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 KADIR HAS UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES


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that this Master of Arts that I have submitted is entirely my own work and I have cited and referenced all material and results that are not my own in accordance with the rules;
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that Master of Arts does not contain any material from any research submitted or accepted to obtain a degree or diploma at another educational institution;
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and that I commit and undertake to follow the "Kadir Has University Academic Codes of Conduct" prepared in accordance with the "Higher Education Council Codes of Conduct".
In addition, I acknowledge that any claim of irregularity that may arise in relation to this work will result in a disciplinary action in accordance with the university legislation.

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14.07.2023
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To My Family,
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ayşe Nur Erek, for her support, guidance, and patience throughout this challenging.
I would like to thank my instructors, İnci Eviner, Fulya Erdemci who shaped my understanding and quest on the means of art during my master years at Kadir Has University.
This thesis, which slightly spanned a long period of time, could not have been completed without the support of my friends and family.
I would like to thank my dear parents, Şeyda Çakır, Teoman Çakır and Sena Çakır and also Semih Çetin, Mine Çetin, İsmail Çetin. Their unconditional support and unfailing love always keep me alive and made this process possible.
Thank you for being with me.
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EXHIBITION MAKING AND THREE CASE STUDIES ON THE MAIN EXHIBITION HALL OF THE GALATA GREEK PRIMARY SCHOOL
ABSTRACT
In the history of exhibition design, there have been a number of exhibitions ranging from the works hung on the walls of the first churches and palaces to today's contemporary art museums, biennials and even digital exhibitions, creating important breaking points in the process. Each of the different exhibitions creating breaking points has incorporated various concepts into the exhibition literature. The artwork, the place where the content is exhibited beyond its own borders, lighting, graphic design, the identity of the place, circulation, etc. makes sense when the elements come together. Beyond these, the experience of the visitors and the feelings that arise when leaving the exhibition space ensure the completion of the exhibition process.
Different decision mechanisms play various roles in the process of each exhibition. Exhibitions are prepared as a result of many multi-layered equations such as how much the curator is involved in the art production process, what kind of restrictions are placed on the artist by other actors, how much the potential of the space can be evaluated by the artist, and how the budget and political factors affect it.
Seeing different or similar understandings in the exhibitions held in the same place reveals the effects of the space on art production and the elements it insists on. Exhibition design allows the development and implementation of different approaches to the exhibition of artworks. Art spaces are places where spatial research takes place as a means of experience and communication. Today's exhibitions try to gain the perception of the audience directly by questioning the concepts of spatial experience.
Biennials have been one of the elements where the breaking points are most evident in the history of Exhibition Making, and the Istanbul Biennial has a special place in terms of the innovations it brings, the use of different spaces and the large scope of the exhibitions. Galata Greek Primary School, one of the most used venues of the Istanbul Biennial and the Istanbul Design Biennial, directed the exhibitions that took place both
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with its architecture and its own school identity spatially, and was supportive in terms of themes. After telling about exhibition making and thehistory of exhibition design, I am examining works of two Istanbul Biennial artists and an Istanbul Design Biannial artist, which were held in different years in the main hall of Galata Greek Primary School. Main hall of the Galata Greek Primary School has the largest exhibition venue with a balcony in the old school building. I identify the similarities and differences in the use of the space of all three of the biennial artists (İnci Eviner, Pedro Gomez Egana, SUPERPOOL) which I chose. Whit my research and the interviews whivh i did with the artists of biennials, i discover that there are three different exhibition methods are used in the exhibitions prepared in the same place: Immersive Exhibition Design, Exhibition Design As An Independent and Space Within Space As An Installation.
Keywords: Exhibition, Exhibition Design, Exhibition Spaces, Contemporary Art Museums, Artist, Curator, Visitor
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SERGİ YAPIMI VE GALATA RUM İLKOKULU'NUN ANA SALONU ÜZERİNE ÜÇ VAKA ANALİZİ
ÖZET
Sergi tasarımı tarihinde, ilk kilise ve saray duvarlarına asılan eserlerden bugünkü güncel sanat müzelerine, bienallere hatta digital sergilere kadar uzanan ve süreçte önemli kırılma noktaları yaratan bir takım sergiler olmuştur. Kırılma noktaları yaratan farklı sergilerden her biri çeşitli kavramları sergi literatürünün içerisine dahil etmiştir. Sanat eseri, içeriğin ve kendi sınırlarının ötesinde sergilendiği yer, aydınlatması, grafik tasarımı, bulunduğu yapının kimliği, sirkülasyonu vb. unsurların bir araya gelmesiyle anlam kazanmaktadır. Bunların ötesi ziyaretçilerin yaşadığı deneyim ve sergi mekanından ayrılırken ortaya çıkan hisler, sergi sürecinin tamamlanmasını sağlamaktadır.
Her serginin işleyişinde farklı karar mekanizmaları çeşitli roller oynamaktadır. Küratörün sanat üretimi sürecine ne kadar dahil olduğu, sanatçıya diğer aktörler tarafından ne tür kısıtlamaların getirildiği, mekanın potansiyellerinin sanatçı tarafından ne kadar değerlendirilebildiği, bütçe ve politik unsurların nasıl etkisi olduğu gibi pek çok katmanlı denklem sonucunda sergiler hazırlanmaktadır.
Aynı mekanda yapılan sergilerde farklı ya da benzer anlayışların görülmesi mekanın sanat üretimindeki etkilerini ve direttiği unsurları ortaya koymaktadır. Sergi tasarımı, sanat eserlerinin sergilenmesine yönelik farklı yaklaşımların geliştirilmesine ve uygulanmasına olanak sağlamaktadır. Sanat mekanları, bir deneyim ve iletişim aracı olarak mekansal araştırmaların gerçekleştiği yerlerdir. Günümüz sergileri, mekansal deneyim kavramlarını sorgulatarak izleyicinin algısını doğrudan kazanmaya çalışmaktadır.
Bienaller sergi yapımı tarihinde kırılma noktlarının en belirgin olduğu unsurlardan biri olmuştur ve getirdiği yenilikler, farklı mekan kullanımları ve sergilerin büyük kapsamları anlamında İstanbul Bienali özel bir yere sahiptir. İstanbul Bienali ve İstanbul Tasarım Bienali’nin çokça kullanılan mekanlarından biri olan Galata Rum İlköğretim Okulu gerek
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mimarisi, gerek de kendi okul kimliği ile gerçekleşen sergileri mekansal olarak yönlendirmiş, temalar bağlamında da destekleyici olmuştur. Sergi yapımı ve sergi tasarım tarihinden bahsettikten sonra Galata Rum İlköğretim Okulu’nun balkonlu ve en büyük sergi mekanı olan ana salonunda farklı yıllarda gerekleştirilmiş iki İstanbul Bienali sanatçı ve bir İstanbul Tasarım Bienali sanatısınının işlerini vaka olarak inceledikten sonra üçünün de mekanı kullanımındaki benzerlikler ve farklılıkları tespit etmekteyim. Bu mekanda hazırlanan sergilerde, Sürükleyici Sergi Tasarımı (Immersive Exhibition Design), Bağımsız Olarak Sergi Tasarımı (Exhibition Design As An Independent) ve Enstelasyonun Olarak Mekan İçinde Mekan (Space Within Space As An Installation) olmak üzere üç farklı sergi yapımından söz edilmektedir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Sergi, Sergi Tasarımı, Sergi Mekanları, Güncel Sanat Müzeleri, Sanatçı, Küratör, Ziyaretçi
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... v
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... vi
ÖZET ............................................................................................................................. viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................... x
LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................... xii
LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS ................................................... xv
LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... xvi
1.
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1
2.
TURNS IN EXHIBITION MAKING ..................................................................... 3
2.1
Breaking Points in the History of Exhibition Making ..................................... 3
2.2
Actors in Art Production .................................................................................. 19
2.3
Theme, Venue and Artist Selections ............................................................... 21
2.4
The Birth of Curatorship.................................................................................. 22
2.4.1 The New Curator ...................................................................................... 23
3.
REPRESENTATION AND COMPACTION OF THE IDEA: EXHIBITION SPACES AND TRENDS IN EXHIBITION MAKING AFTER 1990s .............. 27
3.1
Gallery Spaces and White Cube ...................................................................... 27
3.2
Contemporary Art Museums .......................................................................... 28
3.3
Today's Art Spaces ........................................................................................... 30
3.4
Other Spaces: Books, Magazines, Websites, Mobile Applications .............. 31
4.
ELEMENTS OF EXHIBITION DESIGN ............................................................ 34
4.1
What is an Exhibition? ..................................................................................... 34
4.2
Role of Artist and Artwork in Exhibition Design .......................................... 40
4.3
The Constituents of Exhibition Design; Sound, Light, Material, Preservation of Historical Space, Technology (interaction, digitization, etc), Access to Exhibition Content, Budget ............................................................ 42
5.
CASE STUDIES ON THE ARTIST-DESIGNER-CURATOR ........................ 43
5.1
How Contemporary Artists Use Spaces ......................................................... 43
5.2
The Place of Biennials in Our Sociocultural World ...................................... 44
5.3
Use of the Galata Greek Primary School in Exhibitions ............................... 46
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5.4
Three Selected Cases And Their Exhibition Making Understandings ....... 49
5.4.1
13th Istanbul Biennial and İnci Eviner; Immersive Exhibition Design ................................................................................................... 52
5.4.2 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial and SUPERPOOL; Exhibition Design As An Independent ........................................................................................... 61
5.4.3 15th Istanbul Biennial and Pedro Gomez Egana; Space Within Space As Installation ................................................................................................... 68
6.
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 77
BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 81
APPENDIX A ................................................................................................................ 85
A.1 Interviews with Cases ....................................................................................... 85
A.1.1 (Case 1) İnci Eviner ................................................................................ 85 A.1.2 (Case 2) SUPERPOOL ............................................................................ 88 A.1.3 (Case 3) Pedro Gómez-Egaña ................................................................. 90
A.2 Curatorial Text ................................................................................................... 93
A.2.1 Mom Am I Barbarian, Curator’s Text .................................................. 93
A.2.2 The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, Curator’s Text ..................... 110
A.2.3 A Good Neighbor, Curator’s Text ....................................................... 112
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1: An image of Cabinets of Curiosities, Antique room of Olaus Wormius, from the Wormianum Museum, 1655. ...............................
Figure 2.2: A view from the facade of the British Museum .................................
Figure 2.3: A painting by Samuel Morse depicting the Paris Salon event in the Louvre in 1832. ..................................................................................
Figure 2.4: An image of “Expo Paris”, Paris, 1900. .............................................
Figure 2.5: El Lissitzky, "The Proun Room", from the Berlin Art Exhibition, 1923 ....................................................................................................
Figure 2.6: El Lissitzky, Hannover "Abstract Cabinet" study, 1927. ....................
Figure 2.7: An image of Kurt Schwitters’s work at his home, Hannover, Germany, 1923-1943 ..........................................................................
Figure 2.8: “ The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” exhibition in Paris Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938 ................................................................
Figure 2.9: An image of White Cube Gallery, London, 2013 ...............................
Figure 2.10: William Anastasi's exhibition in New York Dwan Gallery, 1965 ......
Figure 2.11: An image of Daniel Buren's work, exhibited in the museum by stretching a 20-meter-high and 10-meter-wide blue-white striped fabric at the Guggenheim's Sixth International Exhibition in 1971. ..
Figure 4.1: A visual, visualized by me, showing classical exhibitions. ................
Figure 4.2: A visual, visualized by me, showing three main decision mechanisms of exhibitions. ................................................................
Figure 4.3: Two images taken during the preparations for the Istanbul Research Institute, Memories of Humankinds Exhibition, 2019. ......................
Figure 4.4: Pera Museum, Istanbul, Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection, A visual of Osman Hamdi Bey's World: A Virtual Reality Experience for The Tortoise Trainer in the Osman Hamdi Bey Exhibition. .........
Figure 4.5: A visual of Avşar Gürpınar's installation of a contemporary art work named “Le Grand K2” in the Pera Museum, Suna and İnan Kıraç
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Foundation Collection, “The Art of Weights And Measures” exhibition. ...........................................................................................
Figure 4.6: A visualization by me describing the exhibition making process ......
Figure 4.7: A visual visualized by me, showing the steps in the spatialization process of the exhibition story ............................................................
Figure 5.1: A facade photograph of the Galata Greek Primary School located on Kemeraltı Street in Beyoğlu. ..............................................................
Figure 5.2: 1st floor plan of the Galata Greek Primary School, where the main exhibition hall of the three different exhibitions examined for the thesis is located. ..................................................................................
Figure 5.3: Section drawing of Galata Greek Primary School that shows the main exhibition hall and the balcony. .................................................
Figure 5.4: A photo from the Main Exhibition Hall of the Galata Greek Primary School .................................................................................................
Figure 5.5: Exhibition poster of 13th Istanbul Biennial, ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’
Figure 5.6: İnci Eviner, Co-Action Devise: A Study (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom Am I Barbarian?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul ...............................................................................................
Figure 5.7: 3D model image prepared for İnci Eviner's work “Co-Action Device: A Study” during the preparations for the 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom, Am I Barbarian?” ...................................................................
Figure 5.8: İnci Eviner, Co-Action Devise: A Study (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom Am I Barbarian?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul ...............................................................................................
Figure 5.9: Exhibition poster of 2nd İstanbul Design Biennial, ‘The Future Is Not What It Used To Be’ ....................................................................
Figure 5.10: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul .........................................................
Figure 5.11: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul .........................................................
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Figure 5.12: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul .........................................................
Figure 5.13: Visualized by the me, plan of the assembly hall designed by Superpool for the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?” at the Main Exhibition Hall of Galata Greek Primary School ...................................................................................
Figure 5.14: Exhibition poster of 15th İstanbul Biennial, ‘A Good Neighbour’ ....
Figure 5.15: Exhibition posters of 15th İstanbul Biennial, ‘A Good Neighbour’ .. Figure 5.16: Map of showing the Six Main Venues of the 15th Istanbul Biennial .
Figure 5.17: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Domain of Things (2017), 15th Istanbul Biennial “A Good Neighbor”, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul ...............................................................................................
Figure 5.18: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Domain of Things (2017), 15th Istanbul Biennial “A Good Neighbor”, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul ...............................................................................................
Figure 5.19: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Virgo (2022), 16th Lyon Biennial “Manifesto of Fragility”, Lyon. .............................................................................
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LIST OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
ICOM: International Council of Museums
IKSV: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 5.1: A table prepared by me comparing the elements of exhibition design over three different exhibitions. .........................................................
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1. INTRODUCTION
Until the 1950s, artworks often adorned the walls of churches and palaces, living quarters of the middle and upper classes, museum and gallery spaces. Since the 1950s, elements such as space and environmental design, conceptual frameworks, and the audience factor have come with art. The artwork has begun to gain meaning by transcending the boundaries of the canvas space, being evaluated within the space and environment it is in.
The relationship between art and space has been accepted as concepts that contain each other and cannot be considered independently of each other. Experimental forms of expression of contemporary art have increased the examples of the use of space in art.
Concepts such as the space of art and the art of space have begun to be introduced.
The role of space in exhibition design is critical in shaping the overall visitor experience, communicating the intended message, and enhancing the impact of the exhibition. The spatial layout, arrangement of exhibits, lighting, and overall ambiance play a significant role in engaging visitors and conveying the exhibition's theme, narrative, and objectives.
In the second chapter of the thesis, a chronological study is presented on the breaking points in the history of exhibition design and how new exhibition trends are determined. It is explained who determines these trends, who are the decision mechanisms in art production, and how the roles of these actors have evolved from past to present.
In the third chapter, the places where the exhibitions take place and the effects of these spaces on the content of the exhibition are mentioned. It is investigated where exhibition venues are, where exhibitions are held when they go outside, and in which unusual venues this concept that has no borders meets visitors.
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In the fourth chapter, the mediums and concepts used in the exhibition are given. It explains how the exhibition spaces emerged, what attention is taken into consideration, and what are the elements that guide and support the design.
After these three chapters, giving information about the elements of exhibition making, the analyzes on the artist and the space, which are made through three different exhibitions in the great hall of the Galata Greek Primary School, the most used venue of the Istanbul Biennial, are examined.
In this thesis, the exhibition design is analyzed methodologically and semi-structured interviews were conducted with three people as a case, two of whom are Istanbul Biennial artists and one of them selected from Istanbul Design Biennial designers. These cases and three different biennial exhibitons are examined through the concepts of space, artist, visitor, theme and curator.
Art-space interaction as a method, exhibition making and literature research is conducted on the experiences and communication styles of the new space transformed through art. The breaking points in the history of exhibition making are examined through exhibitions around the world. Interviews with 3 different artists and designers reveal concrete examples of how much the concepts and exhibition elements are involved in the exhibitions.
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2. TURNS IN EXHIBITION MAKING
2.1 Breaking Points in the History of Exhibition Making
While tracing the breaking points in the history of exhibition design, trends that make a big difference are revealed. The concept of exhibition has been the point where it started to develop in today's sense and spatially with the "Cabinets of Curiosities" that emerged in the 17th century. “Cabinets of Curiosities” are also known as world chambers, memory chambers. The objects and living things found here are primarily rare and different objects that arouse curiosity, accumulate as a result of curiosity. Its basic idea is that it arouses curiosity before it is rare. When it comes to the size of the space, after its first appearance, it has changed according to the collector's desire, opportunity and location.
Generally, these exhibitions are arranged in a cabinet with plenty of boxes, a large safe with compartments, depending on the wealth of the owner, the variety of the collection, and the size of the objects; It was exhibited in places such as a room with various boxes, divided shelves or a large hall (Figure 2.1). These venues were open to invited distinguished audiences, where distinguished individuals presented their own collections. The aim is to provide mutual information dialogue and share ideas (Özkal, 2006).
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Figure 2.1: An image of Cabinets of Curiosities, Antique room of Olaus Wormius, from the Wormianum Museum, 1655.
(Source: screenshot from www.wikipedia.org)
Although today's museums are not very similar to the exhibits in the "Cabinets of Curiosities", which are the first examples of exhibition design, they still satisfy people's curiosity and the need to know more about the world we live in.
When we did research on the forms of exhibition, the architect and educator Dernie said in his book “Exhibibition Design”: In historical places such as the Louvre and the British Museum, the works are exhibited in a dark and messy structure. The walls are covered with works of art up to the ceiling. At this point, three important exhibition ideas are mentioned for such spaces: Cabinets, Progressive Galleries and Period Rooms. The simple purpose of cabinet exhibitions is to keep the viewer physically away from the artworks and to establish a safety distance. Another method, Progressive Galleries operated as a much clearer and cleaner display area with diagonally placed rows of rooms. Lastly, Period Rooms have been exhibition forms that bring together different owners and genres (paintings, sculptures, architectural projects, furniture) produced in the same historical period (Dernie, 2006).
When museums first began to be founded in Europe, they had two main purposes: the work and learning of experts - the public's appreciation of the contents. Two examples that can best describe these purposes are the British Museum and the Louvre. The British Museum was founded in 1753 by Sir Hans Sloane. Donating his natural sciences collection and library to the government, Sir Hans Sloane's purpose was to meet scholars and work to advance the growing British industrial economy, opening its doors to the public only one day a week. The Louvre was founded in 1792 as “Musèum National”. It was founded with the idea of transforming the royal collection, which was previously the exclusive property of the king, into the collective property of the people, to be an educational tool for painters and sculptors, and thus to develop the concept of citizenship. The museum calendar is divided into days in order to fulfill these two tasks. Three days
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a week are reserved for artists so that they can work undisturbed, the other three days for public visiting and one day for cleaning (Nardi, 2016).
In the following centuries, conservation studies were emphasized rather than communicating with the public on the basis of museum studies. According to Nardi as a result, museum directors began to lose interest in the public, and their main concern was to conduct research on the objects under their responsibility and to protect the treasures for which they were responsible. This change has caused most of the museums of this period to be mentioned as dusty places, a pile of unexplored, meaningless and uninteresting objects. Architectures that often imitate Greek temples have also caused these negative thoughts and museums have begun to move away from daily life (Figure 2.2) (Nardi, 2016).
Figure 2.2: A view from the façade of the British Museum
(Source: screenshot from www.britishmuseum.org)
In Samuel Morse's painting depicting the event environment of the Louvre in 1832, there are picture frames and sculptures that are randomly placed on the walls and floors of the artworks within the space, with no gaps left between each other. The exhibition space is equipped with floor-to-ceiling paintings and sculptures (Figure 2.3).
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Figure 2.2: Gallery of the Louvre by Samuel Morse depicting the Paris Salon event in the Louvre in 1832.
(Source: screenshot from www.arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com)
According to Bennet with the Great Paris Hall event in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was ensured that the first exhibition of "Good Art" was carried out as an annual or biennial event, aiming to reach a wider audience (Bennet, 1996).
In 1863, due to the harsh and selective attitude of the Salon jury, four thousand works, which made up three-quarters of the works participating in the exhibition, were refused participation in the exhibition and Upon the reaction of these rejected artists, Emperor III. Napoleon allowed the formation of a new exhibition with the name "Salon des Refuses", which was left to the public's decision by exhibiting the works in another part of the Palace of Industry (İnankur, 1997).
