9th Istanbul Biennial

Remembering Istanbul
Edited by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa

Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2011

Good morning. I spoke to you earlier about my experience curating the 3rd International Istanbul Biennial in 1992, and now I will speak about curating the 9th Istanbul Biennial in 2005. It was a very different kind of animal. My co-curator and better half, Charles Esche, is not here today, so I will speak for him. And for our two assistant curators, November Paynter and Esra Sarıgedik. Probably they were our better halves!

When we took over the project, we did not know the inside story of the biennial as an institution. Dan Cameron has his version, but what we saw was a traumatized team, unable to make a decision about anything at all. The director of the biennial had been let go because of a major budget overrun in the 8th edition. The biennial is part of a larger cycle of festivals and has historically been an orphan, a financial drain, a project that taxes the staff of the foundation, especially in the mid- to late summer. The biennial office is understaffed and part of a complex bureaucratic structure. Things don’t always go as you want them to. And there is, of course, the fact that they are always hiring someone from outside, an outsider, to be the curator, so that creates a lot of complexities. We managed, as we all did during our respective editions, but it is never an easy marriage with the biennial office, and it is hard to expect it to be so. Our solution to the challenge in 2005 was to actually structure a ghost office, a parallel office, at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center here in the city, and take care of much of the organization and management from there.

I regarded the 2005 edition as a kind of continuation of the saga that began in 1992. In terms of my practice, I was trying to deal with the question of the megalopolis. In 2001 I did a project at Proje4L called Becoming a Place, and that was followed by a range of projects, interviews, workshops, and writings that all somehow took Istanbul as a premise. There was also Charles’s and my concern about the city’s regional, social, and political promise within a wider historical trajectory.

Istanbul, the Istanbul Biennial of 2005, was not only an exhibition but also a template. It was a model we tried out, to test whether it would work or not. What were the characteristics of this new tem- plate we were proposing? One was to extend the biennial literally to two years instead of focusing entirely on the opening shenanigans. We simply stretched the project out for a year in either direction, not only in Istanbul but also elsewhere. The fact of the exhibition, the event of the exhibition, was only one part of our project. It wasn’t a terminus; it was just a station (albeit a big one) along the line.

The second idea was to re-locate the exhibition in the city-the real, actual city. In 2005 the tourist city has not yet shifted to the actual city, by which I mean Galata, Beyoğlu, all the way to the Taksim neighborhood, and the Tophane belt. So we started looking for spaces, as all the biennial curators before us had done. They would go on a space hunt and try to match the project with the space. In Feshane, where I did the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992, I was shocked now to see marble floors and a Turkish-Islamic synthesis in the recent restoration. Another location, Camialtı Tersanesi, was a fantastic place that we came close to securing as a venue. It was a space with great significance as a massive shipyard, and we could have located the whole project there. We realized that the only places in the city that are on the water, on the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, have been occupied on behalf of the public by either the military or state monopolies. They are spaces for the public, but with no public access. Otherwise, the city has full access to the water. All of the big spaces we tried to reserve for the biennial were headed for privatization, and would soon be inaccessible. It would not have been beneficial for the people in charge of this process to allow us the use of these spaces, as the buildings would then enter the public psyche and privatization would become an issue. The city was moving faster than the exhibition.

The city promised us verbally, but then took away, the TRT2 building’s basement floors, which had been used for various cultural fairs and events in the past. We looked at the Demirören building and were told that it was about to be under construction, but the construc- tion didn’t happen for another five years. Then finally we found our dream building! Inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, we de- cided to take the whole exhibition underground, make it subterranean, at the current Şişhane subway hub. Again we had an understanding with the city, and again it was withdrawn, this time five months be- fore the exhibition opened. The excuse was that they wanted to make the station operational. They did not touch it for another three and a half years. We had to go back to the drawing board.

