The Pessimist Issue, Spike Art Magazine, No: 79, Spring 2024.
Christian Kobald: You have said that “Serotonin I” and “Serotonin II”—two week-long programs of installations and happenings organized by a group of artists in a former fez factory in 1989 and a gashouse in 1992—were your portal into contemporary art.
Vasif Kortun: The thing with “Serotonin” is that it occupied a space outside the waning modernists, who had a limited, more provincial practice and could not address the world, and the Turkish conceptualists, who were quite dogmatic and exclusionist in the way they worked. The latter did only one exhibition a year, not individually, but as part of their discipline as a collective. “Serotonin” was a breathing zone outside the established art world in this wedge between the two. It happened almost simultaneously with Damien Hirst’s first YBA exhibition [“Freeze,” 1988] and shared an entrepreneurial aspect nobody had exercised before. It was there in 89, and again in 92, and then it was gone, as many in the group went into advertising.
Also, the idea of having “Serotonin I” at Feshane was crucial for me. For one, it was outside the historical city, so it was not in a tourist zone at all; it was very close to an existing mahalle (neighborhood); and, as a bonus, I could work in a former factory. It was the first factory of the empire where the Ottomans produced the fez and uniforms for a new regular army. The hat was introduced in the early 19th century as part of the uniform of the modernizing Ottoman army and has been a symbol of modernity ever since. The Belgians erected the building on the Golden Horn, each column shipped from a foundry in Belgium. Boats would enter the Golden Horn, load the fez, and take them to Alexandria, for example. In short, it was a counterpoint to using buildings like Hagia Irene, Hagia Sophia Bath, or the Süleymaniye Imaret as in the first two biennials in tourist areas. The Byzantine-Ottoman revelry was replaced with the traumas of modernity.
As two wide-open halls of 4,000 square meters, you could direct the audience traffic any way you chose. I visited many buildings, and Feshane was the only one we could handle then. Working on the 2nd Istanbul Biennial in 1989, I realized that, technically speaking, the capacity, the workforce, and the installation knowledge prevented us from distributing the exhibition to multiple venues. We had to be one team, in one place, working towards one goal, in a space we could manage.
CK: How did you come up with the idea of inviting co-curators, or of “curating curators,” to approach the participating countries and artists?
VK: I had zero travel budget. The team consisted of a part-time assistant, a law student, and one secretary who did not speak English, and I was paid 400 dollars a month in the last eight months. I also had a teaching job in Ankara. To keep pace with the work, I carried around my Macintosh Plus like a laptop; it weighed almost nine kilos. If I can’t travel, I thought, or put this show together by myself, what if I put together a team of people and communicated exceptionally intimately with them? I know what and how they’re doing, and there is much room for negotiation.
A few things were essential to this process. One was the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990, where a conference called “Expanding Internationalism” brought together people from different geographies in the 1980s for the first time. It was a closed conference, but I did sneak in. The Indian literary critic Homi K. Bhabha gave the keynote speech, and I met the Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita, who became a close friend. The conference was repeated the following year, in 1991, and I was invited to talk, along with Bart de Baere, assistant curator of Documenta IX (1992), and Lillian Llanes, who had taken over the directorship of Havana Biennale. I was afraid and somewhat to the side, as it was my first international stage, but the talk went very well, and people wanted to get to know me. That opened communication channels, especially with Mesquita and Bruce Ferguson, from Canada, who became a good friend and an incredible supporter.
There were also people I was following, like Viktor Misiano from Russia, whose writing I appreciated a lot, and Anda Rottenberg, who did the exhibition “Europa Nieznana” [“Europe Unknown,” 1991] in Kraków. It was a fantastic show! It was a defining moment for me, and many Balkan colleagues later fed into the Biennial.
I failed in two zones: with the Spanish and Italian participations. I should not have involved them, but they came with their funding. I got soft, having already disinvited Germany and Switzerland. They needed to pay attention to our well-written, detailed framework. Wolfgang Laib? In the framework of the production of cultural differences? It was also critical to involve Bosnia, and I also tried hard with Egypt and Brazil. But there needed to be money on their part or cash on ours. We couldn’t put it together.
CK: What was your thinking behind including artists and curators from Romania, Bulgaria, and Russia post-1989?
VK: After the wall was brought down, there was a reverse migration towards Turkey, which you might have called a waiting-room country, especially to Istanbul and a few other cities. People came from Russia, former Soviet republics, Bulgaria, and Romania. A bus arrived every hour from the Bucharest train station, full of people coming with everything they had. They would come and sell in Istanbul, make some money, and go to the next port, trying to trade up. We used to go down to the port every Tuesday because that’s when the Russian boat would dock. You would get one bottle of vodka for one dollar, and caviar was not much more expensive. Vodka and pasta with caviar! It was that kind of crazy situation. That was part of our lived experience after 1989.