As İnankur mentioned, the search for new narratives of the works that present a stance against the academic tradition are shown as the reason for rejection. New trends in painting techniques have led to the rejection of these works by the academic community. In their works, these innovative artists have depicted the first impression of the environment quickly and without detail, with a direct expression, since the changing light
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and shadow situations of the environments and objects cause different appearances. These works also became the pioneers of the impressionism movement (İnankur, 1997).
As a continuation of the fairs held in Paris, “Expo Paris” is a world fair organization attended by approximately 51 million people in 1900. Although the need to show everything without a specific thematic narrative still has not been overcome, it is significant in that it includes pavilions built specifically for specific exhibitions (Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.3: An image of “Expo Paris”, Paris, 1900.
(Source: screenshot from www.gettyimages.ae)
As Italian art historian Germano Celant mentioned before, with the Impressionism movement that emerged in the first half of the 19th century, in order to be more effective on the aesthetic act of exhibiting, the interconnected relations between the works of art and the establishment of the rhythmic order of the space through analogical, chronological and thematic sequences began to be questioned (Celant, 1996).
El Lissitzky's "Proun Room" work in 1923 shows an example of the situation where painting is spatialized within a space (Figure 2.5). An organic unity is built between space and object. The exhibition has an unbreakable chain integrity (Özkal, 2006).
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The artist and author Lynton expresses "Proun is a made-up word meaning for new art and consisting of the initials of a number of words." As with the relationship between the paintings and the wall, the walls create a sense of both support and emptiness, at the same time with the artist's new interpretation of the space, it can be interpreted as a presentation of new searches, experiments and arrangements regarding the potential uses of the space (Lynton, 1982).
Figure 2.4: El Lissitzky, "The Proun Room", from the Berlin Art Exhibition, 1923
(Source: screenshot from www.cca.qc.ca)
As Löschke explains, after El Lissitzky's "Proun Room" work in 1923, his work in Dresden in 1926 and Hannover in 1927 focused on experimental applications of the material and activation of the observer (Figure 2.6). In these two works, he wanted to develop new exhibition design ideas and prototype proposals. As an example, he emphasized the importance of the best optical vision requirement in the exhibition space, as well as the positive contributions of having the best acoustics in a concert hall. He realized the design of the exhibition with the grooved steel plates he used as wall material and the fixed lighting fixtures created in the space. The wall material provides different color variations and focal points in different perspectives according to the movement in
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the space, so visitors encounter a dynamic visuality while moving in the space (Löschke, 2012).
Figure 2.5: El Lissitzky, Hannover "Abstract Cabinet" study, 1927 (Gough,1998).
(Source: screenshot from www.socks-studio.com)
According to O'Dherty, the work held by Kurt Schwitters, one of the artists of the Dada Movement, on two floors of his house in Hannover, Germany, between 1923 and 1943, was one of the most prominent examples that gave the possibility of spatial intervention to the art object. O'Doherty described Kurt Schwitters' "Merzbau" as one of the earliest examples of the "Gallery" idea. "Merzbau" is a variable fiction product that shows the relationship between space, material, artist and process (Figure 2.7). Considering the period when Merzbau was built, the idea of experiencing the space with the art of installation became a new artistic practice since it has not been applied yet (O'Doherty, 2010).
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Figure 2.6: An image of Kurt Schwitters’s work at his home, Hannover, Germany, 1923-1943
(Source: screenshot from www.tate.org.uk)
According to Celant, the space used in the exhibition "The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme", held in Paris Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938 and the exhibition design of which was also contributed by Marcel Duchamp, was considered as a "Non-neutral Space" in the presentation of art. In addition to the holistic flow in the space with the installations of the artworks that fill the whole space, it is not allowed to be left passive in the gallery space. Visitors have always been compelled to collapse, climb, touch and move. Exhibition participation is requested (Figure 2.8). The person does not remain fixed and is invited to the senses and physical impulses by being forced to be involved (Celant, 1996).
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Figure 2.7: “The Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” exhibition in Paris Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938
(Source: screenshot from www.koregos.org)
In the 1950s, space was treated as a quiet entity. In the spaces of this period, there should be no external elements that can come between the viewer and the painting, and the walls of the space should be of a quality that helps the artwork by being silent and colorless. This new ideal gallery space, which O'Doherty refers to as "White Cube", is defined as a space that excludes any element that hinders the perception of the artwork as art (Figure 2.9). According to O’Doherty with this new gallery aesthetic called “White Cube”, spaces with square or rectangular plans, consisting of white walls, and where the lighting source is usually only on the ceiling, space becomes a canvas for artworks (O'Doherty, 2010).
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Figure 2.8: An image of White Cube Gallery, London, 2013
(Source: screenshot from www.whitecube.com)
As mentioned in Atilla Döl and Pelin Avşar's article about minimalism; with the innovations brought by Minimal Art in the 1960s, it started to rise as a place. Space has generally acted as a part of the work, as an element that integrates with the work, so that the work can associate its existence with the space (Döl and Avşar, 2013).
It can be said that, with the exhibitions organized in this ecole, the contribution of the audience to the production of ideas and thinking more about the concepts were provided. The Minimalism movement, which blurs the boundaries between daily life and art, has formed the basis of art production in many different subjects such as works that combine painting and sculpture, environmental art, space arrangement and installation, and site-specific productions related to space.
As Altshuler discussed in his book Biennials and Beyond – Exhibitions That Made Art History, the 1960s were the years when innovations such as themes and curatorial context began to be used in exhibitions. The artists started to produce their works around the determined themes. The first thematic exhibition title was used was the 36th Venice Biennale “Work or Behavior”. Exhibition catalogs describing the exhibitions were prepared, and art magazines featuring the theme and the artists began to be published. In this way, the exhibitions can reach people who do not have the opportunity to visit (Altshuler, 2013).
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For this period, space is a factor of art and all its parameters are questioned, it is possible to cite an example of William Anastasi's exhibition in New York Dwan Gallery in 1965 (Figure 2.10). Anastasi photographed the gallery space as empty and hung the prints she took on the canvases on the walls to which the photographs belong, and covered the wall with her own images. Thus, he wanted to draw attention to his own images of the space. For O'Doherty, this exhibition is considered quite successful as the exhibitions that take place after this exhibition will remind the space itself with its own images (O'Doherty, 2010).
Figure 2.9: William Anastasi's exhibition in New York Dwan Gallery, 1965
(Source: screenshot from www.kangyy1.wordpress.com)
As Altshuler mentioned, major international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1895), Documenta (1955) and St Paulo Biennale (1951), which appeared in the 19th century, enabled short-term and temporary exhibitions to enter the art world. In these exhibitions, the concepts of national, international and locality are discussed, while supporting tourism and economic development, it also depicts the state of contemporary art (Altshuler, 2013).
After the Second World War, in line with the need to restructure the museums in Europe and to recover the confiscated artworks, UNESCO established an international council by developing the cooperation between museums and the International Council of
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Museums (ICOM) was founded. According to the first definition published by ICOM: “The museum; It is a non-profit, permanent institution working for the public service and for the development of the public, open to the public, which accumulates, preserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity for the purpose of education, training and entertainment.” (ICOM, 1946).
It is possible to say that, exhibition design has differentiated as a result of World Fairs and the development of Museology. With the effect of the changing social structure of the 20th century and the concepts such as rationality, simplicity and functionality, the exhibition design has gained a very different image from the exhibition spaces arranged without a specific theme or meaning in the exhibition of works of art.
There was an increase in the construction of new museums and art spaces in the early 20th century. One of them, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is an artwork on its own with its architecture. Regarding this situation of museums, Gintz said that "the museum function of the building - the function of displaying works of art - can easily be sacrificed for the sake of celebrating its own existence" (Gintz, 2010).
As mentioned in Claude Gintz's book, artist Daniel Buren wanted to destroy the dominant power of the Museum (Figure 2.11). He wanted to highlight the works exhibited in the museum by stretching a 20-meter-high and 10-meter-wide blue-white striped fabric at the Guggenheim's Sixth International Exhibition in 1971. Upon the objections of some artists such as Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, on the grounds that the installations scattered around the spiral staircases disrupted the viewing angles, Buren's fabric work was removed and the works continued to exist within the dominant power of the museum space (Gintz, 2010).
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Figure 2.10: An image of Daniel Buren's work, exhibited in the museum by stretching a 20-meter-high and 10-meter-wide blue-white striped fabric at the Guggenheim's Sixth International Exhibition in 1971.
(Source: screenshot from www.abitare.it)
According to Taşçıoğlu, “Installation Art”, which emerged in the 1970s, includes the act of installation with all the forms of the act of exhibition that have changed until today. With the questioning of the conceptual content in art after the minimalism movement, it was aimed that the sculptural objects placed in the space interact with both the space itself and the audience with various tools (Taşçıoğlu, 2013).
“Installation” literally means putting in place, installing, arranging, arranging, bringing to office and placing in a place. As an artistic equivalent, it is expressed with the words space arrangement or installation.
As Miwon Kwon mentioned in her book "One Place After Another: Site Specific Art And Locational Identity", the concept of place was questioned and artworks were questioned
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in the 1960s, when installation art was carried out in certain alternative spaces outside the gallery space and at certain times that could not fit in the gallery.
In first examples of site-specific works, as Richard Serra said about the displacement of the artwork, the understanding of "replacing the work is to destroy the work" has become a general opinion and the works can not be repeated again. It has been accepted as a quality. This situation, which prevents the transportation of the artwork, has been re-interpreted as "it can move in the right conditions" in order to clarify the situations that require it to be carried in the future, contrary to the first ideas of location specificity. Because the fact that the art object can be transported also means that it reaches more audiences (Kwon, 1997).
Celant thinks that, regardless of the place where it is made in installation art (in public space, in nature or in a gallery environment), space appears as a factor that affects art in general. Starting from the gallery and museum spaces, alternative spaces (warehouses, industrial buildings, etc.) come into play. The definition of "New Space" has begun to be made by interpreting it within spaces with freer arrangements and forms. The decrease in closure has opened the way for different exhibition opportunities. Thus, there is a presentation situation that leads to action in the space. There is no longer a single point of view and no adherence to wall surfaces. In Celant's words, a "global perception" is formed (Celant, 1996).
On the one hand, as Altshuler claimed, one of the most important international exhibitions that created a breaking point in the history of the exhibition was the Documenta1 5 exhibition held in 1972. Documenta exhibition takes place every 5 years in Kassel, Germany, and it was held for the 15th time in 2022. Harald Szeemann is the curator of the Documenta 5 exhibition. During the hundred days of the exhibition, different events and conversations took place. The fact that events other than the exhibition were organized for the first time and the contracts protecting the intellectual and financial legal rights of the artists thanks to these events made this exhibition important (Altshuler, 2013).
1 www.documenta.de
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According to Altshuler, the 1980s was a period marked by significant social, political, and cultural changes, which influenced how people understood and expressed their identities. "The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 80s" is an exhibition that explores various cultural and social frameworks of identity during the 1980s. The show aims to shed light on the diverse and complex ways in which individuals and communities constructed their identities during this transformative decade (Altshuler, 2013).
On the other hand as Altshuler mentioned before, with the Havana Biennial2, which was established in 1984, biennials began to be built with artists outside the art world, far from international art centers where no exhibitions were held before. After the Havana Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial 3 ,established in 1987, has developed the model initiated by the Havana Biennial, with a similar location on the periphery of Europe and interesting exhibitions by leading international curators (Altshuler, 2013).
As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill mentioned in her The Educational Role of the Museum book, contemporary museum and exhibition approaches until the 1990s, it was exhibited in the closed showcases of the collections in museums and in an intangible and inaccessible form. This rigid, static understanding of museology and exhibition gained a creative flexibility and fluidity to meet the needs of post-modern approaches at the end of the 1990s. The post-museum movement that developed in this period aimed to provide a new approach to the museum audience by bringing a more sophisticated understanding to the emerging concepts of culture, communication, learning and identity and the relations between these concepts. In the exhibitions held with this new approach, ensuring more active participation of the visitors has been the focus (Hooper-Greenhill, 1999).
In 1987, with the recognition and spread of the curatorial profession, curatorial education programs began to emerge in academic circles. Altshuler also mentioned that in this period, curating began to be more accepted as a profession in the art world and began to be seen as a professional discipline (Altshuler, 2013).
2 www.biennialhavana.org
3 www.bienal.iksv.org
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In the opinion of Altshuler, in the 1990s, developing countries and municipalities saw biennials as a means of economic growth and representation of cultural status, and they went beyond tourist attractions and began to be established in every region. Furthermore, this exhibition model has been continued with the manifesto of traveling exhibitions without being tied to a specific place. By 2010, about sixty exhibitions could be counted, meeting the generally accepted criteria for a worldwide biennial, such as regular repetition, ambitious scale, and international participation (Altschuler, 2013).
Altshuler expresses that with the introduction of larger-scale biennials, the format of exhibitions with multiple venues has emerged. In 2005, at the Istanbul Biennial, co-curated by Vasıf Kortun and Charles Esche, exhibitions were held in unused local buildings outside the city, away from touristic structures and even closed for various purposes. Thus, architecture was integrated as the subject of the biennial. Biennials have been established in both urban and regional areas, taking into account social and political reasons. As a result, discussion frameworks have been created around local and global concepts (Altschuler, 2013).
According to Ceylan Aydın’s article, in the 20th century, with the concept of culture talking about the awareness of power, the need to develop a new approach to the visitors of the museums arose. It was desired to create a space where the society and the museum are in a dialogue and where the relations between the visitor and the museum are examined. Goals such as educating the visitors, getting them excited, relaxing, contributing to their cultural development and entertaining them at the same time have come to the fore. Thus, museums have become places of discussion and practice around a subject. By organizing interactive exhibitions, visitors can read objects, share cultural and social values, and make applications that seek the truth (Aydın, 2013).
The role of museums today has gone beyond opening the exhibitions they present their collections to the public. Their economic sustainability also tries to bring these exhibitions together with the society in an attractive and impressive way. Developing visitor-oriented principles, today's museums are no longer static exhibition spaces, and instead of
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exhibiting objects, they have the approach of exhibiting the stories that make up the content. Today, the experiential relations, creative actions and intellectual inquiries of space and art objects are reconstructed by artists. This change differs from traditional presentation methods and reconstructs the relations between the exhibition space and the art object. Visitors become subjects who not only perceive with their own experiences, but also interact with the art object and space and play an active role around the content.
2.2 Actors in art production
This part examines the first steps of exhibition development and how museums are organized to carry out exhibition plans and projects. It also addresses how ideas are generated, how exhibitions are selected for development, how staff are assigned to exhibition projects and who is responsible for project management.
Functioning with different factors such as general structure, size, age, history, vision, mission and management, museums have created their own unique organizational structures. Each museum has a director with ultimate responsibility for exhibitions, reviewing and approving critical elements such as the long-term exhibition plan, specific exhibition ideas and final exhibition designs. Depending on the size and type of museums, the involvement of the directors in the content of the exhibition and the degree of authority vary.
Generally, the exhibition office has responsibility for design and production (tasks that it may contract out), and usually for project management. Responsibility for the content of an exhibition—concept, objects, text, and story—typically falls to subject matter experts within the curatorial or scientific departments. Other units involved in carrying out exhibition programs, such as marketing, fundraising, public affairs and maintenance, are not central to this discussion (Smithsonian, 2002).
There are a wide variety of roles in the art market with the main actors being artists; sponsoring companies behind major art fairs, gallerists, art consultants, art managers, critics, auctioneers, buyers/collectors, investors and audiences. Art, operated by two branches of communication and capital, is now offered to the market not only for aesthetic
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appeal but also with different motives; just as in other fields, certain factors play a role in presenting the artwork as a product.
Production is a word with many meanings at the heart of making art. It can refer to the making of something or to a final product, like a theatrical performance. It is labor, capital, and the invisible groundwork of modern society and can be as simple as making a clay pot with your hands. Artists and theorists have acknowledged its importance as both an artistic action and an idea to be explored.
Art production is a broad term that includes a lot of different ways to show creativity, like painting, sculpting, taking pictures, and putting on live shows. It involves the transformation of raw materials into something new and meaningful that reflects the artist's vision and perspective on the world.
Actors in art production can include artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, and art critics. They all play a role in the creation, curation, promotion, and evaluation of artwork. Actors in art production can also include art historians, art educators, museum directors, and art dealers who contribute to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of artwork to wider audiences. Each of these people brings their own unique ideas and skills to the process, which adds to the artwork's overall value and impact. Collaboration and communication between these actors are crucial for a successful art production.
In his article The Artist in Brand Culture, Schroeder states that the identity of the producer is influential in determining the aesthetic value of the artwork, and as a result, the brand value of the artist can be discussed. Although business and art seem to be different fields, he mentions that as the image is the key to the world of brands, art and artists are also the other gear of marketing as image managers, even though they are identified with 'inspiration' and 'creativity'. Again in the same article, quoting his previous works, he says: “Art is serious business, it creates tremendous value. The art market is all about money, prices, investment potential, and their lucrative booming careers – at least the best-known examples are artists.” (Schroeder, 2010).
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As with all consumers and buyers, it can be said that the brand and consumption culture have an impact on the art audience and investors. Understanding the motivations of the art buyer requires taking into account the fact that having a well-known artist in one’s collection or being a close follower of that artist also gives one an identity in consumer culture.
Additionally, whether the branding of the artist is in line with his/her own desires or not, at the point where the consumption culture has reached, the artist finds himself/herself in the market as a brand, such as in Andy Warhol's "Art of Making Money" or Barbara Kruger's works criticizing consumption culture and marketization. Once more, in addition to the artists and their creations, there are names in the art world that are not publicized or preferred to remain anonymous when determining their value and marketing them. In his study, Martin Shubik classified art dealers based on the results of his research on the profession of art dealing and the reasons why people choose it. There are many examples of these, ranging from small-scale galleries that begin with their own collection, to souvenir shops that collaborate with artists, to large corporations that set their own prices. In each of these instances, the main feature that sets apart the art dealer from other vendors is the position in which their products are situated in relation to the market's objects of consumption and need. Art dealers should have a general interest in and knowledge of art because, in contrast to other products, art work is not easily determinable.
2.3 Theme, Venue and Artist Selections
Theme, venue and artist selections are also important factors that determine the success of an art exhibition. The theme should be relevant and engaging, the venue should be accessible and suitable for the artwork, and the artist selection should showcase a diverse range of styles and perspectives.
When choosing a theme for an art exhibition, it's important to think about who will be there and what you want to say. A well-chosen theme can create a cohesive and engaging experience for viewers, while also providing a framework for artists to explore and express their ideas.
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When choosing a place for an art exhibition, it is significant to consider such things as the size and layout of the space, its location and how easy it is to access , its lighting and climate control, its security, and any other amenities or services that may be needed. Additionally, it is important to research the reputation and track record of the venue, as well as any past exhibitions or events that have been held there.
The selection of artists for an art exhibition is a crucial step in ensuring the success of the event. It is important to consider factors such as the theme of the exhibition, the style and medium of the artists' work, and their level of experience and reputation in the art world.
2.4 The Birth of Curatorship
Art historian Charles Eastlake, who set off from exhibitions that didn’t require visitors to strain their necks or squat while examining the works, was instrumental in determining the eye-level boards and standards. This is how eye-centered design, not textural or experiential, was started. Such an architectural design inevitably led to the birth of the curatorial institution. In addition, storage areas were not considered in the designs of the first museums. The lack of display areas outside the existing walls has increased the need for a curator. Curators who will respond to these emerging needs have to be a kind of organizer.
The word "Curator" is derived from the Latin word "Curare" meaning "to attract attention". It is also used in the meaning of "manager, supervisor, inspector, protector, operator". As persons who traditionally undertake the management and guardianship of a museum, gallery, library or an archive, is an institution containing cultural heritage; they worked as content experts who interpreted the collections for which they were responsible and undertook the task of incorporating them. Today's contemporary art curators have determined their own working principles by becoming independent from institutions and have turned into people who make periodic exhibitions by leaving the usual exhibition techniques (Loveday, 2018).
The evolution of the museum as a concept and its reflections on its design have begun to change in parallel with these situations. It has become clear that museums should no
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longer be designed from the outside in, but on the contrary, from the inside out. In order to perceive the works of art, an eye-themed, bodily wandering order was prepared. Besides the exhibition areas, there was a need for additional services such as warehouse areas, library and store.
2.4.1 The New Curator
As it is mentioned in the “New Curator” book: “It's hard to imagine a contemporary art world without curators. Curators are the taste makers of a global industry, and often seem to be just as well-known as the artists they promote. Popular figures like Hans Ulrich Obrist, Okwui Enwezor, Klaus Biesenbach, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev dispense their knowledge and intellectual cachet through exhibitions, projects, and conferences from New York to Sydney. They frequently make the news, shape scholarly research, and make or break the careers of artists.” (Milliard, 2016).
