Binder & Haupt: SALT has developed a remarkable program in the last one and a half years, do you feel that you are also getting closer to the institution’s goal of “encouraging the audience to offer critic and respond”?
Vasıf Kortun: It’s our mission to stimulate debate and learn with the critique, but I cannot say we are there already. We don’t have new tools to enable our audiences; they are to be invented. And in the long haul, the idea is to run the institution with its users and their support. You cannot achieve that overnight. We are slowly morphing from a “broadcast institution” to something that develops intelligence with its audiences. For the “audience” to become embedded and active, you need organic interfaces built on many factors like trust and inevitability.
During the last year and a half, we began to unfold ideas about what an institution can be today in Istanbul, how it can produce a new reality, and how it can build a sturdy backbone with engaged groups of people. We are neither orthodox nor arrogant, and the programs are neither discipline-based nor spectacular. It is its own thing and, as such, harder to process.
Binder & Haupt: Your space in Beyoğlu is designed to have this direct access from the street, being located on İstiklal Caddesi, which is such a popular pedestrian street, with millions of people on the weekends. Do the people come in more naturally because of that to participate in SALT’s program?
Vasıf Kortun: It has been a humbling process. We had structured the entrance area, the Forum, without any institutional barriers to make it accessible with a low threshold. The turnout was not how we had imagined it. The problem was that we had over-designed the entrance with underwhelming design principles. People did not feel at home. This kind of “democratic luxury” we were offering was not registered. So, we began testing the Forum with different ideas. But it took over a year to figure out what was impossible. We are the best-visited institution on the street by a large margin, but I am not satisfied at all.
Binder & Haupt: And what about the Galata building?
Vasıf Kortun: Galata is different; it was the imperial bank, introverted, with grandeur, and it would be futile to challenge it. We can only change how it works. You don’t expect anyone to come to it unless they know what it does; it operates at a different temporality, with research, workshops, and such, it breaks away from Beyoğlu‘s faster-paced exhibitions and programs. You learn the building, the institution, and how the public works with and reacts to it, and you start again.
Coming back to your first question on how to engage the public with an institution in a different way, well, at the end of the day, the institution has to belong to the people who use it. For example, we will change some things with the next set of programs. We have consciously made the new exhibition “ scared of murals” incomplete, and it would have been a lie if we had closed it and presented it as a finality. We are hoping to develop the exhibition with the people who know of the times during the period it is up.
Binder & Haupt: In view of the very heated and market-oriented development of Istanbul, how would you define SALT’s position and function in the arts scene of the city, and of Turkey?
Vasıf Kortun: We consciously move away from the marketized world, and that world is not limited to art but also includes design and architecture. SALT does not look at things like products. At the same time, we are actively trying to cushion the impact of a vociferous market and disregarding a lot that seems to be “in.” It is essential to know that the market has neither intelligence nor is it an arbiter of anything. We are actively putting together archives for research, concentrating on particular artists’ archives from the 60s and the early 70s, supporting research projects and offering a refuge without retreat.
Binder & Haupt: It’s interesting to see that while everything is speeding up, and just focusing on the present and future, you’re more concerned of safeguarding cultural memory.
Vasıf Kortun: We are trying to. Institutions in Turkey have gotten better in the last few years. Professionals are running them. We come in where that complex sense of history is missing, and for that, it has been swept under the carpet. This burden is enormous; people trust us, and there is much to do.
Binder & Haupt: For how long did you plan the exhibition about Atatürk Cultural Center? How does the exhibition contribute to the discussions about its renovation and the competing interests around its future program?
Vasıf Kortun: About a year and a half ago, we were digitizing the archives of Hayati Tabanlıoğlu, who was the architect of the building. The Center is a unique building because it was a comprehensive project where the architect masterminded the whole process, working very precisely with designers and engineers, and pushed the limits of building technology in Turkey. We thought it was the right moment to visualize the research and contribute to the debate on the Center and the Taksim Square issue that it looms over. The project was realized in Galata’s “Open Archive,” where we have archive-based exhibitions. It contributed to the story from an angle that does enter the debate, mainly the irrecoverability of that process. That’s my take on it.
Binder & Haupt: That’s what you mean by protecting archives: to make them visible and available for research?
Vasıf Kortun: I don’t know where to start; the public sector’s deficient report card, suspicion towards the private sector’s motives, history of military interventions, and destruction of archives… We have had our fair share of loss of memory. We protect in the classical sense of good-keeping and are scaling up to contemporary technologies to share what we have. It will all be free and open access.
vasıf kortun 