The possibility of hiring location scouts, as for a film production, occurred to us. We charged them with finding particular sets of spaces that did not necessarily serve similar functions: different climates, different zones, and different specialties. We located in the end a small opera house, a residential building, a small storage space, a large ware- house, a gallery, and a storefront with good space behind it, all within walking distance of one another. One issue was of course to “mark” them all with distinctive graphics, and that is when Gruppo A12 came in with a solution: a particular color that was impossible not to notice, even in Istanbul.

The issue then became how to pair the artists with the spaces, and also to manage the spaces between the spaces. Having multiple, smaller venues helped us remedy the inevitable exhibition fatigue that takes place in large exhibitions. Exhibition walking is unlike any other form of strolling, it is mentally and physically inhuman. This was a pedestrian project. The exhibition was in Istanbul, and it was called Istanbul, and we wanted to very deliberately consider the routes by which visitors would walk by situating works, settings, and events in ways that would cause them to be simply stumbled upon, then reflected upon. These extended to Hospitality Zones.

There were no private parties and no private dinners. And we did not have bags, mugs, or T-shirts. We stayed completely away from that kind of customary exhibition economy. We did not want to insert our financial scheme into the already-existing economy of the neighborhoods. There was no Biennial Café, for example, because there were cafés all around the places that the biennial inhabited. Some self-organized things popped up because we were there. The entrepreneurs of the neighborhood immediately turned the pavement in front of Tütün Deposu into a food joint with makeshift tables.

Nearly 45 percent of the participating artists were invited to our residency programs in Istanbul. These were not two-day, three-day, fly-in-fly-out residencies. There were no quick responses to the city; it was critical to avoid the touristic syndrome that happens quite a bit with biennials, especially in cities that are fascinating. The resident artists committed to research, and their projects had to be negotiated with us and even with the locals. The residencies ranged from two to six months. We devoted a part of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center’s existing residency program to the biennial. You can imagine how difficult it is for a very established artist to devote two months, let alone six months, to an exhibition outside their habitus. Thus, we decided to simply work with artists who were available and complete- ly disregard their age, international prestige, or funding contexts. In 2004 if you had looked at the artist list, you’d have recognized only a few names.

Some aspects about the larger project: Hospitality Zone. We wanted to structure this whole situation. How do we refer to other institutions in the city? The arbitrary selection of institution listings in the biennial guide was not making any sense. We didn’t want to go with an anonymous connection to other institutions in the city. We might as well, we thought, meta-curate it. Some of it was physically inside the biennial, like the free kick exhibition of Halil Altındere, Projeckt: Production Fault by Hafriyat group, and Lost in Translation, which was a 15-day workshop with 20 art academies around the world. Roll magazine made a special ongoing project for the duration of the exhibition. Then there was the Kiosk by Revolver, and many screen- ings, publication launches, and conversations.

We decided to change the publication policy. The biennial used to have one catalogue published before the opening and one catalogue published after the opening. It was very good to have the second one, because it was a visual witness to the project. But the second catalogue had a very limited circulation potential. And the first catalogue does not always make perfect sense because it is written before the biennial opens. It is about intentionality, not what actually happened, and usu- ally the short entries about the works are simply numbing. The change we brought about was very easy, because with new printing technolo- gies one can turn out an exhibition catalogue in three days. The whole exhibition was photographed as it was being installed, and three days before it opened we finished the book and went to press. The texts for the entries were written, and rewritten, in the last three weeks as the work was being developed.

This was a pocketbook of about 160 pages, black and white, to be given away free with the exhibition ticket. It was quite serious, with clear language, aimed at the average exhibition attendee. Then on six Fridays in a row we inserted in the Radikal newspaper our biennial newspaper of six to eight pages. This produced a whole different range of access, and made sure that the exhibition was an ongoing process that produced its own news and criticality, inviting outside commen- tary as well. Thirdly, we produced a reader. The reader was the place where we laid out our intentions, our way of framing the biennial