According to Milliard, curating began to take off in the 1960s, propelled by now-iconic figures like Pontus Hultén and Harald Szeemann, whose ground-breaking exhibitions supported nascent conceptual art scenes. Early in the 1990s, the curator-author emerged as a central figure in the global art world, and the first academic programs in curatorial studies were established. Even though the term "curating" is now used in a wide variety of contexts, it is still in its infancy. Over the last fifteen years, artists have relentlessly pushed the boundaries of what an artistic gesture can be, and contemporary art has absorbed fields as diverse as dance, theater, carnival, archiving, political activism, and digital programming. Many curators admit to having entered curating by chance before they have become professionals, which is only another indication of how young the field still is (Milliard, 2016).
As Milliard mentioned, curators have developed ways for to exist in the real world and interact with their audience. In the same time frame, biennials and art fairs have completely taken over the art calendar, fostering new perspectives on curating in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Additionally, regions of the world that were previously largely ignored by the mainstream art industry have begun to emerge and, on occasion,
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have demanded new types of curating that both respond to the demands of their local scenes and situate them within a wider global context (Milliard, 2016).
As Milliard described, “Where is curating today?” is a challenging question that is made all the more difficult by the field's ongoing process of redefinition. A curatorial practice is by its very nature collaborative, as Koyo Kouoh emphasizes. No curator can work by themselves. Curators support living artists by acting as producers, collaborators, mentors, and enablers. They are unafraid of failure and, in some cases, even embrace it as a necessary step in the creative process. They serve as guides and mediators for audiences, introducing and dissecting the many facets that make up any artist's work (Milliard, 2016).
It is curicial to emphasize once more how frequently a curated artistic event—whether it be an exhibition or something else—is taken to be final. This ignores the importance modern curating techniques place on experimentation, which is one of their core components. In other words, exhibitions should not be seen as a final product but rather as a process of critical thinking and experimentation. It is argued that curators are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging traditional norms in the art world, which is what makes their work so exciting and relevant (Milliard, 2016).
Approximately in the 1960s, the modern curator began to emerge. Two significant individuals in this decade broke the pre-existing career paths for museum curators to launch their careers.
Pontus Hultén's and Harald Szeemann's practices serve as excellent examples of the key trends that have come to characterize contemporary curating. Hulten explored the boundaries of institutional frameworks, while Szeemann went beyond them and expanded curating outside the purview of conventional art institutions (Milliard, 2016).
One of the most well known and accomplished European museum professionals of the 20th century, Hultén served as the founding director of four important art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977-1980), the Los Angeles Museum of
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Contemporary Art (1980-1984), the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn (1990-1992). He was also the director of the Moderna Museet from 1958- 1973 in Stockholm and the Palazzo Grassi from 1984-1990 in Venice. By collaborating closely with artists and allowing them to create and install their works on site, Hulten more than anyone else tested the boundaries of the modern museum from within. By introducing the element of spectacle, focusing on public programming, and extending opening hours, he contributed to changing the museum's reputation from one that primarily preserves heritage to one that serves its patrons. (Milliard, 2016)
Szeemann, on the other hand, decided to abandon conventional museum leadership and create a new position for himself as an independent exhibition creator who shunned conventional museum duties. His groundbreaking, radical exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, which he mounted in 1969, received such negative feedback that it led to his resignation as director of the Kunsthalle Bern. "When Attitudes Become Form" is often remembered for its innovative and unconventional approach to curating. Szeemann invited artists to create site-specific works directly in the gallery space, blurring the lines between art and the exhibition space itself. This exhibition is a prime example of how Szeemann's curatorial style focused on the relationship between the artist, their work, and the environment in which it was presented. In addition to allowing Szeemann to imagine and conceptualize exhibitions in a variety of spaces that were not initially intended for that purpose, this radical gesture of leaving the institution demonstrated the strong affinity of Szeemann's curatorial work with contemporary artistic practices (Milliard, 2016).
He was appointed as the youngest artistic director of docu-menta in Kassel in 1972. By inviting artists to exhibit not only paintings and sculptures but also durational performances and "happenings," he revolutionized the fundamental idea behind this 100-day event. Milliard argues that, Szeemann permanently altered the perception of the curator's role by imposing his personal discourse on a selection of works in the exhibition and undermining their individual significance (Milliard, 2016).
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With these two exhibitions, Szeemann permanently changed the dynamic between the curator and the artist and emphasized the idea of the exhibition as an occasion. The characteristic that Hultén and Szeemann most obviously shared was their appreciation of and familiarity with artists. They were typically regarded as artists working alongside other artists because they both possessed the capacity to establish connections and spread knowledge both between the curator and the artists and (especially in the case of group exhibitions) among the artists themselves, thereby promoting the sharing of thoughts and experiences. Thus, it is possible to view Pontus Hultén and Harald Szeemann as the innovators who established the new parameters and trajectories of contemporary curatorial practice.
The culture of mobility resulting from the processes of globalization and economic change since the 1960s, is by far the most important of these dimensions. For instance, the emergence of the modern curator could be viewed in the context of the progressive breakdown of Fordist capitalism, a production system that depended on the organization of the workplace and the economy of time, and its transformation into more flexible and dislocated forms of production that demanded workers' unprecedented mobility. One of the first professional groups to experience these new levels of mobility and intermittence as part of their daily lives were contemporary curators. A curator's job necessitates frequent travel in order to carry out daily duties (Milliard, 2016).
The role of a curator has indeed evolved significantly over time, and the concept of the "new curator" reflects the changing dynamics of curatorial practices in response to shifts in culture, technology, and art. Traditionally, curators were responsible for the selection, preservation, and presentation of artworks and artifacts within a physical museum or gallery space. They conducted research, organized exhibitions, wrote accompanying texts, and ensured the proper care of the artworks. The curatorial process was centered around creating a narrative and guiding the audience's experience. With the advent of digital technologies and the changing ways audiences engage with art and culture, the role of the curator has expanded and transformed.
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3. REPRESENTATION AND COMPACTION OF THE IDEA: EXHIBITION SPACES AND TRENDS IN EXHIBITION MAKING AFTER 1990s
3.1 Gallery Spaces and White Cube
Gallery spaces are physical venues dedicated to the exhibition and display of artworks. They can take various forms, such as public art museums, commercial galleries, nonprofit art spaces, or artist-run initiatives. These spaces provide a platform for artists to exhibit their work and for audiences to engage with and appreciate art. Gallery spaces often curate exhibitions, organize events, and facilitate dialogue between artists, curators, collectors, and the public.
Gallery spaces serve as venues for the display and presentation of artworks. They can vary in size, layout, and design, ranging from traditional white cube galleries to alternative and unconventional spaces. Galleries play a crucial role in the art world, as they provide a dedicated platform for artists to showcase their work and engage with audiences.
Art spaces of the 20th century and beyond are viewed through introversion and extroversion. In this context, the concept of "white cube", which is associated with the state of introversion, defines the context, which is its first and archetypal feature. The situations created by the conceptual and spatial characteristics of the interior space created by the white cube context are examined in terms of the communication and therefore the relationship between the artwork and the person who encounters it. Being closed to the outside world and having defined boundaries, being introverted, sterile, infinity and spacelessness, etc. expressions stand out as the representational conceptual features of the white cube and the effects of the representation of interior elements in color, material and functions are read. The feature of this contextual space setup is that daily life is excluded and the person is confronted with the works. Different from the
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complex exhibition approach of traditional museology, the paintings hanging on the walls are placed at the viewer's eye level and at wide intervals, aiming to provide direct one-to-one communication between the work and the person. In this place where his bodily existence is insignificant and the human being fades away, the reader (the person who encounters the art) who experiences the works in a way that no other organ other than their eye functions as a watcher, is called the "viewer" (O'Doherty, 2013).
In museums with the concept of White Cube, walls without identity have led to a change in the architecture of art, with these spaces where there is neutral lighting, no ornaments, and works are isolated. The isolation of the works means that it has no architectural connection with the place where it is located. White cube exhibitions are localized exhibitions where only the artwork itself is present, without interaction with the architecture (O'Doherty, 1999).
White Cube is a formation that touches the boundaries of the gallery. Art works have begun to question the existence of the gallery. It is designed as abstract spaces, free from time, space and worldly feelings. Artworks are highly blessed, and the form of the space shows the value of the artwork in this sense. This art, which has become independent, emphasizes how valuable the artist is.
3.2 Contemporary Art Museums
Contemporary art museums play a vital role in the art world by collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting artworks created by contemporary artists. These museums focus on showcasing artworks that reflect the current artistic trends, ideas, and practices of our time.
Contemporary art museums around the world play a crucial role in preserving, showcasing, and promoting contemporary and modern artworks. Here are some of the most well-known contemporary art museums: MOMA - Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao, Spain), The Broad (Los Angeles, USA), Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA), MOCA - The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, USA),
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Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA), SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, USA), MOT - Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan).
According to Artun, encountering art is an ethical experience as well as an aesthetic one. History tells us what the nations did. The place to see art is the museum. Museums are art libraries. How the art is displayed here is of vital importance. According to Ruskin, the museum constitutes an alternative world, an escape from the brutality of the factory that planted its seeds, as well as that of the modern city. Arts and crafts meet in the museum. In museums, people develop themselves with the training of the eyes. The main purpose of the modern museum is education. Museology policies dedicate museums to the service of the public. Seeing develops physically as well as mentally. Encountering art is an ethical experience as well as an aesthetic one. History tells us what nations do, and art tells us why they do it. Museums are the place to see art (Artun, 2012).
Contemporary art museums acquire artworks through purchases, donations, and sometimes commissions. They build collections that represent a diverse range of artistic disciplines, media, and conceptual approaches. The museum's collection serves as a cultural archive, documenting the artistic production of a specific period or region. Museums also undertake the responsibility of conserving and preserving artworks for future generations, however, differences can be seen according to the different visions and missions of museums.
Contemporary art museums organize exhibitions to present artworks to the public. These exhibitions may be thematic, showcasing a particular concept or artistic movement, or they may focus on the works of individual artists. Museums often collaborate with artists, curators, and other institutions to develop exhibitions that provide critical insights into contemporary art practices. The display of artworks may involve various approaches, including traditional gallery spaces, site-specific installations, multimedia presentations, or interactive exhibits.
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Contemporary art museums play a crucial role in educating and engaging the public with contemporary art. They offer educational programs, guided tours, workshops, lectures, and panel discussions to foster understanding and appreciation of the artworks on display. Museums often provide interpretive materials, such as wall labels, catalogues, and audio guides, to provide context, historical information, and critical analysis of the artworks. These educational initiatives aim to bridge the gap between the art and the audience, encouraging dialogue, reflection, and interpretation.
In summary, contemporary art museums serve as vital institutions for collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting artworks created by contemporary artists. They contribute to public education, engagement, and research, playing a crucial role in shaping the discourse and appreciation of contemporary art practices.
3.3 Today’s Art Spaces
Today’s art spaces are diverse and dynamic, ranging from traditional museums and galleries to pop-up exhibitions and street art installations. These spaces not only showcase the works of established artists but also provide a platform for emerging talents to showcase their creativity and push boundaries. In addition, many art spaces now incorporate technology and interactive elements to enhance the visitor experience and make art more accessible to a wider audience.
Contemporary art has indeed transcended traditional boundaries and can be found in a wide range of unexpected places and everyday life practices like: public art and street art, digital and virtual art, social media and the internet, art in advertising and design, art festivals and biennales, art as activism, art in entertainment, art in education, artisanal and craft movements.
The transformation of art production in parallel with social, cultural, political, religious, scientific and technological changes in the historical process has brought about changes in the ways of exhibiting artworks. While we are accustomed to seeing works of art in palace rooms, churches and museums in terms of classical art, today art has transcended the boundaries of the canvas and has begun to appear in all areas of our daily life practice.
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Just as Duchamp has brought ready-made objects into museum spaces, the artworks that we are used to seeing in museum spaces have also moved into our daily routines. Crossing the boundaries of the museum spatially, allows for a theoretical reinterpretation of artworks in terms of the environment in which they are located and the contexts they establish with other entities around them. Furthermore, using the places where today's works are located as material is also one of the topics of art. Artworks that initially try to imitate nature and reach its level of perfection are now part of the natural environment.
Environmental installations other than traditional painting and sculpture arrangements, artworks and art events that try to overcome the physical and ideological boundaries of galleries and museums where the space of the artwork changes, involve the viewer in a mental process of perception and reflection. Sometimes the space exhibited alone and the viewer in it, sometimes the crammed space and the viewer outside, not entering or not given the opportunity to enter, sometimes arrangements such as land, fields, bridges and etc., which, although small in nature, are too big to fit in a gallery or a museum, first of all encourage the viewer to think. Museums and galleries have become places where the artwork is reproduced and reinterpreted, rather than a place where it is stored and meets with the audience. Unlike surfaces where the idea of space is discussed on two dimensions, in contemporary art, there are works that are shaped by the idea of the viewer-artist and in which the space is included with its essential quality. The artistic permanence and beauty of the works are integrated with the exhibition spaces. (Girgin, 2014)
3.4 Other spaces: books, magazines, websites, mobile applications
While recognizing the role of digital media in making artworks more accessible and visible, it is important to remember that the primary place for the public to encounter art is still the physical exhibition. Exhibition spaces are places where people can transcend their own existence through compelling and meaningful aesthetic experiences. As a consequence, it has become essential to rethink the exhibition conceptually and methodologically in the context of an increasingly digital world. The contemporary exhibition space is thus conceived as content rather than container, and the exhibition is envisioned with the intention of a holistic artwork rather than merely a means of displaying artworks and objects.
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According to Barbara dos Santos Coutinho and Ana Toestoes, the processes of digitizing information and virtualizing reality are important issues today, as they can lead to the dematerialization of the physical experience of art. If we consider the profound changes taking place in all aspects of our daily lives, in our social habits, in visual culture and in the way we perceive the world, we can contribute to a constant rethinking of the physical exhibition. The exhibition, like any other product, should not consume culture and art, and should try not to create a momentary, superficial image. It should offer engaging and meaningful aesthetic experiences through which people can move beyond their own existence as individuals and members of society (Coutinho, Tostoes, 2020).
Social media platforms like websites, instagram, facebook, twitter are also all examples of spaces that can be displayed in exhibitions. These spaces provide a platform for artists to exhibit their work and engage with their audience in a physical or virtual setting.
Virtual exhibitions have become increasingly popular in recent years, allowing artists to showcase their work to a global audience without the limitations of physical space.
Additionally, virtual exhibitions often incorporate interactive elements that enhance the Viewer’s experience and provide a deeper understanding of the artist’s vision.
Virtual museums, for example British Museum’s virtual version, also offer the convenience of being accessible anytime and anywhere, making it possible for individuals to explore the exhibition at their own pace and without any time constraints. Additionally, virtual museums can reduce the costs associated with physical exhibitions, such as transportation and insurance expenses.
Exhibition books are also becoming more common as a way to document and share the artwork from virtual exhibitions. These books can serve as a tangible reminder of the exhibition and provide a way for people to revisit the artwork long after the virtual
exhibition has ended.
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Exhibition websites are also a way to reach a wider audience and allow people from all over the world to experience the exhibition. They can provide additional information about the artwork, the artists, and the curatorial process, as well as interactive features such as virtual tours and online discussions.
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4. ELEMENTS OF EXHIBITION DESIGN
4.1 What is an Exhibition?
According to the Turkish Language Association4, the word "exhibit" it is defined as “to display, promote or sell certain things in any form, to place where everyone can see, to display”, in the Cambridge Dictionary5, “exhibition” it has been described as “an activity where objects such as pictures are shown to the public, a situation in which a particular talent or quality is shown to the public, or the act of showing them” (Figure 4.1).
In its simplest definition, the meeting of a series of items with the visitor around an organized presentation and theme is called an exhibition. Generally, cultural or educational areas such as museums, art galleries, parks, fairs, libraries are used as exhibition venues. Exhibition venues are not limited to these types of venues, and exhibitions also take place in public or commercial spaces. In other words, there is no restriction on the exhibition space and exhibitions can be held anywhere imaginable.
Figure 4.1: A visual, visualized by the auther, showing classical exhibitions.
4 https://sozluk.gov.tr/
5 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/
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Exhibition design comes from the idea as a concept; it is a development process until it becomes a physical, three-dimensional experience. Exhibition design can basically be explained in this way, but as we get into the specifics of this field, we need to examine the concepts that make up the exhibition throughout the process.
Exhibition design is a unifying design process that utilizes varying proportions from many different disciplines such as architecture, interior design, graphic design, digital media, lighting, and audio interaction.
In exhibitions there are main decision-makers such as curators, museums and artists. The exhibition design process begins with the fulfillment of the wishes of these three decision-makers in the context of a space (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2: A visual, visualized by me, showing three main decision mechanisms of exhibitions.
Exhibition design focuses on creating real-time experiences that enable multi-layered communication by using space, movement and memory in many different areas, from museum displays, commercial spaces, fairs, thematic entertainment areas, information kiosks, visitor centers, world fairs and exhibitions. Regardless of the venue used or the message to be conveyed, it utilizes many different disciplines simultaneously to tell the desired story to the targeted audience.
According to Skolnick, in this sense, while shaping the experience, it plays the role of a composer, conductor, choreographer and director and ensures that the desired message is conveyed in the most impressive and meaningful way. Exhibitions combine communication design and space (Skolnick, 2007, p.8).
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According to Demir, although the types of exhibition design cannot be clearly differentiated and the boundaries between them are decreasing day by day, they can be classified according to their permanent or temporary use, function and content. Demir has gathered the exhibition types under four headings: exhibitions with different cultural/social content, trade fair exhibitions, art gallery exhibitions, museum exhibitions (Demir, 2009).
The development of exhibition design in the context of museums and exhibitions has led to the formation of the concept of museology, transferring objects with historical, artistic, religious, scientific or aesthetic value and information about them. In terms of museums, which act with the aim of protecting objects, presenting them to the society, making sense and forming a culture, how the exhibition is designed has been an area that has undergone great changes over time.
Before starting the exhibition design, the content files are transferred to the designer teams by the museum's collection officers and curators. These content files are organized by the curatorial teams according to the topics, groups or chronology that the content is desired to be highlighted, in a way that can be understood by someone who does not know the subject. In cases where the curators do not have enough knowledge about the subject, this research is carried out by the content development teams, as they are mostly collectors (Figure 4.3).
In certain exhibitions photographs, memories of the periods are the most common and supportive elements used in the exhibition design. While researching the object, any material we see in a photograph that can be associated with the object can be transformed into a concept that can be used in the exhibition. A diary or an oral interview written at that time can provide a direct transfer of emotion.
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Figure 4.3: Two images taken during the preparations for the Istanbul Research Institute, Memories of Humankinds Exhibition, 2019.
(Source: Pattu Architecture archive)
In some cases archives of domestic and foreign institutions are usually used to develop content. Very special objects that have not been exhibited anywhere before can often be found in the archives of private collectors. In order to reach the right institutions and people, it is beneficial to get consultancy from experts in the field. 3D objects found during these researches are one of the ways to spatialize a reference related to the subject while designing the exhibition. The spatialization part can also be made digitally. For example, Osman Hamdi’s painting Turtle Trainer (1906) at the Pera Museum has been transformed into an experience where you can walk around with VR glasses (Figure 4.4).
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Figure 4.4: Pera Museum, Istanbul, Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection, A visual of Osman Hamdi Bey's World: A Virtual Reality Experience for The Tortoise Trainer in the Osman Hamdi Bey Exhibition.
(Source: screenshot from www.peramuzesi.org)
After doing a historical research through archive scans, it is possible to present contemporary artworks that show how the subject has been handled by contemporary artists. Revealing what a concept from the past means and how it has been handled by contemporary artists provides a link between the past and the present. For example, in the “The Art of Weights And Measures” exhibition which was organized at the Pera Museum, there was a contemporary art work by Avşar Gürpınar among the historical objects. Inspired by the Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection of artist Avşar Gürpınar, “Le Grand K2” brought a contemporary perspective to the “The Art of Weights And Measures” exhibition (Figure 4.5).
Figure 4.5: A visual of Avşar Gürpınar's installation of a contemporary art work named “Le Grand K2” in the Pera Museum, Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection, “The Art of Weights And Measures” exhibition.
(Source: screenshot from www.peramuzesi.org)
Before an exhibition begins to form, a bright idea must emerge. The interpretive plan will be created, thus focusing on exhibition ideas and questions such as why they are exhibited, what the messages are intended to be given. This work forms the basis of the exhibition design. It is an in-depth report of what the museum or exhibition is about
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institutionally and why the museum is doing it at this time, in this way and at this scale, and in particular. With this study, the basic criteria for the exhibition will be determined for whom, at what scale, when and with what budget. More in-depth research will be conducted later. After planning, storytelling and exhibition design, the production process starts with the budget decisions. The opening takes place with the end of all architectural drawings, construction sites and workshops where productions are made, and the exhibition emerges when the content meets with the visitor (Figure 4.6).
Figure 4.6: A visualization by me describing the exhibition making process
In my definition, exhibition designers tell a story in terms of space and content. Every story has a beginning, middle and end. The place where the story takes place is told by a storyteller who is determined by the actors and factors that affect the story. Storytellers are not always one person. In exhibitions, storytellers can transform into objects, texts, graphics, technology, scenography and interactive presentations (Figure 4.7).
