All this is useful and indicative for understanding of artistic practices and especially certain gestures / statements that in ironic and provocative way problematized position of the artist in a cultural milieu that is considered peripheral. Within hierarchical relations between “centre” and “margin”, the latest is always bound to “be late”, to be “the follower”, an “epigone” producing imitations…
V.K.: Yes, there was a lot of reflection about the notion of being late, arriving after the fact. “New” and “groundbreaking” were categories patented by the center, even if amazing things were going on regarding artistic practices in places like Brazil, Japan, Argentina, ex-Yugoslavia, or the East. Not so long ago, when there was no Internet, when books and magazines were rare, printed in black and white, with colored illustrations pasted on some pages, in places like Turkey, it was much more challenging to get information and know what was happening. One was informed of the event only after it had transpired. Due to the information flow, our relationship to an image or something significant or interesting in art production was always through a piece of paper. Therefore, our notion of originality was utterly different. The original was the book! We had an inverse relationship with originality. This was a starting point for reflection initiated by some artists mocking this situation and producing interesting work out of the condition.
DD: This makes me think of the work by Serkan Özkaya or some projects that Erkan Özgen and Sener Özmen realised together, parodying this relation of periphery towards centre, or playing with the notion of authenticity and originality through the intentional production of copies… But there is also a notion of failure, intrinsic to this projects…
V.K.: I recall Serkan Özkaya copying Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s “Wrapping Reichstag” a couple of years later, having as his motivation or “excuse” that he never saw the original. With these kinds of actions, he insinuates that originality is always set away for an artist living on the periphery. The possibility of producing something interesting and authentic from his location seemed impossible. So, he decides to undertake the same process and re-do the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, re-writes Don Quixote after reading Borges, or re-examines the historical approaches by proposing to the director of Louvre to expose the painting of Mona Lisa up-side-down for few days, and draws by hand a daily newspaper and sends them as a gift, turning the copy to a manufactured original.
For the 9th Biennial, he proposed a project of re-doing a perfect but gigantic copy of Michelangelo’s David. It was supposed to be the biggest David possible, as big as Istanbul, so to say, but the joke or the tragedy was that it collapsed during installation. The work became, by default, a frustration and failure, indicating the impossibility of accomplishing the masterpiece. Özkaya was in the “wrong place and in the wrong time” and, therefore, inevitably out of “history.”
Erkan Özgen and Sener Özmen did a series of works individually or in collaboration, like “Manifesta Murders”, “The Story of Tracey Emin,” or the video “The Road to Tate Modern.” “The Road to Tate Modern” projects the problem of an imaginary center. In the video, we see two Kurdish artists in formal dress trudging along the mountains on a horse and a donkey, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, looking for the Tate. It is the temple they respect and want to either conquer or demolish. When they get lost, they ask a villager for directions to the Tate. “… behind those mountains, far far away” is his answer. We do not know if they will arrive as the video ends there.
DD: There is also the work by Halil Altindere “My Mother Likes Pop Art, Because Pop Art Is Colourful” that in same cynical way questions the authority of what is considered “The History of Art”. He deals with notions of belonging / not-belonging to a western cultural tradition and still, using its language, its field of reference, its practice of appropriation… and this process is full of paradoxes and misunderstandings that he is ironically exposing…
V.K.: Exactly, and there is also the second part of the work that is even better, which goes: “My Mother Likes Fluxus, Because Fluxus Is Anti-Art.” In this series of photos, we see the artist’s mother, an elderly woman in traditional clothes, sitting on colorful pillows on a carpet, holding books like “Pop Art” with Warhol’s Marilyn on the cover or the Fluxus catalog. This work is about the notion of habitus. Now, to be a contemporary artist is a complicated issue, especially if you are from these regions or from the Eastern part of the Mediterranean. Contemporary art is subjected to cosmopolitan circulation; the space of emission and reception are also cosmopolitan spaces. One cannot see much difference between a museum of contemporary art that looks like an airport in Istanbul and a museum of contemporary art that looks like an airport in Vancouver. However, with Altindere’s work, the situation is amazingly real: it is the artist’s mother; she is “acting” in a private space of her home, and the aesthetic of her apartment is based on cultural specificity and tradition. So inevitably, the question arises, “what is the relationship of this artist towards Fluxus or Pop Art?” I think he has the same relationship as his mother. She doesn’t understand it; she is looking only at the surface. She is not reading because this content has little to do with her life. This is how curiosity and misunderstanding are triggered, but the way of misunderstanding things can also be very creative.