And secondly, I’ve been obsessed for many years with the fact that I neither agree with nor understand Turkey’s “Europeanism.” And it always befooled me to think that, as a child, going to Europe meant driving fast through the Balkans and Yugoslavia (not Europe) and ending up in Italy. Europe started in Italy. It was also the historically vertical order of the art world. Not that the Balkans weren’t part of Europe —indeed, the Balkans were part of Europe— but that wasn’t Europe enough. It was the Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia. But the reality is that we had 500 years of shared histories, languages, food cultures, and traditions with these geographies. They were part of the “Middle East” as much as “Europe.” Since Turkish republican history and bureaucratic socialism were systemically undermining that fact, it was time to counter-poise us. I am still on the same track.
Suddenly, everything was disoriented: Europe was coming to Turkey. Migration had never before happened eastwards; historically, that’s a non-reality. Migration is always up, northwards, westwards, or northwestwards. That shifted with the fall of the wall, and with that came the realization that we were part of the same world only eighty or ninety years ago. At that time, with Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book [1990] and the first discussions around the “2nd Turkish Republic” moving from the modernist phase to a more liberal, democratic tradition that recognizes difference, it was the right moment to conjecture a diverse world around the historical geography of the Ottoman Empire, with Istanbul at its center. How should this center act in the late 20th century? My dream became a nightmare as Istanbul became arrogant and imperial again under Erdoğan. Mine was much more modest, welcoming, and humble, just a part of a whole recognizing its historical prerogatives.
CK: Was this part of the political promise of contemporary art at that time?
VK: Amid all the argument around the “Primitivism” show at MoMA [“‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” 1984]; the repercussions of “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Georges Pompidou [Magicians of the Earth, 1989]; exhibitions like “The Decade Show” at the New Museum [“The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,” 1990]; and the multicultural exhibitions at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the question was, how could I rethink “the Istanbul situation?” In my tiny way, it was my answer specifically to “Magiciens,” the biggest fault of which was its denial of urbanity or urban discourse to “artists. I was translating this new context with art to my situation and looking at the world as it developed and where we sat within that paradigm.
CK: Did you try to translate this into how the show was actually installed?
VK: We created an exhibition plan with a colleague predicated on The Black Book, which describes an Istanbul that loses all orientation. In Istanbul’s old city, you don’t know where the sun rises or sets because you constantly disorient yourself. That there is no East or West, no South or North. Istanbul does not separate the East from the West but connects the North and the South. This idea of disorientation and seeing one space through another was critical for the installation plan. Because the countries were not to be organized as pavilions but as constant openings, they couldn’t be solid or separated but had to be porous. The line of sight was that you could see through Romania to Russia and Poland.
We conceived the exhibition plan and communicated it to all our colleagues, and we knew exactly where everything would go. Unfortunately, the restoration architect Gae Aulenti, who renovated great buildings like the Musée d’Orsay, said she wouldn’t deal with this exhibition model since she could not see her building. And yes, that was precisely the point! She threatened us, saying that if I didn’t cut two Mussolini-style avenues through the exhibition so that she could see her columns, she would not come to the opening. The museum’s founder said nothing, just “okay,” and I resigned. Then, I returned the next day or the day after, and we redesigned the exhibition. We had to communicate everything to the curators all over again. We took down 200 meters of walls and put 200 meters of walls up again. It would have been a much better exhibition with our plan because it would have been adapted to what we were saying. It was very traumatic, I have to say.
CK: When did you come up with the title, “Production of Cultural Difference?”
VK: Cultural difference is not a given; it is in flux and has to be produced. That was critical because it also explained my beef with “Magiciens,” where cultural difference was predestined and ancestral. But it was a fantastic exhibition. I had the opportunity to see it and am still dealing with it.
CK: Do you see a future for these large-scale, biennial-type international exhibitions?
VK: The classic, post-dictatorship, put-my-city-in-the-limelight exhibition type, as they appeared from the late 80s onwards (Istanbul, Johannesburg, Manifesta, Gwangju) – that’s over. First of all, they lost to the art fairs a while ago. We’re not in a good moment, and it doesn’t seem likely that we will get out of that moment quickly. I certainly do not harbor any hopes for Germany or Europe in general. I think there’s something else happening here, something much more radical and critical, which is that the global south is disengaging from Europe, the US, and Canada. It was inevitable, obviously, and it’s been in the works for a while. Many international exhibitions outside the Euro-American space are not going to suffer. I’m unsure what will happen, but we are moving into a different paradigm. I can feel it all over my body. But this is another discussion altogether.
vasıf kortun 