Figure 4.7: A visual visualized by the me, showing the steps in the spatialization process of the exhibition story
While creating the structure of the exhibition, including the decisions of the curator, museum staff and the exhibition designer, they determine the theme, concept, chronology,
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mission and vision of the exhibition. At this point, concepts such as circulation, which are intended to be designed in parallel with the subject within the physical possibilities of the place where the exhibition will be held, come into play. When we first enter the exhibition area, such questions as what we want to see, what will be more effective to exhibit in the space, what kind of materials we should use as a theme and concept, what kind of lighting should be are discussed.
While preparing a curatorial brief, the subject of the exhibition is decided first. Then a thematic research is carried out. Related objects, documents, photos and videos are brought together. Depending on the content, it is given up to the target and target audience. Finally, the decisions made are considered through the concepts of experience, examination, learning, imagination, and practice.
The biggest difference of exhibition architecture from architecture or interior architecture is not that the priority is function, use or pleasure, but that the content is accepted as the basis of everything. When the scale, usage and design abilities given in architecture and interior architecture education are blended with historical interest and experience, exhibitions are designed by considering these concepts with the identity of the designer.
4.2 Role of Artist and Artwork in Exhibition Design
The museum represents an environment most commonly associated with the experience of art. Exhibition design and the way artworks are displayed have a huge impact on how we see them. In today's museum spectrum, visitors encounter a variety of curatorial concepts. This observation shows that context is important to experience artworks in museums. The more a visitor likes the presentation and selection of artworks, the more they like the respective painting. The number of works exhibited and their consistency in terms of size is one of the factors that influence the capacity to remember a particular painting (Swaboda, 2019).
Daniel Buren's explanation of how a slice of bread turns into an artwork by being exhibited in an art gallery expresses the links between the artwork and the gallery space. Even if the artwork ignores the role played by the architectural conditions of a gallery or
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a museum, in the end, every place will reflect its formal, sociological, political, cultural meaning on the object or artwork within it.
An empty museum or gallery means nothing, after all, it can be turned into a gymnasium or a bakery at any time, and this transformation does not affect what will be there or what will be sold there, the social status of those spaces does not change just because there were once works of art there. Putting an artwork in a bakery or exhibiting it there does not change the function of the bakery, yet the bakery cannot turn the artwork into a slice of bread. Putting a slice of bread in a museum or exhibiting it there does not change the function of that museum, however, the museum, at least for the duration of the exhibition, transforms that slice of bread into a artwork. Now let's put a slice of bread on display in a bakery and see: It will be difficult, even impossible, to distinguish that one slice of bread from the other breads. Then let's exhibit an artwork - any artwork - in a museum; is it really possible to distinguish it from other works? (O’Doherty,2010)
If we consider the difference between an artist's transformation of space into art and the preparation of the space for art; both are forms of communication and both contain both design and art. Therefore, design and art are two concepts that cannot be considered independently.
Contemporary works of art go beyond their borders by integrating with the places they are in. This interaction in the fields of art and design forms the basis of the spaces prepared for art. Space design, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship of architecture, design and visitor with interior space as a starting point. In this direction, museums and galleries prepared with different design methods are no longer a place where art is exhibited, but become the artist’s workshop.
Exhibitions where the space itself becomes an artwork are often referred to as site-specific or immersive installations. These exhibitions blur the line between the art object and the environment in which it is displayed, creating a unique and interactive experience for viewers. In cases where the space itself becomes an artwork, the artist's transformation of the space and the production process becomes an art element in itself. Liam Gillick is one
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of the most important artists who produces in this way. Gillick who was born in England in 1964, is the person who has articulated the concept of Relational Art. In the exhibition design; there are many fields such as architectural design, lighting design, graphic design, book design and texts. Liam Gillick also uses graphic design, one of the most important of these elements, as an art tool. Liam Gillick perceives the space as a graphic and brings this to the fore in his art. While handling the space graphically, he uses elements such as acrylic panels and metal constructions in the space. While providing the setting of the space, he transforms the space by using it in different ways by acting within the exhibition language that is already taking place in the space. This transformation constitutes the art of Liam Gillick.
4.3 The Constituents of Exhibition Design: Sound, Light, Material, Preservation of Historical Space, Technology (interaction, digitization, etc), Access to Exhibition Content, Budget
In today's museums, the concept of experience is the biggest element that distinguishes contemporary exhibitions from classical ones. Classical exhibition forms, which have continued from the past to the present, cannot meet today's needs. Exhibitions, where the visitor interacts with the artwork and can learn about the subject by experience, attract more attention from today's visitors. Each exhibition, with its own history and experience, becomes each visitor's own special experience.
Observing the subject and the world around it allows visitors to leave the exhibition by learning. Various scenographies and voice-overs allow the visitor to find themselves in the narratives and imagine more. An important part of the learning experience is that people can actually practice doing something with their own hands.
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5. CASE STUDIES ON THE ARTIST-DESIGNER-CURATOR RELATIONSHIPS IN EXHIBITION MAKING
5.1 How Contemporary Artists Use Spaces
Contemporary artists use spaces in various ways to create unique and innovative works of art. Some artists incorporate physical space into their pieces, such as creating installations that interact with the environment around them. Others use negative space or empty areas to create a sense of balance and contrast within their compositions. Additionally, some artists explore the concept of virtual space through digital media and technology, creating immersive experiences that challenge traditional notions of physical space. Overall, the use of space in contemporary art is a dynamic and constantly evolving aspect of artistic expression.
Space and art both shape and give meaning to one another; they are complementary ideas. Space serves as a halt in the world of limitless artistic images. Because everything in life, including people and societies, subjects and objects, the concrete and the abstract, the past and the future, is contained by and constrained by space. In this situation, there are two ways to assess the connection between art and space. The first is the physical presence of space, which serves as a venue for art exhibitions and gives the pieces a pathway to their intended audience. The spatial arrangement, which is a component of the artwork as a representation of the spiritual world, is the second aspect.
Today, the experiential relations, creative actions and intellectual inquiries of space and art objects have been reconstructed by artists. This change differentiated from traditional presentation methods and reconstructed the relations between the exhibition space and the art object. With the experience, the participants started to take place in a position that not only perceives, but also interacts and becomes active with the art object and space. Thus, spatial setup and experience have become an important part of the exhibition design as part of the participatory and artistic process.
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Contemporary artists approach spaces as dynamic platforms for artistic expression, engagement, and critical inquiry. They constantly push boundaries and experiment with new ways of using and transforming spaces to create meaningful and immersive art experiences.
5.2 The Place of Biennials in Our Sociocultural World
Biennials hold a significant place in our sociocultural world by promoting global cultural exchange, reflecting sociocultural contexts, fostering experimentation and innovation, engaging with communities, influencing the art market, and leaving a lasting impact on the host city or region. They play a vital role in shaping the contemporary art landscape and facilitating cross-cultural dialogue and understanding.
The concept of biennials, which are recurring international art exhibitions held every two years, can be traced back to the late 19th century. The first and most well-known biennial, the Venice Biennale (La Biennale di Venezia), was established in 1895 in Venice, Italy. It was founded by the Venetian city council as a way to promote contemporary art and showcase Italy's cultural achievements. The Venice Biennale has since become one of the oldest and most prestigious art biennials in the world, serving as a model for similar exhibitions in other cities. Biennials are major recurring international art exhibitions that typically take place every two years, showcasing contemporary art from around the world. These exhibitions often serve as platforms for artists to present their work on a global stage, and they can be influential in shaping art trends and discourse (Altshuler, 2013).
In some biennials exhibition formats the city is re-evaluated where the event takes place and the cultural-social life of the city and produces new exhibition forms for the present or the future through the event. Each biennial event has different contents and objectives depending on where it takes place. The concept of biennial means to take place every two years. Although many biennials are usually held in the same city, there are also events called biennials, which are held every two years but take place in different cities each year. For example, the Manifesta Biennial, which started to be held in 1996, is a
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biennial without a geographically fixed venue, although it is held every two years. This event is held in a different European city every two years.
With the different approaches of the artists, the role and meaning of art in space design are redefined and fictionalized in every biennial event. As a tool for generating creative spaces, art can create a new spatial situation in each creative act. The interaction of art and space, with its visual and experiential understanding, affects the way of understanding the environment and can contribute to the acquisition of new information.
Throughout history, the innovations brought by time and the changes in social life have pushed artists to constantly seek innovation. Developing technological conditions and the increase in cultural mobility have directly affected art and its scope has gradually expanded. Artistic actions, whose conceptual dimension is gradually expanding, have become phenomena that need to be thought about and comprehended by producing meanings. Today, art has become an experiential and communicative subject, which has been removed from its distant relation to society and made open to new trials. Therefore, the art object has been opened to social, social and cultural interactions with the new roles and new expressions it has acquired.
Nowadays, while creating an exhibition , it is thought about which spaces can be used, how the spaces will be shaped and with which concepts they will be associated. Depending on the content of the exhibition, how the space is viewed, the contribution of the relationship between the artwork and architecture to the exhibition are important on the meaning of the art event depending on the chosen exhibition space. Event organizers, curators and artists create an action plan according to these questions about the space and how the event will be located in the city. The globalization of biennials refers to the spread of the biennial format, which involves recurring international art exhibitions held every two years, to various regions around the world. It signifies the expansion of this art exhibition model beyond its traditional Western origins (such as the Venice Biennale) to encompass a more diverse and global landscape.
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5.3 Use of the Galata Greek Primary School in Exhibitions
Galata Greek Primary School is a well-established and modern educational institution opened in 1885 to contribute to the education and training of Greek children. It is located in Galata, one of the oldest districts of Istanbul. The school building has a Neoclassical architecture. The school had to suspend education in 1988 due to the noticeable decline of the Greek community as a result of the political environment that led to many exiles, migrations and loss of civil rights. Reopened as a kindergarten in order to increase the number of students and the quality of education, the building was closed in 2007 due to the insufficient number of students (Galata Greek School “History”) (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1: A facade photograph of the Galata Greek Primary School located on Kemeraltı Street in Beyoğlu.
(Source: screenshot from www.ilkrauntsergi.com)
In 2012, the school, whose ownership was returned to the Greek community, was freed from years of silence and hosted various cultural events, including the Istanbul Biennial. As a place where many other identities besides the Greek identity and backgrounds are embodied, Galata Greek Primary School aims to become a cultural, artistic and educational space for the future. With its cultural heritage, it has also established a
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relationship with the memory of the city to which it belongs. Galata Greek Primary School was restored in 2023 by architect Murat Tabanlıoğlu with the support of the Athanasios and Marina Martinos Foundation and is now open to all creative mind and project that is qualified, experimental and free aiming to explore the history, memory and future of the school and the city (Figure 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4).
Figure 5.2:1st floor plan of the Galata Greek Primary School, where the main exhibition hall of the three different exhibitions examined for the thesis is located.
(Source: İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, İstanbul Biennial Archive)
Figure 5.3: Section drawing of Galata Greek Primary School that showing the main exhibition hall and the balcony.
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(Source: İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, İstanbul Biennial Archive)
Figure 5.4: A photo from the Main Exhibition Hall of the Galata Greek Primary School
(Source: screenshot from www.artfulliving.com)
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5.4 Three Selected Cases And Their Exhibition Making Understandings
Between the Istanbul Biennial and the Istanbul Design Biennial, held in the Main Exhibition Hall of the Galata Greek Primary School, I created a case group with two artists and one designer team, who used different exhibition styles. The completely different visibility of the spaces created by the cases I chose and the accessibility of artists and designers to be able to interview were the factors determining the process.
As the first case, I examined the work of artist İnci Eviner's Co-action Device: A Study (2013). Co-action Device: A Study was a part of the 13th Istanbul Biennial6 curated by Fulya Erdemci with "Mom, am I barbarian?" title. In this biennial, research has been carried out on the public sphere and how the public sphere can be evaluated in political frameworks in today's world.
As the second case, I chose the assembly hall designed by Superpool. This hall was exhibited as part of the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial7, the theme of which was determined by the curator Zoë Ryan as "The Future Is Not What It Used to Be" in 2014. In this biennial, answers to the questions of what is now and what is the future are sought.
As the last and third case, I examined Pedro Gomez Egana's Domain of Things (2017) work. Domain of Things (2017) was exhibited as part of the 15th Istanbul Biennial8, the 6 13th Istanbul Biennial, Mom, am I barbarian?, 14 September – 20 October 2013, Curator: Fulya Erdemci, Venues: Antrepo no. 3, Galata Greek Primary School, ARTER, SALT Beyoğlu, 5533 https://bienal.iksv.org/en/biennial-archive/13th-istanbul-biennial
7 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial, The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, 1 November – 14 December 2014, Curator: Zoë Ryan, Venues: Antrepo no. 7, Galata Greek Primary School http://2tb.iksv.org/index.asp
8 15th Istanbul Biennial, A Good Neighbour, 16 September – 12 November 2017, Curators: Elmgreen & Dragset, Venues: Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul Modern, Pera Museum, Yoğunluk Artist Atelier, ARK Kültür, Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, Outdoor Sites
https://bienal.iksv.org/en/biennial-archive/15th-istanbul-biennial
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theme of which was determined by the curator duo Elmgreen and Dragset as “A Good Neighbor”. Neighbor and neighborhood issues were discussing in this biennial.
By asking the same questions to the 3 selected cases, I wanted to reveal which of the elements used in the construction of the exhibition were mentioned, what similarities and differences were seen between the exhibitions. The questions I asked the artists are as follows:
1.
How did your work come about?
2.
How did you go along with the curatorial concept?
3.
How did your interaction with the curator affect the work? How would you describe the curator in this biennial?
4.
How did you interact with the place? How did the qualities of the space, namely its physical characteristics (light, material, acoustic, historical, urban aspects) affect your work?
5.
How did the venue limit/shape your project? (technology, staging, circulation..)
6.
Did the artwork leave anything to the venue after the exhibition? Were there any traces of previous work at the Galata Greek Primary School?
7.
Is the memory of the place a factor that directs your work?
8.
How would you position the Galata Greek School in terms of space usage in your general art practice?
9.
Were there any exhibition designers/architects or consultants? Can you talk about the realization of the exhibition design? Who was on the team (carpenters,… )
10.
What was the effect of the location of the Galata Greek School in and around Karaköy?
11.
How long ago did you start working at the venue?
12.
How did you choose the participants of this study? Were they practitioners you worked with regularly?
13.
How did the process affect your project? Are there any differences between the initial idea and the final product, or was the initial idea directly reflected in the final product?
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In line with the answers to these questions, I listed the concepts mentioned by the artists and designers and prepared a table describing which of them were used in 3 different exhibitions (Table 5.1).
İNCİ EVİNER
SUPERPOOL
PEDRO GOMEZ EGANA
INTERACTİON INTO THE PHYSICAL SPACE
YES
YES
YES
MEMORY OF SPACE
YES
NO
NO
RELATIONS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT
YES
YES
NO
INTERACTION WITH THE CURATOR
YES
YES
YES
SHELL AND SPACE RELATIONS
YES
YES
NO
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
YES
YES
NO
FLEXIBILITY IN DESIGN
NO
YES
NO
LIGHTING
YES
YES
YES
ACOUSTIC QUALITY
NO
YES
YES
SOUND AS A PART OF DESIGN
NO
NO
YES
INTERACTION WITH THE BALCONY
YES
YES
YES
USING DAYLIGHT IN DESIGN
YES
YES
NO
CIRCULATION
YES
YES
YES
SCENOGRAPHY
YES
NO
YES
DIGITAL EXHIBITION ELEMENTS
YES
YES
NO
GRAPHIC DESIGN
NO
YES
NO
Table 5.1: The comparison table created by me shows the concepts used by the three selected cases in the analysis of the thesis in the exhibition making.
Based on my interviews with two Istanbul Biennial artists and an Istanbul Design Biennial artist, I am discussing three different exhibitions held at the Galata Greek Primary School. In this analysis, the similarities and differences between the use of space by artists and designers are determined, and it is revealed how the space, theme and decision mechanisms in the exhibition design have been shaping the artists' projects.
Although it is not possible to separate the three exhibitions with sharp distinctions, in general, it will be possible to gather them under the titles of Exhibition Design As An
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Independent, Space Within Space As Installation and Immersive Exhibition Design. I will explain what these titles are in the next paragraphs.
5.4.1 13th Istanbul Biennial and İnci Eviner: Immersive Exhibition Design
13th Istanbul Biennial "Mom, am I a barbarian?" curated by Fulya Erdemci, It was organized by İKSV in 2013. Within the scope of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 88 artists from different generations and two art groups took part (Figure 5.5).
The curator of the biennial, Fulya Erdemci, was also the director of the Istanbul Biennial between 1994-2000. She worked as a temporary exhibition curator at Istanbul Modern between 2004-2005. Erdemci took part in the curator team of many international biennials such as the 25th São Paulo Biennial and the 2nd Moscow Contemporary Art Biennial. Fulya Erdemci initiated the "Istanbul Pedestrian Exhibitions", the first exhibition held in the public space for pedestrians in Turkey, in 2002. Fulya Erdemci also curated the 2011 Pavilion of Turkey at the 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Erdemci also worked as an academician in many universities.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial's conceptual framework, "Mom, am I barbarian?" which takes its name from Lâle Müldür's book of the same name, is organized along three axes. The theoretical axis explores how, in light of the contemporary environment, we might reconsider the public sphere as a political forum and the idea of multiple publics. The conceptual framework asks how these various—and, in fact, frequently antagonistic—multiple worlds could come together, coexist, and act collectively while acknowledging that it is impossible to speak of a homogeneous public or of people uniting under a single will (IKSV, “13th Istanbul Biennial”).
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Figure 5.5: Exhibition poster of 13th Istanbul Biennial, ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’
(Source: screenshot from www.bienal.iksv.org)
In the beginning, it was intended to carry out strategic projects in hotspots of urban transformation like Taksim Square, Gezi Park, Tarlabaş Boulevard, and Karaköy, in addition to the two exhibition sites, Antrepo No. 3 and the Galata Greek Primary School. With the decision to leave urban public spaces immediately following the Gezi resistance, however, in order to avoid supporting the authorities who violently repressed the voices of their own citizens, it has faced issues with the venues, as some of the projects that were meant to intervene with urban public spaces had to be adapted to interior spaces or replaced by different projects (IKSV, “13th Istanbul Biennial”).
The 13th Istanbul Biennial is spread over 5 different venues, namely Antrepo no.3, Galata Private Greek Primary School, ARTER, SALT Beyoğlu, 5533. Artist İnci Eviner's work was featured in the main hall of the Galata Greek School as part of the biennial.
İnci Eviner, born in Ankara in 1956, lives and works in Istanbul. The main theme in İnci Eviner's work is patterns. She develops her own sense of art by utilizing a vast visual vocabulary that includes everything from modern ideograms and pictograms to historical allegories, iconography, illustrations, and mythologies of art. She creates works that
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appear to be timeless as well as contemporary by fusing the violence in the beautiful, the potential of the suppressed, and the distinctive creativity of the subconscious.
Artist who plays an active role in the current transformation of Turkish contemporary art; she expresses a unique field of expression on different aspects of women, gender and identity politics within social, political and socio-cultural conditions. She explores the reflections of the historical, discursive and unconscious processes that we have been under the influence of since childhood on female identity, and defines being a woman as a field of unlimited imagination that does not fit into a single image. Acting on their gestures in daily life, Eviner challenges the forms of representation deemed appropriate for them and the prohibitions that create these representations. (İstanbul Modern, “İnci Eviner Retrospektifi: İçinde Kim Var?”).
Due to its former role as a school, the Galata Greek Primary School primarily hosted site-specific and context-responsive projects that explored ideas such as civilization and barbarism, subjectivity and system, utopia and dystopia against the backdrop of education as a top-down system (control and discipline). The Co-action Device: A Study (2013), a ground-up learning device exploring how art can be a tool in learning processes, and generally in sociopolitical change, was presented in the main hall on the first floor. The group developed ideas over the course of more than a month of workshops with the help of 40 young artists, actors, writers, performers, and students. Also there is a film that includes interviews with İnci Eviner and the students participating in the study, reveals the different production practices of the artists and serves as a kind of documentation (IKSV, “13th Istanbul Biennial”).
For the 13th Istanbul Biennial artist İnci Eviner, the identity of the space and its relationship with its environment do not mean anything at the point of departure for her art production. Because the artist creates a new space within the space given to her. In the curatorial text, 13th Istanbul Biennial curator Fulya Erdemci mentioned that since the Galata Greek Primary School used to be an educational institution, site-specific and context-sensitive works were exhibited. In this framework, Co-action Device: A Study
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(2013) refers to the fact that the real identity of the place is an educational institution, since it is a school where performative researches are carried out.
Matching an artist with the right space involves understanding the specific requirements, preferences, and aspirations of the artist or creative project. By considering factors such as purpose, size, location, amenities, budget, community, and long-term vision, you can increase the likelihood of finding a space that aligns well with the artist's artistic practice and goals. In the curatorial context, we can say that Galata Greek Primary School has been a successful match in terms of artist-space matching, in line with the parallelism of the Biennial's theme and the subjects that İnci Eviner has researched in her art practice (Figure 5.6).