DD: More than focusing on the dichotomy of centre/periphery art production from this region in the last decades made us rediscover poetics and complexity of all those “spaces in-between”, those physical / psychological spaces that characterizes mobile, nomadic, displaced existence… This issues were central to many Turkish contemporary artists, weren’t they?
V.K.: Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Esra Ersen, and Gulsun Karamustafa are among artists who have created extremely compelling and poetic works on these issues from different perspectives.
I also recall Hale Tenger’s work exhibited on the occasion of the 4th Istanbul biennial, entitled “We didn’t go outside, we were always on the outside; We didn’t go inside, we were always on the inside“ (1995). It was a shack inside the warehouse on the Bosphorus used by the caretakers. As the building had no heating, the guards stayed in the shack. Even though they had this beautiful view of the Bosporus, inside the hut were posters of landscape views of the Alps, beaches of the Caribbean, and such. So the notion of being inside was being questioned already through the title, inside to what? Outside to whom? Are we talking about the country? Are they immigrants? Are they we/they yearning for an outside? Probably yes. Istanbul is a 100 % immigration city, so it doesn’t belong to anyone… Also, Hüseyin Alptekin dealt excitingly with questions of hospitality and hostility, immigrant destinies, invisible and un-coded mobility of people, and their circulation in his work.
DD: There is also a dichotomy between inside and outside, private and public space that appears like a recurrent element in many works by Turkish artists. The very notion of private and public space is totally different in your culture and this has specific onsequences also on the way contemporary art is perceived and practiced…
V.K.: Contemporary art needs places that can be shared: galleries, museums, institutions, and various types of public and private spaces. These places are the historical context for art because it is not enough to make “art” or declare that something is art. There has to be somebody who recognizes it anonymously. There must be a place of proposition and recognition with critics, writers, and viewers. In Muslim society, the notion of public space has been constructed differently. For example, in Arabic the word “public” corresponds to “salam,” which also means “hello” and therefore indicates a place where one can meet people and discuss with them. To indicate “private,” we use the word “mahrem,” which inscribes much that is intimate. This could be part of the body or house; it invariably demarcates a zone. The structure of the Muslim city, in many cases, is an organic conglomeration of private spaces. Sometimes, the house is divided into a private and a public part with two entrances. Traditionally, in the Middle East, the public space is the space of the other, so while the private space is kept clean and tidy, the street is usually squalid because the street is a non-communal, urban space to be resisted. Contemporary art operates in the non-communal space, which is the prerequisite. It doesn’t mean we cannot have a museum in Cairo, but there is an internal friction that must be considered. Bülent Şangar problematized this question in a few of his photo works.
DD: What we can understand is that there are certain irreconcilabilities, right? But at the same time there are more and more artistic initiatives in the countries like Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Palestine, as well as Balkan countries… so could you tell me how do you see the relationships between Turkey and Mediterranean area in relation to Europe, or West in general, in the terms of contemporary art and culture?
V.K.: It is hard to tell since everything is moving faster than we can imagine. We are facing a strong interest from Western institutions towards art production from regions like the South-East Mediterranean. However, this interest is framed within “geographical” exhibitions, which triggers the problem of ghettoization. After 9/11, there was a concerted attempt to host exhibitions in these regions. But how can one make an exhibition about Islam? These are super active places. Just think of the flourishing of artistic communities in Cairo, Alexandria, Beirut, and even Syria and Jordan. Israel is also powerful. Art is bringing more and more cosmopolitan impulses that overlap with traditional concepts. I think that there are still many contradictions that we tend to suppress.
vasıf kortun 