Figure 5.6: İnci Eviner, Co-Action Device: A Study (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom, Am I Barbarian?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul.
(Source: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Istanbul Biennial Archive)
As İnci Eviner says: “For me, my agenda was how the Gezi Protests affected me, how I reacted to it, and how we were all in a situation. However, what was important to me was not to directly convey an event, an issue, but how we could transform this energy. The concept of the curator is always as follows: the curator is not necessarily the subject, it is the concept chosen by the curator. So it's a very broad framework. I mean, of course, it
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was my agenda, but extremely political works were chosen in the extremely public sphere and the question "Mom, am I a Barbarian?" was asked. I always interpret the title as follows; I think the deceased Fulya Erdemci wanted to be a part of the debate between the civilized and the uncivilized. Therefore, I think that this work I have done is “Co-action Device: A Study” which fits into the concept of this biennial very easily. But generally, the concepts introduced in these biennials are not decisive. It is very flexible and the artist's contribution to these concepts is important. So it doesn't work from top to bottom. It is a mutual interaction, the interaction between the curator and the artist here.” (full interview transcripts are presented in Appendix A.1.1).
In İnci Eviner's work, the potentials of the space have been evaluated in line with the interventions to be made in order to create various spaces where students will exhibit their performances. Workshop areas have been designed where students from different disciplines can exhibit various productions and performances. The workshop areas consist of units that are similar to the forms and graphics that we can see in İnci Eviner's other sketches and video works. Apart from common exhibition forms, units that are shaped by various users' own researches were constructed from surfaces with no clear boundaries. These undefined units allowed students to interact with each other and produce performances that intertwined and added different layers to each other's research (Figure 5.7).
Figure 5.7: 3D model image prepared for İnci Eviner's work Co-Action Device: A Study (2013) during the preparations for the 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom, Am I Barbarian?”
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(Source: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Istanbul Biennial Archive)
When I asked İnci Eviner, how did she interact with the space, her answer was: “Of course it was important. These simple things are what the installation entails. It is very easy to design this. In other words, every artist establishes the most accurate placement of their work with the place, but for some artists, the memory of that place is important. Not so much for me. Some artists dig holes, throw doors… These are not important things. The content determines the space and is spoken. How the content was determined, the traffic and circulation of the space given to the artist bodily, how I could circulate those bodies, how I could activate those bodies, how I could create encounters were the main factors that mattered to me.” (full interview transcripts are presented in Appendix A.1.1)
The effective use of space in exhibitions is crucial for creating a well-organized, visually appealing, and immersive experience for visitors. It involves careful consideration of layout, display areas, interactive zones, information spaces, and other elements that cater to the specific objectives and themes of the exhibition. Co-action Device: A Study (2013) has a setup that completely occupies the lower level area within the existing shell of the space. After seeing the lower level from the door, the visitors become aware of the balcony in the venue and are invited to the balcony to watch the rest of the performance. The balcony factor in the space allows the performances going on below to be watched from above, beyond the usual viewing levels. Since these performances continued throughout the entire biennial, even though the furniture in the space remained constant, the traces and instant performances of the performers varied throughout the process. This created a curiosity for visitors to come at different times and watch different performances.
In the context of an exhibition, circulation refers to the movement of visitors within the exhibition space. It involves the flow of people as they navigate through different areas, exhibits, and displays. Effective circulation design is essential for creating a pleasant and engaging experience for visitors, ensuring that they can easily access and explore the exhibition. In Co-action Device: A Study (2013), the circulation in this exhibition is
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designed around the balcony on the upper level, however, on certain participant performance dates, the boundaries of the performance area are removed, allowing visitors to wander among the performers and participate in the performances.
Graphic design plays a crucial role in enhancing the visual communication and overall aesthetics of an exhibition. It involves the use of typography, color, imagery, layout, and other visual elements to create an engaging and cohesive experience for visitors. There is no graphic designer other than the artist within the scope of this exhibition, the work itself also creates a graphically rich visual world. A yellow film was applied to the glass surfaces around the existing shell of the place. With this film material, the direct sunlight entering the space is filtered and a yellow light filtering in harmony with the colors of the units placed in the space creates a background in the space. The space setup, which we view from the top plane, consisting of various repetitions and colors, references the artist's other works.
There is no extra sound or music as part of the exhibition design. The sounds used or produced during the performances were included in the space from time to time. No extra touch was made to ensure the acoustic order in the space. The microphone was used as a tool at the points where the performers wanted to be heard.
Artist İnci Eviner, while constructing the exhibition space, by placing a tree in the middle of the space, which is a reference to Gezi9, and using some objects such as stuffed birds, explains the importance of scenographic elements in this exhibition.
Multimedia usage in exhibitions has become increasingly prevalent and impactful in recent years. It involves the integration of various digital media elements, such as videos, animations, interactive displays, sound, and virtual/augmented reality, to enhance visitor engagement and create immersive experiences. In Co-Action Device: A Study (2013) when the performance was stable, pre-recorded performance videos from the venue were
9 A wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Turkey began on 28 May 2013, initially to contest the urban development plan for Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park.
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broadcast using video display, which is one of the technological exhibition elements. Visitors can thus have the opportunity to watch previous performances (Figure 5.8).
Figure 5.8: İnci Eviner, Co-Action Device: A Study (2013), 13th Istanbul Biennial “Mom, Am I Barbarian?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul.
(Source: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, Istanbul Biennial Archive)
The effective use of space in exhibitions is crucial for creating a well-organized, visually appealing, and immersive experience for visitors. It involves careful consideration of layout, display areas, interactive zones, information spaces, and other elements that cater to the specific objectives and themes of the exhibition. The environment and scenographic elements constructed in Co-action Device: A Study (2013) enable visitors to connect with the content, question their own existence in the space with the performances they watch, and thus acquire their own experiences. It will be possible to say that İnci Eviner has put forward an Immersive Exhibition approach based on the world in the newly created space and the emotions of the visitors.
Immersive Exhibition Design refers to exhibitions that engage visitors in interactive content. The aim is to transport visitors to a different world, evoke emotions and create a memorable and effective encounter with the content.
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Immersive exhibits often involve careful consideration of physical space and layout. Designers create environments that immerse visitors, using elements such as curved walls, winding paths or strategic lighting methods to direct the flow and create a sense of discovery.
A multisensory experience that "transports" visitors to a different time, place, or circumstance and makes them active participants in what they encounter is mean the term "immersion," which is related to museum exhibitions. In a similar vein, Mortensen defined an immersive museum exhibition as one that immerses visitors in the experience while transforming the physical space into a three-dimensional world (Mortensen, 2010). The experience of being completely submerged by a different reality is referred to as immersion. Nevertheless, immersion is neither the outcome of the evolution of digital technologies, nor is it even a new concept, as many researchers have historicized (Derda, Popoli, 2021).
Many artists, curators, and theorists continue to be fascinated by audience immersion strategies and the pursuit of total immersion. Gilbert identified that museum professionals behind the creation of immersive exhibitions are motivated to create experiences that are more attractive and thus competitive leisure-time options, that are more memorable and engaging, and finally more effective in making meaning and communicating content, all integral factors for museums’ success. Therefore, immersive methods transcend the relationship between people and technology while offering a new aesthetic experience and spectatorship through their interactive and engaging possibilities. (Gilbert, 2002)
Immersive exhibits go beyond visual elements to engage multiple senses and they place emphasis on strong storytelling to entice visitors. A well-developed narrative or theme guides the visitor's journey, creating a coherent and immersive experience. Exhibits feature dramatic or theatrical elements, using techniques such as visual narratives, audio guides or live performances to convey stories.
Such exhibitions often aim to create certain moods or atmospheres that resonate with the content. Designers use creative scenographic designs, atmospheric lighting, projections
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and thematic installations to transport visitors to different time periods, places or emotional states. These mnemonic environments help deepen the connection between visitors and content.
Using a variety of design elements, storytelling techniques and sensory interactions, Immersive exhibitions seek to break the barriers between the viewer and the content by providing a transformative and memorable experience.
5.4.2 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial and SUPERPOOL: Exhibition Design As An Independent
The 2nd Design Biennial was organized in 2014 by the Istanbul Culture and Art Foundation. The main venue of the biennial was the Galata Greek School. In parallel with the biennial exhibition, an Academy Program was organized in Antrepo 7 building, where the projects of design students were exhibited. The theme of the biennial was determined by the curator Zoë Ryan as The Future Is Not What It Used to Be and 'What is the future now?' The answer to the question was sought together with the audience. Zoë Ryan is an American curator and museum professional known for her work in the field of contemporary design and architecture. Zoë Ryan has a background in curatorial and academic pursuits related to design, and she has curated numerous exhibitions and projects showcasing innovative and cutting-edge design and architectural works. (Figure 5.9).
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Figure 5.9: Exhibition poster of 2nd İstanbul Design Biennial
“The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?”
(Source: screenshot from www.tasarimbienali.iksv.org)
Within the scope of the biennial, besides 53 projects, panels, interviews, workshops and film screenings took place during 6 weeks. The projects of 200 designers from over 20 countries are divided into five sections by curator Zoë Ryan and associate curator Meredith Carruthers; Publication Section, Personal Section, Resources Section, Norms and Standards Section, and Social Affairs Section.
Throughout history, manifestos have functioned as statements of purpose, stimulating dialogue without limitations and pursuing inquiry as a radical process. Manifestos have typically been produced as texts that lie somewhere between declaration and desire. In the new context of today, how can we reclaim the manifesto as a catalyst for critical thinking in design? Reinvented as an action, a service, a provocation, or an object, what new potentials might the manifesto have for generating inventive outcomes that address both positive and negative consequences? (2nd Istanbul Design Biennial, “Theme Text”)
This biennial aims to include international projects that focus on aspects of society that have not been adequately studied or overlooked, and that will provoke research and
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exchange of ideas about our age. While imagining the future, it was desired to include designs with innovative approaches that can lean on everyday realities, interact with and see the world. In addition to design-related disciplines, the biennial included projects that circulate within the boundaries of politics, economy, culture and art, and were fictionalized with transitive boundaries. Projects selected from all over the world have brought innovative ideas to Istanbul.
While the spatial and graphic framework of the biennial was being set up, the Superpool team was involved in the project and undertook the design of the venue. Superpool10 is an international design office founded in 2006 by Selva Gürdoğan and Gregers Tang in Istanbul. Apart from the Design Biennial, they have also designed many different exhibitions.
Based on the curatorial theme, they came up with a design that divides the space into two to define the circulation. The end of the circulation ends again in the main hall, where the tour started. Translucent fabrics, which are also a reference to the materials we encounter in the exhibition, and cork surfaces that make reference to the past and the future were preferred as materials. Works were exhibited on modular units consisting of self-standing design touch repeats.
Exhibition designer of the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial Superpool was involved in the biennial process while preparing the curatorial theme. The curator and the biennial team actively interacted with the process. Material selections were made in direct relation to the theme and the design of the exhibition became a complementary element (Figure 5.10).
10 Superpool.org
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Figure 5.10: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul
(Source: screenshot from www.superpool.org)
Superpool has made an installation inside without touching the existing shell of the place. The relationship with the existing shell and outside has been preserved. Based on the circulation problem of the Galata Greek Primary School, it has made the circulation more defined with the partition screens placed in the middle of the stairwells. Visitors who start their tour at the Galata Greek Primary School encounter the Assembly Hall firstly designed by Superpool, and at the end of the tour they end up in the hall again.
Assembly Hall is generally a multi-purpose event hall designed for screenings and speeches during the exhibition. In the Superpool designed space, the visitor encounters different views at different times. In the installation, the cork blocks come together to form an amorphous shape. While it is used as exhibition and seating units during events, when there is no event, this whole block is in the space as an installation on its own.
The chandelier hanging from the ceiling and the materials in the pop-up rooms at the back continue the same language with the cork materials placed in the middle (Figure 5.11 and 5.12).
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Figure 5.11: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul
(Source: screenshot from www.superpool.org)
Selva Gürdoğan (SUPERPOOL) tells the design idea that: “We worked on the circulation in the space and we built the whole story on circulation. It was important here that the curatorial theme and the space overlap. We were also trying to construct a space around the theme. The building has such a confusing situation, you come to the main hall from the outside and there is confusion about where to go on the staircases. The building does not direct itself. The story Zoe Ryan wanted to tell was more linear and we wanted to eliminate the moments of confusion in the space by providing this linearity. We were able to deal more specifically with the ceremony place, this is where we could be more involved as a designer. In other places, because other designs need to be on display, our design of the space should stand further back. The relationship with the stage, the fact that the place does not work in one direction and functions in a way that it can look in all directions were the points we discussed about this ceremony place. This place also has a strange feeling of being viewed from above. We took the decisions about the place in this direction. Since all of the curatorial decisions came from Zoe, of course we had a defined space.”
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Graphic design has been one of the main elements in this exhibition. Unlike other exhibitions, a graphic designer also took part in the team here. Various quotations and writings on the walls are scattered around in special fonts and as spots of different sizes.
General lighting is provided in the space with three design chandeliers suspended from the ceiling. Except for the chandeliers, a supportive lighting was continued with the spotlights. Lighting scenarios were used in different ways according to the activities inside.
It was not used as a permanent sound design element inside, but different sounds were included in the exhibition space during the events. The fact that the material of the installation was cork also added an acoustic value to the space. Various digital exhibition elements such as screens and projections were used as supports in the space.
Figure 5.12: Assembly hall designed by SUPERPOOL, 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial (2014) “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul
(Source: screenshot from www.superpool.org)
In the Assembly Hall design of Superpool, they listened to the needs of the space and researched what interventions could be made in line with the theme, so that the design of
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the space would not leave behind, they created their own design. Accordingly, it will be possible to define Superpool's role here as “Exhibition Design As An Independent” (Figure 5.13).
Figure 5.13: Visualized by me, plan of the assembly hall designed by Superpool for the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be?” at the Main Exhibition Hall of Galata Greek Primary School
“Exhibition Design As An Independent” involves the creative and strategic process of planning, conceptualizing and executing the physical and visual elements of an exhibition to enhance the visitor's experience and effectively convey the intended message.
In these types of exhibitions, exhibition designers are professionals who specialize in creating immersive and engaging environments that effectively communicate information and tell stories. These designers work closely with curators, content experts and museum professionals to transform the theme of the exhibition into tangible spatial and visual experiences.
Exhibition designers consider factors such as space planning, layout, lighting, color schemes, materials, graphic design, signage, multimedia integration and interactive elements to create coherent and effective exhibits. Design principles and techniques are used in the exhibition space to guide visitors, control the flow of information, create focal points and evoke emotional responses.
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Independent exhibition designers contribute to the overall success of an exhibition by focusing separately on the design aspect, ensuring that the physical and visual elements align with the curatorial intent, enhance the visitor's understanding and leave a lasting impression. Independent designers try to bring the exhibited object to the fore in the most accurate way.
5.4.3 15th Istanbul Biennial and Pedro Gomez Egana: Space Within Space As Installation
The 15th Istanbul Biennial was held in 2017 by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) under the curatorship of Elmgreen and Dragset duo. The biennial was organized with the theme of “A Good Neighbor” and dealt with the issues of neighbor and neighbourhood. Elmgreen & Dragset is an artist duo consisting of Michael Elmgreen, who is Danish, and Ingar Dragset, who is Norwegian. They are known for their collaborative work in the fields of contemporary art and installation art. Elmgreen & Dragset have gained international recognition for their thought-provoking and often humorous installations that explore themes related to architecture, identity, sexuality, and social norms. (Figure 5.14 and 5.15).
Elmgreen and Dragset are a Northern European artist duo known for their provocative and imposing work. The fact that the curators in this biennial are of artistic origin is also a first for the history of the Istanbul Biennial. Elmgreen and Dragset have previously participated in three different Istanbul Biennials as artists, so they are well acquainted with Istanbul and the art scene in Turkey.
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Figure 5.14: Exhibition poster of 15th İstanbul Biennial, ‘A Good Neighbour’
(Source: screenshot from www.istanbulmodern.org)
Among the most well-known works of Elmgreen and Dragset are the Prada Store installation in the middle of the Texas Desert, the inverted swimming pool sculpture named Van Gogh's ear in front of Rockefeller Center in New York, the statue of a boy swinging under the toy in Trafalgar Square.
The theme of the biennial was formed around the questions of 'who is a good neighbor'. It was aimed to create a new discussion environment with questions such as "Is a good neighbor live like you?", "Is a good neighbor reading the same newspaper as you?" or "Is a good neighbor wearing headphones while listening to music?" The works of 56 artists from 32 countries, which open up the concepts of home, neighborhood and belonging, were exhibited at the biennial. 30 of the 56 participating artists produced works specifically for this biennial (Elmgreen & Dragset, 2007).
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Figure 5.15: Exhibition posters of 15th İstanbul Biennial, ‘A Good Neighbour’
(Source: screenshot from www.icmimarlikdergisi.com)
The curators defined the 15th Istanbul Biennial as follows: “Your neighbor may be someone who lives quite differently from you. However, we hope that, unlike many politicians in the world lately, you are not dealing with your fear of the 'other' by building fences around you. The artists at the 15th Istanbul Biennial open up ideas about home, neighborhood, belonging and common life from various perspectives. Some of the works examine how the conditions in our home life have changed and the transformation of our neighborhoods, while others look at how we are tackling today's geopolitical challenges on a micro scale. The biennial is shaped by the personal or analytical expressions of the artists invited to the exhibition, creating spaces where hopes and dreams, sadness and anger, past and present mingle.” (Elmgreen & Dragset, 2007).
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Figure 5.16: Map of showing the Six Main Venues of the 15th Istanbul Biennial (Source: screenshot from www.xxi.com)
In keeping with the biennial theme, the show took place in residential areas such as six neighboring venues (Istanbul Modern, Galata Private Greek Primary School, Pera Museum, Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, ARK Kültür and an artist studio in Asmalımescit) (Figure 5.16).
The work of artist Pedro Gomez Egana11, Domain of Things (2017) is located in the great hall of Galata Greek School, one of the main venues of the 15th Istanbul Biennial.
When the public cannot access or see communities, practices, or events, we refer to them as "underground." However, the word "underground" also means other things: People may live underground to stay safe, for instance, during times of war or disaster. In this way, the idea of the underground is intertwined with ideas of survival and permanence on the one hand and a setting that allows people to move, express themselves, and act freely on the other. (Egana, 2017)
11 Pedro Gómez-Egaña (1976, Colombia) lives and works in Oslo (Norway). At Goldsmiths College and Bergen National Academy of Arts, he pursued studies in music composition, performance, and visual arts. He also finished his doctoral project with funding from the Norwegian Research Fellowship Program. At the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Gómez-Egana is the sculpture and installation department head at the moment. In addition to creating sculptures, immersive installations, phonographic works, and films, Pedro Gómez-Egana also creates works in text, sound, and performance. The performative nature of sculpture, which he presents as animated, dynamic objects or theatrical settings, is at the heart of his artistic methodology. Technology and how it affects the ways in which we experience and comprehend time are the driving forces behind his practice (Zilberman Gallery).
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The artwork of Pedro Gomez Egana explores the dual significance of underground space as a location of restriction and freedom. Gomez-Egana interprets the underground as both a place of safety and pleasure in his performance piece and installation Domain of Things (2017). People are lying on a railing and wheeled platform. They have a flooring-related structure on them. Each of these pieces depicts a different interior space, including a dining room, a bedroom, and a bathroom, each of which is furnished with various media or technology, including newspapers, radios, and televisions.
15th Istanbul Biennial artist Pedro Gomez Egana evaluated the potential of the venue to have a balcony and to be viewed from above, in line with the mutual exchange of ideas with the biennial curators Elmgreen and Dragset since his first visit to the venue. Apart from the balcony, he created a new wall by closing the wall at the balcony level at the bottom in order to isolate the shell of the space from the installation he had made. Due to the need to cut off the connection with the outside and a dark place due to the content, he closed all the windows of the place given to him with blackout materials. Due to the double-layered nature of his work, he provided the circulation with the platform he created around the work on the lower floor, and the circulation around the balcony on the upper floor (Figure 5.17).
The installation has two layers. In one, visitors watching from above see a house moving into pieces, but have no idea how and with what force it moves. When viewed from the lower level, this time the house is viewed in a sectional view, and the performance that moves the house under the house begins to notice its visitors as they watch it in the dark. Pedro Gomez Egana's work has established a direct relationship with the theme of the biennial through the concepts he mentioned such as the home and the underworld where we feel safe.
According to Pedro Gomez Egana, how Galata Greek Primary School’s effect/shape the work is: “There is humidity, there was a lot of sun coming in, there was a big rain flow.. We had to do something about that. Electricity was okay. My work wasn’t so technological. It was so analog. Greek School was perfect for this work. It was a perfect match so I can’t complain about this place.”
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Domain of Things (2017) is an installation in which a house is divided into parts by being moved by the mechanisms set up on the rails by the performers. The displacement and movement here are part of the performance, and visitors to these movements can only be spectators.
There is no graphic design intervention that is specifically considered within the scope of Domain of Things.
Figure 5.17: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Domain of Things (2017), 15th Istanbul Biennial “A Good Neighbor”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul,
(Source: screenshot from www.pedrogomezegana.net)
Instead of a general lighting design in the space, the work itself illuminates through the decorative lightings in the house installation. For this reason, the visitor who enters the Galata Greek Primary School first encounters the Domain of Things (2017), and when the darkness enters from the outside, which is bright, he suddenly finds himself inside the exhibition, in another world disconnected from the outside. There is no additional lighting in the lower part of the house installation, where the performers are located, and the visitors can notice the black dressed performers lost in the darkness during their circulation in the lower level (Figure 5.18).
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A sound specially recorded for the exhibition is broadcast in the exhibition space, the sound was used as one of the exhibition elements in this exhibition.
The house installation located on movable and segmented platforms is a scenographic element. Pedro Gomez Egana, again in collaboration with the curators, decided what kind of house looking it would be.
Figure 5.18: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Domain of Things (2017), 15th Istanbul Biennial “A Good Neighbor”, Galata Greek Primary School, İstanbul,
(Source: screenshot from www.pedrogomezegana.net)
It was an exhibition in which the scenographic elements used in the exhibition, which changed with the performances in the Domain of Things (2017), were acted upon by the performers. Therefore, visitors see the business in different ways at different times.
For example, when they first arrive, they encounter a complete house plan adjacent to each other, but in the next time period, they encounter unusual sections where the surfaces are separated from each other, and daily objects are split with sharp lines, especially when viewed from above.
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It is possible to say that Pedro Gomez Egana's work is a new space created within the existing space, the interruption of interaction with the outside and the viewer's own interaction with the installation can be an example for the exhibitions constructed with the concept of "Space Within Space As An Installation”. It is seen that Pedro Gomez Egana produces works with the same approach in his other exhibitions. Virgo (2022), which he made as part of the 16th Lyon Biennial, can be shown as an example of exhibitions made with this approach.
Figure 5.19: Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Virgo (2022),
16th Lyon Biennial “Manifesto of Fragility”
(Source: screenshot from www.pedrogomezegana.net)
"Space Within Space As An Installation” is a widely used method in installation art to create immersive and transformative experiences for viewers. The installation defines a new space enclosed or delimited within a larger space in which it exists as a separate entity. This approach allows the viewer to enter, interact with the installation.
In installations constructed in this way, a smaller room or closed area is built within a larger area. The interior is designed to have a distinctive atmosphere, often contrasting with the surrounding environment. Thus, an alternative reality is created in the existing space.
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Indoor environments or rooms are created where the audience can enter completely immersed in the artwork. These installations are supported by various elements such as light, sound, video projections or sculptural forms to create an all-encompassing sensory experience.
The concept of "Space Within Space As An Installation” allows artists to manipulate the viewer's perception, question their relationship with the environment, and create immersive experiences that blur the boundaries between the artwork and the viewer's own reality. By providing a diverse and controlled environment, installations using this concept often allow viewers to engage with the artwork on a more personal and experiential level.
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6. CONCLUSION
From the Cabinet of curiosities to the virtual museums of today, the understanding of museology has gained a different meaning with each passing day. Many factors such as newly founded museums, biennials, technological developments and political situations create a new breaking point in the exhibition making history. Since the museum is a changing and developing institution, International Council of Museums (ICOM) also redefines the museum in some periods.
In essence, space is a dynamic canvas that exhibition designers use to curate experiences that engage, educate, and inspire visitors. The strategic use of spatial elements allows designers to shape the narrative, emotions, and interactions within an exhibition, making it a powerful tool in delivering the intended message and creating a meaningful encounter for visitors.
In the second chapter, I wrote the developments in exhibition making history and chronological innovations. In these developments, the factors such as artists, curators, museums, visitors, and exhibition designers, who played a role and how much were revealed. I mentioned the emergence of exhibitions around a subject, the acceptance of the birth of the curator identity, and the changing roles of today's curators.
The exhibition design process involves several key decision-makers who play critical roles in shaping the overall concept, layout, and presentation of the exhibition. These decision-makers often collaborate closely to ensure that the exhibition's goals are achieved. There are artist, curator and institution, which are the main decision mechanisms that determine the process of exhibitions in museums. By linking these three mechanisms, exhibition designers provide the spatialization of a content.
In the third chapter, I mentioned about the formation of gallery spaces and the concept of “White Cube”. According to “White Cube” understanding, gallery spaces have created a canvas for the artwork. It has been seen in cases where it is the opposite, and the space has been transformed with different materials, colors and forms according to
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the artwork. Today's contemporary art museums become the image of cities beyond just the places where art is exhibited, they also provide tourism or they can be a repsentation of political or economic power.
The fact that contemporary art is out of the museum spaces and artwork does not have to be limited to a certain area has also brought contemporary art in the public space. I mentioned that today's contemporary art is not limited to certain defined areas, and it is possible to exhibit it on many platforms such as books, magazines, websites, and mobile applications, apart from museum spaces or public spaces. At the end of the third chapter, I wrote about the concept of the visitor, which is becoming the subject of museums and art, and the imaginary museum formed in the minds of the visitors. I also wrote about the ease of travel of today's visitors, the fact that art is not limited to physical spaces, but also that they have the opportunity to see more works from many artists who have signed in art history.
In the fourth chapter, I explain the processes of exhibition making, the relationships between art and the artist connection with space. In some exhibitions, while the artworks completely direct the exhibition design, in some exhibitions the opportunities provided by the space to the artist have been the elements that direct the artwork and its content. Many different elements such as circulation, exhibit design, lighting design, sound installations, digital installations, acoustic arrangements, scenography setups can be used to prepare a space for exhibition.
Biennials, as organizations that organize short-term and international exhibitions at the same time, open an artistic window to current issues. Since the day it was founded, the Istanbul Biennial has an important place in the art world with the exhibitions it has organized in extraordinary venues and on unusually large scales, and the different subjects it deals with. Istanbul and the art environment in Istanbul are also shaped and changed by İstanbul Biennials.
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Istanbul Biennial has used Galata Greek Primary School as a venue in many of editions. Beyond being an exhibition venue, Galata Greek Primary Schhol is an old minority school building. For this reason, it differs in terms of both architectural features and identity and the use of space.
The main hall of the Galata Greek Primary School takes on a completely different appearance in every exhibition, as it bears traces of the space, has an architecture with two floors and a balcony, and is the first exhibition space encountered in the building. I researched the exhibition making here by interviewing the artists and designers of the two Istanbul Biennial (İnci Eviner, Pedro Gomez Egana) and an Istanbul Design Biennial exhibitions, as I was wondering what the artists and designers who use this space are affected by the process of producing their works.
In the fifth chapter, I examined through interviews with the artists what kind of touches different artists working with different themes and different curators in the same space make to the space, what they add from their own discipline, and what similarities and differences are seen while creating a space within a space. As a result, I put forward that three different exhibition making methods are used in the main hall of Galata Greek Primary School.
In all three exhibitions, I determined that there are different approaches when settling within the shell of the space. İnci Eviner has redesigned the space given to her and transformed the elements with space as a part of the exhibition. Superpool has completely preserved the existing shell and made an insertion inside. Pedro Gomez Egana, on the other hand, kept the balcony feature of the space, isolated the space from the outside and created a new gallery space. In all three different exhibitions, the balcony was evaluated by making it an important part of the work in terms of use. While it is not possible to take İnci Eviner's and Pedro Gomez Egana's work in the same form and display it elsewhere, Superpool's design can also be carried to other places.
In this thesis, I determined the feasibility of three different exhibition making methods based on the exhibitions held by three different artists in the same place; Immersive
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Exhibition Design, Exhibition Design As An Independent, Space Within Space As Installation.
As a result, topics such as what is exhibition design and how it is done are discussed in theses written so far. In my thesis, the differences between contemporary exhibitions and classical exhibitions are examined through cases. The fact that all three exhibitions held consecutively in the same space were realized with different production methods formed the basis of my thesis. In this thesis, unlike other theses, Immersive Exhibition Design, Exhibition Design As An Independent, Space Within Space As Installation are included together with case exhibitions.
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APPENDIX
A.1 Interviews with Cases
A.1.1 (Case 1) İnci Eviner
Co-Action Device: A Study, 13th Istanbul Biennial: Mom, Am I Barbarian?
ÖÇ: How did Co-action Device: A Study come about?
İE: I wanted to integrate my relationship with education as an artist, so I sort of turned classes into pedagogical stuff. So for me "Can the classroom become an art medium?" has always been an idea that we developed with the classes I did. Because as an artist, my relationship with students, teaching and learning has been one of highly dynamic exchanges. Therefore, it took place in an exhibition format, within the scope of the biennial, as participatory art projects. Together with Fulya Erdemci, the name " Co-action Device: A Study " is something we can act together, by performances and knowledge production. It was important how all these would affect and transform each other. For this, space was the element that would provide all this circulation, all these encounters. Therefore, I created a space by abstracting some of the iconic buildings of modernism that I worked on in my previous "Nursing Modern Fall" video, based on my own artistic practice. By modeling these pieces, I wanted to carry them to 3 dimensions and build a space with them. There were a number of cells in this space. There were small workshops that opened towards each other, and an old tree in the center of it, which was a reference to GEZİ for the period after GEZİ. On the one hand, the spatial pieces built around this served as a workshop, and this installation, abstracted from these iconic buildings, was very inspiring for performers, architects and interior designers. Because they were opening into each other, that is an installation suddenly gained a function. A dynamic function. Therefore, there was actually a performance that lasted 40 days with 40 students, by acting, thinking, developing ideas together. For this, it was important for me to design the space.
It doesn't matter to me whether it is in the Galata Greek Primary School or not, so the second factor is that there is a mezzanine there and it is watched from above, of course, it added a lot to the work. I think of it as an artwork. I think of it as a participatory project and redesigned the space. It was an installation while designing the space. By inviting young artists and students from other practices with this installation, I almost brought this installation to life. These performances, which lasted for 40 days, were a process, rather than a result, that 40 students created through constant reading, performing and interaction with each other. I have created a dynamic installation that can embody that process. In other words, there was an element from the memory of the Galata Greek Primary School because in this installation there were also costumes and objects that formed my visual memory. Props, one of these props, was the skeleton said to have been gifted to the school for scientific research by a person who had once taught biology at the Galata Greek Primary School. We liked it a lot as a discourse, even if it wasn't true, it joined the exhibition. Of course, there were many references among the employees. They acted on both GEZİ Protests as a research into the past of the Galata Greek Primary School, as well as many of the contents they discovered there at that time. So these are there for me as references. Could this be anywhere else? Of course it could. In other words, the fact that it was in the Greek School had an important place in the installation that Fulya Erdemci imagined. It developed with the curator and her suggestions.
The works in the Documenta can also be seen as pedagogical. I realized these with the participants I invited to my own artistic practice. Thus, a different form appeared. In this, space design and installation have turned into artistic form-working art for me. There were entrances and exits, cells, and walls of workshops. Thus, the performers exhibited their work at the same time. There the tree has another meaning, it's a kind of staging, it's a prop. A continuous production, units, wooden sculptures, performances produced there at that moment, works that create space within the space. The space was created in this way, whatever the
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performance and process, performative work and content required. I prepared and laid out the whole place. I made the place with trees, props, and stuffed creatures. Therefore, these have always been motivating and surprising factors. There were some extraordinarily brilliant ideas. Poetry, voice, memorization, camouflage… Many different practices worked together. Simultaneity was important here.
ÖÇ: How did you go along with the curatorial concept?
İE: For me, my agenda was how the Gezi Protests affected me, how I reacted to it, and how we were all in a situation. However, what was important to me was not to directly convey an event, an issue, but how we could transform this energy. The concept of the curator is always as follows: the curator is not necessarily the subject, it is the concept chosen by the curator. So it's a very broad framework. I mean, of course, it was my agenda, but extremely political works were chosen in the extremely public sphere and the question "Mom, am I a Barbarian?" was asked. I always interpret the title as follows; I think the deceased Fulya Erdemci wanted to be a part of the debate between the civilized and the uncivilized. Therefore, I think that this work I have done is “Co-action Device: A Study” which fits into the concept of this biennial very easily. But generally, the concepts introduced in these biennials are not decisive. It is very flexible and the artist's contribution to these concepts is important. So it doesn't work from top to bottom. It is a mutual interaction, the interaction between the curator and the artist here.
ÖÇ: How did your interaction with the curator affect the work? How do you define the curator in this work- as curators, artists, producers, collaborators?
İE: Doesn't it! Once a good curator recognizes the potential of the artist and prepares the environment for the artist to realize their ideas in the best selection. Therefore, a good curator must have a very serious background, knowledge, intelligence, experience and sensitivity in this field.
ÖÇ: How did you interact with the space? How did the qualities of space (i.e. physical (light, material, acoustics / historical / urban) influence your work?
İE: Of course it was important. These simple things are what the installation entails. It is very easy to design this. In other words, every artist establishes the most accurate placement of their work with the place, but for some artists, the memory of that place is important. Not so much for me. Some artists dig holes, throw doors… These are not important things. The content determines the space and is spoken. How the content was determined, the traffic and circulation of the space given to the artist bodily, how I could circulate those bodies, how I could activate those bodies, how I could create encounters were the main factors that mattered to me.
This exhibit featured the Palladio stairs in a tilted state, concrete constructions abstracted from St Germain, the Champs-Elysees. Therefore, an important part of this work was to spatialize it and invite others to their own practices, based on a video of an artist’s discussion of modernism with spaces, as a representation - an image. This can be understood as an exhibition within an exhibition.
ÖÇ: What did the artwork leave to the space? Were there any traces from the previous works at Galata Rum? For example I remember your stools after biennial.
İE: Inside the place, there was a student who copied the tiles on the floor exactly mimetic to the stools. Somehow she wanted to be buried inside that space, like a chameleon. Therefore, these stools formed a kind of camouflage when viewed from above. In other words, the presence of these stools created a spatial awareness. When the pattern on the floor was copied exactly, a completely different image was obtained. Because it was a kind of visual arts work. It was important to me how these stools had a conceptual impact. Yes, the camouflage that this student made by imitating the tiles was later wanted to be used in the space and became permanent.
ÖÇ: How would you position Galata Greek School in terms of space usage in your general practice?
İE: As an academician, pursuing an arts education is not an easy thing for an artist. Because it was never possible to confine or limit art among didactic and certain teachings, so it added a movement to my mind.
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I have deepened these performative learning, performative research topics, I have included it more as a methodology in my lessons. Then we were invited to Utrecht. There, of course, I designed the space. This time I designed a slippery space. This time I did something completely different, but the content also changed. Therefore, concepts became visual language and art. In other words, I realized a participatory thing based on processes such as how we can learn with art, art as a means of knowledge production, and it can open up the dynamics that we can take part in, which I had done in Tbilisi before.
ÖÇ: Were there an exhibition designer / architectural supervisor? Can you talk about the realization of exhibition design? Who are the part of team (carpenters,… )
İE: We had an architect assistant. She modeled our sketches and we built a 3D space. Later, it was transferred to the production teams and progressed. Of course, as an architect, all of them were statically controlled as in every biennial in every museum. There are people dealing with this, I don't need to understand them.
ÖÇ: What was the effect of Galata Greek School's location, being in and around Karaköy?
İE: No, I don't care about such things. I am interested in representation politics, I create a separate space within space. I have nothing to do with the existing space, if the memory of the existing space is important, it is taken into account or not, but I have no such problem.
I designed the exhibition I held at Istanbul Modern. Like why did I do such a thing? Exhibition design, but why the content requires it is always debatable. How the content shaped the form, because here architectural installation is a tool for me. I did not directly target the installation itself.
ÖÇ: There were also the forms in your sketch. We were going out on different levels and looking elsewhere..
İE: Viewpoints, different points of encounter, entrances and exits, private areas, horizontal - vertical I have always taken these into consideration in Co-action Device: A Study. Everything works horizontally and vertically in my exhibitions. There is nothing linear. So there are always surprises. Therefore, the contributions you give to the body, the opportunities you give to the actors… So you put it on an empty stage, you say, let's see, it's different… Here, I am spatially preparing the environment for this here. In other words, the place needs to be highly motivating and stimulating.
It also functioned like a bean-shaped desk, that is, a classroom. It was over the library, there were readings around it. The views from the top, the different viewpoints and perspectives deepened this process even more.
ÖÇ: How did you select the participants of this work? Were they practitioners you have worked with on a regular basis? İE: An open call was made, a long talk with young people. It was announced that this was a participatory project. Explained why we were doing this. It was very offensive to some, so they gave up. Some started and gave up. There were 40 people left, and we continued with them. There are also names that we still continue from here. We worked in a more public space in Hasköy. Here in Hasköy, the issue of location was important. With graduate students, we investigated what Hasköy was and how it happened with different methods. And this turned into an action research. We worked on how to conduct research on Hasköy. How to communicate with people in order to remove this distinction with society? These are important. This is the public domain.
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A.1.2 (Case 2) SUPERPOOL
ÖÇ: Which point of the biennial did you get involved in the Exhibition Design process? Has the theme and curator been decided on?
SG: It didn't take long after she was chosen as the curator, from the very beginning. While curatorial discussions were held, we were involved in the process by conducting spatial research.
ÖÇ: What was your starting point when you started your design?
SG: We worked on the circulation in the space and we built the whole story on circulation. It was important here that the curatorial theme and the space overlap. We were also trying to construct a space around the theme. The building has such a confusing situation, you come to the main hall from the outside and there is confusion about where to go on the staircases. The building does not direct itself. The story Zoe Ryan wanted to tell was more linear and we wanted to eliminate the moments of confusion in the space by providing this linearity. We were able to deal more specifically with the ceremony place, this is where we could be more involved as a designer. In other places, because other designs need to be on display, our design of the space should stand further back. The relationship with the stage, the fact that the place does not work in one direction and functions in a way that it can look in all directions were the points we discussed about this ceremony place. This place also has a strange feeling of being viewed from above. We took the decisions about the place in this direction. Since all of the curatorial decisions came from Zoe, of course we had a defined space.
ÖÇ: How did you progress through the curatorial concept?
SG: Actually, we didn't try to connect directly with the curatorial concept. Because on the one hand, this biennial had a retrospective side as well. Future and post-1970 innovations were also included in this exhibition. We can talk about some of the materials to be used for the innovation part. For example, the ecological properties of the cork, the material used in the main space, was a topic. Beyond that, the theme was not overemphasized.
ÖÇ: How did your interaction with the curator affect the work? How would you describe the curator in this biennial?
(as curator, designer, producer, collaborator..)
SG: She was a really great person to work with. There was an environment where everyone's roles were clear because Zoe Ryan actually came from museum culture. As a defined team, we were working as a team where everyone could bring their own expertise to the fore. Working together with the graphic team, curator and biennial team was a good collaboration. For example, we had exhibition experiences where both the curator and the designer were the same person. This biennial, on the other hand, was a process with more separation of powers and in a way that everyone fed each other. The biennial is already a multi-part teamwork, the size of the production and the distribution roles of İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts.
ÖÇ: How did you interact with the place? How did the qualities of the space, I mean its physical characteristics (light, material, acoustic, historical, urban aspects) affect your work? How did the space limit/shape your project?
SG: The disadvantages of the building itself were probably, as others have said, the lack of an elevator. Not being able to solve it was such a problem we always faced and we were thinking about when it could be solved. Apart from that, the building had a very bright state, so we had to take precautions in rooms that needed to be displayed in the dark. It was a very nice feeling to be in a building with such a strong character. For this reason, we have furthered the process by focusing on issues related to circulation.
ÖÇ: There were designers, their works were exhibited, in fact, your work became another design.
SG: Yeah, that's how we talked from the start and that's how the curator Zoe Ryan and we planned it.
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ÖÇ: Have you used the cork materials before in other projects? What were the advantages and disadvantages of using this material? Do you think it was the right choice?
SG: We hadn’t used it before, when we were working with İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts for the first time here, we had the opportunity to try new things and have fun thanks to the fact that the foundation could bring new materials as sponsors. In fact, Gregers went to Portugal to research this cork material we used, to see the capacity of the manufacturer and to get information about the product. However, it took time to decide on this product, we had problems such as whether we could get sponsorship and when the material would arrive. That's why we thought of other ideas. We thought of 15-20 different ideas about the materials.
ÖÇ: Did your designs leave anything to the venue after the exhibition? Were there any traces of previous work at the Galata Greek School?
SG: I don't think so. There was only one renovation story about the roof at that time, except that there was no permanent touch. Very little touches have already been made. Big chandeliers etc. were gifted to another institution, cork products were distributed around.
ÖÇ: Is the memory of the place a factor that directs your work?
SG: We wanted it to have a direction, but it didn't. It was discussed that a room should be designed as before, a museum room, but it could not be provided because there were not enough objects.
ÖÇ: Were there any other designers/architects or consultants related to the venue and the great hall apart from the Superpool? Can you talk about the realization of the exhibition design? Who was on the team (carpenters,… )
SG: The graphic design team was also an important part of the spatial design, and we solved the lighting ourselves.
ÖÇ: What was the impact of the location of the Galata Greek School in and around Karaköy?
SG: Not being in Karaköy but the entrance had an impact.. Encountering the stairs without having a threshold did not make the place very attractive. It might be too lazy to pass by and that darkness might not be so tempting, so we tried to do something about it. In the end, what we could do was unfortunately very limited. We were exploring ways to reevaluate the shops below and make them more welcoming. Team of Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts was from that region, so we did not feel very foreign in the neighborhood.
ÖÇ: How long ago did you start working at the venue?
SG: Design Biennial’s director Deniz Ova had a detailed business plan. The agreements with the venue were very tight, so it had to be very fast. We entered it 2 months ago.
ÖÇ: How did the process affect your project? Are there any differences between the initial idea and the final product, or was the initial idea directly reflected in the final product?
SG: We did not encounter any surprises. We touched the building very little, so we did not encounter any big surprises. Fabric display units stretched between self-standing steel structures. Stretching the fabrics was more difficult than we expected. It wasn't as clean cut as we wanted. This was more of the design's own concern, not the building itself. Other major problems with the venue were already solved in the previous biennial.
ÖÇ: How would you position the Galata Greek School in terms of space utilization in your general design practice?
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SG: The biennial is more of an event where the designer stands behind, because your own design had to stay behind while you were already trying to bring together many different works. It was good for us to try new materials and later on we had the chance to work with İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts in other projects. Later I was also chosen for the Design Biennial’s selection committee. A.1.3 (Case 3) Pedro Gómez-Egaña Domain of Things, 15th Istanbul Biennial: A Good Neighbor 2022.10.29 – ONLINE MEETING Ö.Ç.: How did "Domain of Things” come about?
PGE: Back to 2017, that was an interesting moment in my practice when I started to get interested in the domestic space, like as a subject as a place where one can study a lot of things that are important in society in different ways.
So if you look at home you can see how certain more of structures are past down, what it is okay to show, what it is okay to hide, what is the idea of a family, what is the idea of safety, what is cozy, what you show to other people as a way of showing of what you choose to not show, what it is clean, what is dirty, so if you look at home you understand a lot about a society at a certain time but also have its been in herited.
Then I was thinking about science fiction. How there are so many ideas in science fiction that they have to go underground by going underneath of the cities to escape or to have a kind of society that is different that is configured in a different way. You can build spaces they don't conform necessarily. then when I started to speak with the curators about the idea of a good neighbor. what a neighbor is then it became more a bow like a metaphor sense. What is at home? What is underneath the home or outside of the home so the people that are underneath? In the installation aren’t necessarily people that are escaping underground but it could be like an idea of either energies or even ghosts that are both connected with the home as we have right now. also invisible in a certain way so it can our insesters for instant or it can be the politicians that in force idea of how we should live. In Istanbul that time as we were building it, it was a very hegitated moment in turkey. There were a lot of demonstrations, there was a lot of agitation. I had the opportunity to speak to several people. that process and there was always this idea of like where can be safe and people felt that they weren’t safe even inside of their homes. because they had to move because they had to be exposed to the news. There were things happening outside of the window so the idea of the home started to be distablised and we talked about the curatorial idea of the neighbor what is just outside of home metaphorically.
OC: How did you go along with the curatorial concept?
PGE: We were talking a lot about the work. I mean this was a new work, and Elmgreen and Dragset were artists so they weren't just curators, they were also colleagues,who are acompanying the process. So we started down and have opinions about for instant what kind of decoration it should be and what that means. Was it like a rich flat or a working class flat that looked like an old person? Was it generic or was it ikea or was it all second hand and we discussed a lot about the lighting also in the way. this is more curatorial about but people would enter and look at the space and a one point about we thought a lot that it just so happened that the Greek School, there is these two floors and immediately we had this idea of like okay if in the installation there is and above ground and an underground then we can extraplate that two architectural of this space that has these downfloor and a balcony to have these two visions and in fact when you remember when you are on the balcony you can not see the people stops at that floor, it looks like they moving on their own, above for illusion and it is a place for the stability and presentability of the home as a place that is impact even though things are moving as you where you see to go to the down to the ground floor you are strucct by how it is constructed how it is fragile how you know there is people down there and who they are and all these questions come up like the place I can say this way the place above is for recognisability, you recognise everything and to a space above below it is all about questions how it is built why it is built like that why don't anything is just mentalic beens and who the hell are these people here and in that play with the site would be the architecture of greek school completely work where it became why the way people could have these two points of view and my discussions with ingar and michael were very much
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about how we can make the most the are of that how that our relation between the work and the architecture .
OC: There was no exhibition designer, right?
PGE: No, I work very much as an exhibition designer myself. For me the way people engage with the exhibition is fundamental part of the artistic content and so I don't delegate that very easily to or I don’t collaborate with architects it for that i usually built up myself in fact when we show that piece again in Rotterdam a year later I designed a sphere ling platform that gave that sense of above and below as well that I also did myself, so I don't know why it is hard for me to engage with like an exhibition architect it feels like its sculptural question.
OC: You don’t have an architectural background, nevertheless your all works looks like an architectural piece of art.
PGE: I know! It’s very me to pretend, so I can do it myself but I still haven’t learned to collaborate with. Then I collaborated with an architect. Often yeah, the work is more and more architectural in the way I am not trained to do. Maybe that’s a view of a different perspective, maybe it is an interesting way to work without having that raining how you approach.
OC: How did the venue, Galata Greek School limit/shape your project? (technology, scenography, circulation..)
PGE: There is humidity, there was a lot of sun coming in, there was a big rain flow.. We had to do something about that. Electricity was okay. My work wasn’t so technological. It was so analog. Greek School was perfect for this work. It was a perfect match so I can’t complain about this place.
OC: Did the artwork leave anything to the venue after the exhibition? And also were there any traces from the previous exhibitions at Galata Greek School?
PGE: No, there was nothing from the previous exhibition and I don’t know if we left anything behind. I hope no.
OC: Is the memory of the place a factor that directs your work?
PGE: Yes! Because it was an ideal place for the work. It is the main reference that we have in Istanbul but also Istanbul has become very important for me and that exhibition has become very important for me as well. So in my practice on that site, that piece has a special place.
OC: How would you position the Galata Greek School in terms of space usage in your general art practice?
PGE: It is one of the highlights of my practice. It brought many things together.
Very fortunate, I found a very good place for the concept of the biennial, and I had very good collaborations with people. It was the right moment and it just worked. People react well. Because of that, there is a number for me, maybe 5 works that are the top that I recognized. Certainly Domain of Things is one of them.
OC: What was the effect of the location of the Galata Greek School in and around Karaköy?
PGE: There are other areas of Istanbul that are Western, more European looking, or a little bit less accessible. So Galata and Karaköy are good in that very in Istanbul, very Turkish. But still very accessible and very innovative. You can relate the rest of the work pieces. Things are not looking so Turkish but they look like very much of Istanbul.
Karaköy is changing but it has all those industrial shops, we bought those second hands from Cihangir and on the one side it was helpful we worked with some craft people around like the carpenter from Galata. I still work with the metal guy whom I met there.
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OC: How did you choose the participants of this work? Were they practitioners you worked with regularly?
PGE: I didn’t choose them directly it was throwing the biennials from “PerformIst”
They have like a person she collects, we get in touch with them. It is interesting that since then I have worked with other performers, professional dancers, and also amateurs. It was certainly very good to work with a person already being a performer. They weren’t my choice directly, it was a collaborative choice.
OC: How did the process affect your project? Are there any differences between the initial idea and the final product? Is it directly reflected in the final product?
PGE: I started with sketches, I think a lot, but I am not a technical drawer then I started making things on Sketch-up, very simple 3D drawings, and then I made in Autocad then Barth came. He was involved with the building of it. When all the production finished we recognized that the all platform should be 10 cm below and one night metal worker came and changed it because of the security issues. But in other exhibitions it was obligatory that we have to put handrails on definitely.
What should it look like? Organised or messy? Should we leave food over?
A messy bed? How much do you feel there is someone there? We discussed those a lot with the curators. Because they have a lot of experience about staging.
OC: I remember that sound was one of the important elements that supported work.
PGE: There were 5 kinds of stereo sounds; music from laptop, radio and 3 speakers in and out harmonic music. Three of them work together. You come from a noisy street from Tophane, the stairs up till the foyer not quite upper also silent and then you walk into the space carpeted and then immediately acoustics change, base tones changes, people would slow down.
OC: How did you make decisions about lighting?
PGE: There were actually no lights. Only lights were from the installation.
Some lamps, bed side table lamp, floor lamp by the dining room, another lamp by the stereo. This was a big discussion with the curators. Should we have big spot lights around or not.. But in the end this darker space we made. There was no light down the side of the installation, only the light from the staircases coming through that part. Corridor through the glass door of the space, big window of staircase was lighting the performers. Sun was very strong on it.
Dark is contrast in the entrance for the walkway around the space. We put a white tape around the edges to show there is a high difference. Even with that precaution, a visitor fell down there. People could know where the border was.
No one wanted to have a rail around but in Holland and in Rotterdam it wasn’t even a question. Health and safety changes from country to country.
OC: How long ago did you start working at the venue?
PGE: I came several times before. First i came to look at the site and then I came to visit the school after I had known that it was my place when ı come one again to talk to carpenter and metal guy for the production, then Bart came to start and later. So all about 6 months , 3 intense months..
OC: Have you visited any of the other exhibitions held in this hall of the Galata Greek School before or after?
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PGE: No I didn't. But I can say in many ways it is unusual to show an art in Galata Greek School even the name is different. It is a school. The feeling, the color.. People in Istanbul love that space to make exhibitions.
A.2 CURATORIAL TEXTS
A.2.1 Mom Am I Barbarian, Curator’s Text
The conceptual framework of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’, borrowing its title from Lâle Müldür’s book of the same name,2 is conceived along three axes. The theoretical axis asks how we can rethink the public domain as a political forum and the concept of multiple publics in the light of the present-day context. Cognisant of the fact that it is not possible to speak of a homogeneous public or of people uniting under a single will, the conceptual framework enquiries as to how these different—and, in fact, often contradictory—multiple worlds could come together, coexist, and act collectively.
As the praxis site, we focused on the spatial components of the democratic apparatus: By investigating contested urban public spaces, these ‘battlegrounds’ from various geographies, and especially the ongoing unbridled assault of urban transformation in Istanbul, we considered the spatial manifestations of the concept of freedom and acts of civil disobedience together with the concept of agoraphobia.
Unfolding the theoretical and practical axes, and reintroducing (even perhaps reversing) the connotations of the barbarian and barbarity in today’s context, Müldür’s title ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’ fits into the third axis, which is the sphere of the imagination. In ancient Greece, the barbarian was related to the concept of the citizen, and also, directly, to language. Not only is the ancient Greek word barbaros the antonym of politis (citizen), derived from the word polis (city-state), hence, inversely related with rights to the city, but from a linguistic perspective, it was a definition that marks those who cannot speak Greek; who are thus not considered citizens. In fact, phonetically, the word ‘barbarian’ was an onomatopoeia for languages that people in ancient Greece did not understand—in other words, the language of the ‘other’, the alien, the most excluded and repressed. From this angle, ‘barbarian’ may refer to the language of those who are marginalised, illegal, and perhaps aspiring to debunk or change the system: the recluse, outcast, bandit, anarchist, revolutionary, poet, or artist.
In the context of the Istanbul Biennial, interweaving these three axes, we endeavoured to crack open a historical aperture between today and the end of the 1960s and 1970s in terms of social change, urban transformation, and artistic practices. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, approaching the future without losing sight of the past was the method to mark the temporality of the exhibition.
The most significant common denominator between these two periods is the quest for ‘another world’. The 1960s and 1970s also witnessed artists developing new artistic practices challenging urban transformation and gentrification processes in cities such as Paris, New York, and Amsterdam. Therefore, for this exhibition, novel artistic practices from these decades were brought together side by side with more recent practices, for instance Mierle Laderman Ukeles with Amal Kenawy, Gordon Matta-Clark with LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Stephan Willats with José Antonio Vega Macotela. Furthermore, temporal actions and performances by Akademia Ruchu in urban public spaces, and specifically Jiří Kovanda’s Theatre (1976), afforded the possibility to contextualise the current performative protests in Istanbul such as Standing Man (June 17, 2013) by Erdem Gündüz3 within the art historical backdrop of the 1970s.
Following this trail, we also sought to anchor the exhibition spatially in time. Out of 88 artists and collectives participating in the 13th Istanbul Biennial, 50 were from non-Western geographies—and histories— including Eastern Europe and Turkey.
Geographically speaking, as a result of education opportunities and governmental policies and support, artists from the United States, England, and Northern Europe have had more possibilities and experience in the field of art in the public domain. However, when we seek out the most contested cities and struggles over urban public spaces in the last couple of decades, the Southern hemisphere and the Eastern part of the world are those that appear predominantly on the map: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, India, Turkey, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, and so on. Hence, in order to reflect the present global
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geopolitical climate and anchor time spatially, in the exhibition we privileged these geographies, where the questions of public domain and urban transformation have been burning issues for the last few decades.
This essay is a narrative of the exhibition, taking the artworks as the main protagonists and highlighting their conceptual, thematic, and formal interrelations and references to each other. It is structured in two main parts. The first part seeks to introduce the curatorial thinking, agenda, and grammar of the exhibition under the headings Ut Pictura Poesis: Grammar; Body-Space-Freedom: A Piece of Straw; Art and Capital: Institutional Critique Reloaded; and Here and Now: Precarity of the Present. In the second part, our aim is to present how these ideas and themes were spatially embodied in the five venues of the Biennial: Antrepo no.3, Galata Greek Primary School, ARTER, SALT Beyoğlu and 5533.
Referencing the long history and tradition of the discussions around the relation of the two forms of art—poetry and painting, the verbal and the visual—ut pictura poesis (‘as is painting, so is poetry’) emphasises their intrinsic connection we aimed to bring forth in the exhibition.
Starting with the literature of the Turkish poet and writer Lâle Müldür, the exhibition sought to explore this connection in contemporary art practices, specifically in its curatorial thinking and grammar. The notion of poetry as a diachronic (verbal) experience versus the synchronic possibilities of the visual provided a basis for the exhibition structure.
Literature, especially poetry, as well as music had a prominent presence in the exhibition. There were projects relating referentially and structurally to poetry, but beyond that, poetry also served as a structural element in selecting, locating, and situating the works. Like music, it is one of the rare forms of art where a very personal inner space can overlap with a public
one. Pointing to the outer limits of language in form and meaning, poetry is unfettered from language’s practical function of daily communication. Its abstracted form bears the potential of creating voids and gaps that can be filled to generate meaning through the interpretation of the reader or audience. Introducing an interface, these gaps can be construed by the audience who can relate to a subjective, as well as collective, sentiment. It is this structure of voids and gaps of poetry that had an impact on the curatorial grammar of the exhibition to open up such a space for the audiences.
There were works with direct references to literature such as The Castle (2007) by Jorge Méndez Blake, a sculptural installation of a 22-meter-long brick wall under whose foundation lies Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle; Nathan Coley’s wall text, which read ‘We Must Cultivate Our Garden’, a quote from Voltaire’s famous novel Candide; and Zbigniew Libera’s subtly ironic photograph African Tales by Shakespeare (2011), in which a Japanese woman tourist poses together with two white naked ‘indigenous’ men, mimicking the early photographs of anthropologists posing with members of primitive tribes. Didem Erk’s video installation I wish I could not be traced in the archives (2013), borrowing its title from Müldür’s Mom, am I barbarian?, presented the artist’s reading and walking performance wherein she read from the novel Secret Decipherer by the Northern Cypriot writer Gürgenç Korkmazel as she walked along the buffer zone in Cyprus. Additionally, in the symphonic work Pivot (2013), a multichannel animated installation with a soundtrack, Shahzia Sikander created visual poetry in which she entwines her paintings with poems by renowned Turkish poets from different generations such as Nazım Hikmet, Ahmet Güntan, and Lâle Müldür, and music by Du Yun.
Tensions between the diachronic structure of poetry versus the synchronic structure of the visual were taken as tools in the reading of documentation or images of time-based or performative practices by Fernando Ortega, CADU, Murat Akagündüz, and Lâle Müldür & Kaan Karacehennem & Franz von Bodelschwingh. Although they were presented through photographic images and video recordings, they are not mere documentation, but embodiments of mental images of lived instances and experiences. In Music for a Small Boat Crossing a Medium Size River (2012), Fernando Ortega fashioned visual ‘verses’: eight photographs of a small boat going back and forth across the Bobos River in Mexico. Ortega wrote a letter to the composer Brian Eno, asking him to create a music piece for the duration of the boat trip across this ‘medium-size river’, which took less than a minute, meaning that most songs the boatman might play during the trip had to be cut off prematurely (the journey is shorter than the duration of most songs). Eno accepted this proposal and composed a piece for the exact duration of the trip, to be enjoyed by the passengers. This minute act was presented in the exhibition through the repetition of the photographic images functioning more as
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rhymes in poetry than visual information. Similarly, CADU’s Seasons II [Estações II] (2012-2013), a presentation of the artist’s experience in the wilderness of the mountains of Rio de Janeiro where he withdrew in solitude as a recluse for almost a year, is more than simply documentation of a place and what he lived through. It is a re-creation of the mental image of his experience as a possibility to live otherwise. In the multichannel video installation Stream (2013), Murat Akagündüz shot the moonlight on the water of the five dams on the Euphrates River running down the border of Syria, specifically when there was a full moon in summer 2013. Abstracted from their surroundings, the videos, which might otherwise document the artist’s observation of these moments, do not offer any clues as to the geographical features of the dams. Like CADU’s photographs and videos, Akagündüz’s installation, in which the five videos are presented synchronically, surpasses the diachronic experience he had traveling from one dam to another.
Finally, the Violent Green (2013), a video work by Lâle Müldür & Kaan Karacehennem & Franz von Bodelschwingh recording the unscripted everyday-life ‘adventures’ of Lâle Müldür, whose acts swing between spontaneous actions and performance, together with her friends and ‘film crew’ Karacehennem and Bodelschwingh, excavates poetry embedded in simple daily actions, blurring the line between art and life, euphony and cacophony.
Unorthodox languages: Impotence of action and the search for poetic act5
The ongoing massive global protests hint at people’s desire for change. In the wake of a new world, we all feel that existing systems, structures, theories, and formulas are falling short. To imagine another world and envision what is to come, we need to invent new languages and learn the languages of the most invisible, repressed, and excluded, as symbolised by the ‘barbarian’.
There were several proposals in the exhibition aspiring to magnify the issues and demands of the invisible and repressed, in a range extending from the urban context to gender issues, and to give voice to the ultimate ‘other’: animals and plants. As the antonym of the citizen, the barbarian directly refers to the urban context and citizenship. Halil Altındere’s Wonderland (February 2013) and the Sulukule Platform’s activities specifically bring voice t the Roma community in Istanbul, who were displaced and relocated at the outskirts of the city when their neighbourhood, Sulukule, became one of the first sites to undergo urban transformation and gentrification in 2006. Another project related to devastated communities is the Liliana Maresca Secondary School Project, an initiative by a group of artists from Buenos Aires that proposes alternative schooling that integrates art for the children living in the Fiorita neighbourhood, the most deprived shantytown in Buenos Aires.
Similarly, Bertille Bak’s Safeguard Emergency Light System (2010) presents an unusual strategy employed for almost a year by the residents of an apartment block of the Din Daeng neighbourhood in Bangkok, reacting against the demolition of their living spaces. Transforming a revolutionary song into a choreographed visual code using flashlights, they create an extraordinary mode of resistance, protest, and self-organisation. Likewise, Earth Tables (July 2013) by Christoph Schäfer depicts how the simple act of gathering to have dinner together—to break the fast after sunset—can become a means of protest. Drawing the tables on Istanbul’s streets and parks during the month of Ramadan (religious feast) in 2013, Schäfer visually narrates the new coalitions alchemically formed among the multiple publics during these dinners: Muslims, atheists, anarchists, leftists, nationalists, environmentalists, gays, lesbians, and so on.
In her video I am the dog that was always here (loop) (2013), Annika Eriksson brings to the forefront the most ubiquitous but also the most invisible ones on Istanbul’s streets, the stray dogs. She visualises the current urban transformation process from the eye and experience of a street dog pushed to the outskirts of the city, resonating with the citizens who share the same fate. In DIAMAGNETI (C/SM) SPECIES (2012-2013), the House of Natural Fiber (HONF), a new-media collective, explores the communication of plants and makes this process audible and visible. By taking the frequencies plants emit and transforming them into perceptible vibrations through an analogue system to create a sculptural installation of suspended geometric forms and charts, HONF evokes intense moments of communication among those we don’t even think have voices to communicate. The title of the exhibition is ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’ obliquely alludes to women, as the idea of the barbarian dates back to pre-Christian pagan times, when women were believed to have magical powers and thus held a central position in question is addressed specifically to a mother. The exhibition contained works reflecting different shades of feminisms, such as Amal Kenawy’s performance on one of the main streets of Cairo, Nil Yalter & Judy Blum’s interpretations of 20 districts
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of Paris in early 1970s, or Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art performative projects. İpek Duben’s Manuscript 1994 (1993–94) focuses directly on the issues of being a woman; she articulates her own body as a written text through the conflict between modernity and tradition in Turkish society. Meanwhile, Mika Rottenberg’s Squeeze (2010) portrays women as essential elements of the absurd capitalist production apparatus.
While theory and practice are situated in the realm of the real and are bound to reproduce existing structures and discourses, art can open up the possibility of loosening the seams of reality. It can provide an experience of otherwise-utopian moments within our daily routines and introduce unorthodox, or, so to speak, ‘barbarian’ languages. Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, in their installation and video work The IncidentalInsurgents: The Part about the Bandits (Chapter 1/2) (2012-2013) adopt the figure of the bandit to explore their own position and language as artists. ‘Searching for what cannot yet be seen but maybe possible’, they define the work as ‘the common search for a language of the moment—a radical new imaginary that can begin to open the horizon for other ways of becoming and being in the world’.6 Guillaume Bijl’s reinstallation of Suspect (1980/2013) debunks the perception of the artist in society as someone suspected of an ‘unlawful’ lifestyle by re-creating his own studio after a police search. Among the reasons for the neighbours’ complaint, upon which the police conduct the house search, are ‘Comes home late at night, probably drunk’, ‘Was seen on television at a left-wing demonstration’, ‘Puts the garbage out on the wrong days’, and ‘Spends a lot of time in bookshops and public parks’.
Yto Barrada’s Beau Geste (2009), on the other hand, documents a real-life action by a group of men to protect a palm tree that is to be deliberately destroyed for urban development purposes. By referring to this futile attempt as a ‘beau geste’, a French phrase meaning a useless yet ‘gracious and fine gesture’, she also alludes to her own position as an artist. Similarly minute, intimate gestures manifest in the works of Cinthia Marcelle, Fernando Ortega, Fernando Piola, José Antonio Vega Macotela, Maider López, CADU, Murat Akagündüz, and Jiří Kovanda, among others.
Artists such as Ádám Kokesch, Lux Lindner, and .-_-. experiment with structural and visual grammar to invent unorthodox artistic languages. Lux Lindner’s Treatise on Argentine Reality (2006-2013), a series of paintings in clear lines and graphically written legible texts, proposes a style and precision that recalls technical drawings. But the visual and textual information contrarily emits multiple Dada-like enigmatic meanings—as in poetry—that need to be reconfigured by the onlooker to make sense. Similarly, Ádám Kokesch creates industrial-looking, highly finished object-sculpture constellations with sound and filmic components that escape definition. Although they recall technical or industrial objects from a studio or a laboratory, the aesthetic premises and groupings defy meaning, demanding another way of looking at things.
On the other hand,.intuition3.0: totally dematerialized, zero-byte work of art_, (2010) by .-_-. is a zero-byte ‘digitiple’ from the series intuitions (after Joseph Beuys), a desktop folder distributed free of charge through a web archive. This work not only brings the question of the dematerialisation of the artwork in Conceptual Art to an ultimate ‘non-materiality’, but also relates to the question of autonomy while proposing a noncommercial relation with the artwork.
Inhaling deeply the smoke of a cigarette through the narrow hole of a straw passing through the thick prison wall separating two adjacent cells, a man lets the smoke wander inside his chest for a while, feels its warmth, then blows it back, mixed with his breath, to share it with the prisoner in the next cell, touching him from within deep inside... What is a piece of straw against a thick prison wall? The sturdiness of the wall against the fragility of the straw? In A song of love [Un chant d’amour] (1950), Jean Genet reverses this seemingly impossible equation by narrating passion and desire between two male prisoners. Against the absolute isolation of imprisonment, Genet brings out imagination fuelled by desire as the only way to resist. Censored and banned upon its release—it was perceived as pornographic and obscene—the film visualises the power and seduction of imagination triggered by desire against authority and severe physical reality. Can desire be the source of imagination, while imagination becomes the source of existence and resistance? The black-and-white film contains no dialogue to drive the focus further toward the poetics of the visual and the rhythm of music to probe this existential question. The film, which could only be screened once during the biennial due to limited permission from the Genet Foundation, sits at the very heart of the conceptual framework of the exhibition, given its central questions related to the public domain and urban transformation as conceptualised around issues of the body, space, and freedom.
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Falke Pisano’s Disordered Bodies Fractured Minds (Private M., Patient A. & Traveller H.) (2012) video installation and Untitled (2013) prints and diagrams are parts of larger ongoing events she describes as Body in Crisis. They conceptualise the body in relation to historical changes while reading history through its impact on the body. Taking Antonin Artaud’s art and texts as a junction point, she explores the body in its historical moments of crisis and the formal possibilities of its representations in art. In her work, Pisano treats ‘the body as a site of de- and reterritorialisation’, a site where crises occurred ‘through a change of living conditions (be these institutional, hegemonic, administrative and/or physical)’7 are actualised repeatedly.
The relation of body and space in connection with the concept of freedom is also the focus of Rossella Biscotti’s installation The Prison of Santo Stefano, consisting of two video documentations and a text (2012–2013) together with minimalist sculptures (2011). The first video documents the making of the sculptures, which are imprints of spatial segments of the prison floors (a cell and a panoptic courtyard) with lead sheets, and the second video narrates the act of finding and naming the graves of the political prisoners —mostly anarchists and communist leaders—who died during life imprisonment. Through the sculptures presented in the Galata Greek Primary School next to a panoptic hall, the work provides an experience of the politics of space in the extreme conditions of imprisonment, while locating it in the political history of Italy. Likewise, the poetic photographic work of the Palestine-born artist Hanna Farah Kufr Birim places the politics of body-space-freedom in a historical context. In the photograph Distorted 1 [Mshwashi I] (2002–2013), the artist supports the fallen arch of his grandparents’ former house with his own body in his hometown village of Kufr Birim, which was occupied by Israel in 1948 and demolished in 1953.
Fernanda Gomes’s spatial installations, on the other hand, propose a purely personal and subjective experience of space. Like a secret ritual, without preconceived plans or materials, she weaves her daily encounters, stories, and objects she comes across into a given space. Through this time-based process, she creates sensuous lived spaces in relation to a specific locality, resulting almost in a three-dimensional abstract painting that aims to activate all the senses and evoke a unique and personal perception of space.
Along with neoliberal funding policies, art institutions have become more dependent on private funding and commercial support globally, and have thus increasingly been criticised, protested, and boycotted for serving to whitewash the ‘dirty’ money, and for being epicentres for the distribution of neoliberal culture and mechanisms. For instance, a group of activists protested the 13th Istanbul Biennial because of its funding sources, starting from the first press conference in January 2013. The 19th Sydney Biennial was boycotted by the participating artists just before its opening for the same reason, and the biennial responded to the protests with the resignation of the president. The Manifesta Biennial realised in St. Petersburg in June 2014, on the other hand, has been criticised and boycotted because of legal pressure on gay rights in Russia. Biennials have become more politicised international platforms and the target of protests that wish to bring crucial issues to the attention of larger publics. And through art projects that critically examine art system(s) they have also become prime sites for institutional critique. Although activism and art may share the same aims of social change in times of urgency—a process that Turkey has been going through—and they can learn from each other, in effect they are subject to different processes, and they create different modes of perception and experience. Therefore, they cannot be evaluated with the same criteria or the same forms of impact. Today many artists experiment with art and activism to question the boundaries between these two forms of resistance, aiming to activate social responses for diverse political issues by utilising the extensive possibilities of art and the art world. We can see certain shades and grades of such attempts in the exhibition.
Art’s relation with power is a historical one. This relation takes form amidst the systems/economies/societies that it responds to, and thus, the production relations and representational regimes of art cannot be abstracted from the systems wherein it is realised. However, unlike many other fields, art has the capacity to critically unfold, from within, the systems in which it partakes. Since the 1970s, artists such as Hans Haacke, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, and Andrea Fraser—and more recently Goldin+Senneby, Vermeir & Heiremans, Burak Arıkan, and Hito Steyerl— have been working around issues of art, capital, and institutional critique. Trusting fully the capacity of art to unfold and challenge its own mechanisms and systems, several projects were invited to the exhibition because of their focus on the relation of art and capital, labour and production.
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Connecting theatrical rehearsals with financial speculation of an algorithmic trading strategy, Goldin+Senneby, in their ongoing performative project Shortening the Long Position (2013), have created a precarious system in which the financial performance of the trading strategy determines the duration of the actors’ contract, and thus the duration of the performances. Splitting open the relationship between the two worlds—finance and art—the project reflects the insecure and unstable world of high finance as well as the vulnerable nature of labour in art. As the strategy developed by the economist İsmail Ertürk worked successfully in Turkey, the performances could continue until the last two days of the exhibition.
Similarly, the lecture-performance Art House Index (May 2013) by Vermeir & Heiremans, realised before the exhibition in scope of the ‘Public Capital’ segment of the Biennial Public Programme ‘Public Alchemy’, denotes the speculative nature of value production in both art and the stock exchange.8 The duo’s video work in the exhibition The Residence (a wager for the afterlife) (2012) embodies abstract value production in neoliberal cultural processes and mechanisms in a complex story that unfolds the increasing entanglement between urban development, social status, and the art world.
An online ‘collective data compiling, mapping, and publishing project on the capital-power relations of urban transformation’,9 the Networks of Dispossession [Mülksüzleştirme Ağları] (2013–ongoing), initiated by the artist Burak Arıkan as a part of his practice and developed collectively during the Gezi resistance, was triggered by similar concerns about unjust transfer of land through urban transformation in Istanbul. Inspired by Hans Haacke’s well-known Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 in relation to the ownership and control of urban space in New York, the Networks of Dispossession [Mülksüzleştirme Ağları] compiled data on urban transformation actors, mainly developers, government, and media, to create maps that highlight and make legible their relationships. In the exhibition there were three maps: one on mega projects such as the third bridge for the Bosphorus, airports, or dams in Turkey; a second map on the actors and processes that deprive minorities of their properties; and a third map on urban transformation in Istanbul, which included one of the sponsors of the Istanbul Biennial. They also organised several workshops and meetings to communicate and disseminate to larger publics the processes and techniques of collecting data and making maps, and to discuss collectively how to utilise such information further.
‘What is the relation of art spaces and battlefields apart from showing works about conflict zones?’10 Hito Steyerl articulated this question further at the lecture-performance and video Is a museum a battlefield? (2013), produced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial. In the search of her friend Andrea Wolf, who disappeared in 1998 as a member of PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) in the region of Van, Turkey, Steyerl began to trace an empty bullet case that she found in a mass grave where her friend was possibly killed. With a witty and convoluted presentation, she questions the relationship between the arms producer General Dynamics, who made the empty bullet case she found, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she presented the video of the search for her friend. Unfolding the historical alliances of art spaces and museums with power, she alludes to the nature of art institutions as war zones. By the same token, Steyerl asks what potential connection exists between the funders of the Istanbul Biennial and the military industry, and further articulates this relation with the biennial’s main sponsor.
That art can look deep into its own production relations dates back to Dada performances. In the exhibition, with an accent on labour, the growing relationship of capitalism with the art world had a more marked presence in the critical works of such artists as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Héctor Zamora, Amal Kenawy, José Antonio Vega Macotela, Praneet Soi, Mika Rottenberg and Carla Filipe. The Maintenance Art performances by Mierle Laderman Ukeles functioned as one of the historical references for the 13th Istanbul Biennial. Her early performative works conceptually question the raison d’être of art by highlighting the most invisible, precarious work of domestic labourers (women) and maintenance workers in New York, ranging from cleaning chicken feet to changing the diapers, replacing lightbulbs to washing floors. For Ukeles, maintenance is not about beautification or cleanliness but about sustaining life, survival. One of the most significant performative works shown in the exhibition was I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976),for which she invited the 300 maintenance workers of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to collaborate with her by selecting and declaring one hour of their daily work as ‘art’ during the seven weeks of the exhibition. Taking Polaroid photographs of the work they declared art, she designated and recorded maintenance labour as art, thus making the invisible visible. Similarly, in her well-known Touch Sanitation (1979– 1980) performance, realised with the New York Sanitation
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Department as a symbolic act of gratitude, she shook hands with every one of the 8,500 sanitary workers, thanking them individually for ‘keeping New York City alive’.
Alongside Ukeles’s historical maintenance works from the 1970s, there were more recent artistic practices actualising the question of art and labour. Premised on the brick workers’ particular way of transferring bricks by tossing them to each other, Héctor Zamora in Material Inconstancy [Inconstância Material] (2012–2013) created a vigorous live performance and a video work pointing out the labour of construction workers as art. Amal Kenawy’s Silence of Lambs (2009) performance and video, for which she hired 12 male day labourers to walk on all fours in a central Cairo street, relates more to the practice of Santiago Sierra reflecting the precarity and exploitation of labour in the capitalist system, while disclosing public sentiments against women and contemporary art expressed on the streets.
In his extensive project Time Exchange (2006–2010), José Antonio Vega Macotela visited the Santa Marta Acatitlan prison in Mexico City once a week for five years, spending hundreds of hours with its inmates. Macotela fulfilled the prisoners’ wishes that they could not realise, for instance witnessing the first steps of an inmate’s baby son (Time-Exchange 148) or spying on a prisoner’s ex-lover (Time-Exchange 231), and recorded them via photograph or video. In ‘exchange’, for the same period of time, theinmate simultaneously performed some creative act for Macotela. One made a composition of the cigarette butts found in his cell (Time-Exchange 148). Another re-created a plan of the prison as a board game using a combination of both his own and his current lover’s hair (Time-Exchange 231).
Looking into labour and production from geographic and gender perspectives, there were works that brought out different modes of production, ranging from preindustrial manual labour, as in Praneet Soi’s Kumartuli Printer, Notes on Labour Part 1 (2010) to Mika Rottenberg’s Squeeze (2010), which exemplifies precarious post-Fordist offshore manufacturing in the age of global capitalism using a very particular, frivolous language.
Carla Filipe’s Empty Hands: the hand is not only an organ for work but it is also a product of it [Mãos vazias: a mão não é só um orgão de trabalho, mas também produto deste] (2011), a floor installation of 41 obsolete tools made of iron and wood, accompanied by a sound piece composed of a selection of old peasant resistance songs, is a poetic reminder of the primordial attachment of humans to the earth and how the labour we do defines us even physically. Correspondingly, soil-erg (2012) by Claire Pentecost suggests returning to the basic, the earth, as the fundamental of value production, as opposed to the normative, abstracted capitalist one.
A number of works in the biennial proposed experience as the measure of time in relation to temporality and the precarity of the present. Through performances and performative projects throughout the exhibition, diverse conceptions of time—stretched, suspended, shrunk, repeated, or fragmented—were experienced, transforming the performers, audiences, and spaces. Directly opening up the phenomenological character of the present, the immediacy of the ‘here and now’ could be experienced and marked by such durational performative practices as Goldin+Senneby’s Shortening the Long Position (2013), in which two performers improvised a scripted ‘play’ directly interfering with the experience of the audience, or Maxime Hourani’s Book of Songs and Places (2013), which entailed process-based songwriting workshops and field trips exploring the potential of music as a binding element bringing people and places together to excavate subjective experiences and expressions.
İnci Eviner’s ground-up learning device Co-action Device: A Study (2013), the functioning of which was decided collectively by the participants, was a theatrical research project on how art can be a part of a learning process that took place at a former educational institution. Elmgreen & Dragset’s Istanbul Diaries (2013), on the other hand, exemplified the materialisation of time through the act of writing and reading. Coming to the exhibition site (a former classroom), seven young men with diverse backgrounds were engaged to write diaries daily in the presence of the audience. Through connecting diverse subjectivities, and thus creating a possibility of intersubjectivity, the solitary act of writing and reading became a collective one.
Jean Rouch’s controversial experimental film Mad Masters [Les Maîtres Fous] (1955) was presented, not only to offer a historical perspective on current performative practices, but also to problematise the concepts of civilisation and barbarity. Thefilm depicts Hauka tribe ‘performances’ mimicking colonial military
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ceremonies as a means of resistance, reversing internalised colonial oppression by acting it out through bodies and trancelike movements. In addition to the documentation of performances by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Amal Kenawy, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jiří Kovanda, Academia Ruchu, and others, these projects formed the heart of the ongoing performative practices that continued throughout the exhibition. Furthermore, there were scripted and/or scheduled performances and concerts throughout the exhibition by artists and musicians, including Héctor Zamora, Shahzia Sikander, Sulukule Youth Orchestra, Tahribat-ı İsyan (Rebel of Destruction), and KOROçapulPORTE, a self- organised chorus that was formed during the Gezi Resistance and continued afterward in the neighbourhood parks, performing revolutionary songs from diverse geographies as well as new ones they compose themselves.
VENUES:
Originally, we aimed to realise strategic projects in contested areas of urban transformation such as Taksim Square, Gezi Park, Tarlabaşı Boulevard, and Karaköy in addition to the two exhibition venues, Antrepo no.3 and the Galata Greek Primary School. However, with the decision right after the Gezi resistance to withdraw from urban public spaces in order to avoid collaborating with the authorities who repressed violently their own citizens’ voices, (among other complications) we confronted problems related to the venues, as some of the projects that were to intervene with urban public spaces had to be adapted to interior spaces or replaced by different projects.
Through collaborations with other art institutions such as ARTER, SALT Beyoğlu and the artist initiative 5533, we were able to overcome this urgency barely a month before the opening. With the inclusion of these new venues, we faced the challenge of reevaluating the relations between the venues and revising existing plans in regard to the conceptual, spatial, and formal connections within the exhibition and the necessities of the works. In accordance with their locations, functions, histories, and architectural features, each venue was conceived individually, and thus designed differently.
Antrepo no.3
The Antrepos had served as the exhibition venue of the Istanbul Biennial for more than 15 years. Together with their surrounding area, they have shared the same destiny as the rest of the city, subjected to unbridled urban transformation. This would be the last time that the Istanbul Biennial would occupy the building with artworks. Responding to this stark reality, Ayşe Erkmen created a sculptural installation in front of Antrepo no.3. bangbangbang (2013) is composed of a crane with a giant wrecking ball that hits the building constantly like a pendulum, a ticking bomb, pointing to the very near future of the building as well as the threatening prospect of the city. Likewise, the entrance of the exhibition hall was blockaded with The Castle (2007), an installation by Jorge Méndez Blake, a 22-meter-long brick wall under whose foundation the novel of the same name by Franz Kafka sat, symbolising culture as a foundational component structuring today’s society as well as an unsettling element, considering the physical defect it caused in the order of the As a metaphor—also a metonym—of urban public spaces, Antrepo no.3 was designed to spatially visualise the statement of the biennial. It was organised around three squares with avenues, side streets, and lanes. While the first square hosted the projects articulating the question of urban transformation and coproduction of cities as common living spaces, the second one was concentrated mostly on historic works juxtaposed with current practices. The third square was reserved for projects related to art in the public domain, problematising the concepts of monument and memorial, the most predominant art form in urban public spaces.
The centre of the first square was occupied by Fernanda Gomes’s spatial installation as a purely personal and subjective experience of space. The square was introduced by the Bostanorama: A Marmaray Tunnel Excavation of the Collective Productions of Space Through Istanbul’s Stadiums, Parks and Gardens (Existing & Recently Destroyed) (January–September 2013) drawings by Christoph Schäfer. The drawings can be perceived as visual narratives woven with theory, activism, and art, accentuating the priority of desire in the coproduction of the city. Based on interviews, encounters, and readings during his visits to Istanbul, they narrate in his personal ‘sparkling’ style the urban transformation of the city, and also the Gezi Resistance. Startingwith Nika Riots (February 2013), one of the most destructive social uprisings in Istanbul during the Byzantine period, the Bostanoramadrawings included Earth Tables (July 2013), Yedikule Bostans (July 2013), and Gezi Park Fiction, St. Pauli (June 2013). Pointing out the urgency to connect different urban struggles, the last drawing depicts a celebratory moment after the renaming the
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‘Park Fiction, St. Pauli’ in Hamburg as Gezi on the night (June 16, 2013) that the Gezi Park occupation ended with police-enforced evacuation.
One of the prominent works around the square was Wonderland (February 2013) by Halil Altındere, focusing on the severe displacement of 300 Roma families due to the gentrification of Sulukule, one of the oldest Roma neighbourhoods in the world, and also the earliest site of urban transformation in Istanbul. Despite the fact that a court case had been under way since 2007 against the demolition of the neighbourhood, it was destroyed and converted to luxurious residences by TOKI, the public housing administration, which was a key player in urban transformation, in 2012 though the court decided against its demolition. Altındere invited the Tahribad-ı İsyan (Destruction of Revolt), a young hip-hop group from Sulukule, to collaborate with him for a music video. In the video, followed by the camera through the demolished houses and above the roofs of newly built villas, they rap the story of their neighbourhood, expressing their anger against this unjust, illegitimate, and violent transformation.
There were proposals from diverse geographies related to creating common living practices and public spaces: minute interventions such as Fernando Ortega’s Music for a Small Boat Crossing a Medium Size River (2012); CADU’s romantic retreat Seasons II [Estações II] (2012-2013); Hanna Farah Kufr Birim’s personal photographs Distorted 1, 3, 7 [Mshwashi 1, 3, 7] (2002-2013); or the futile yet poetic gesture proposed by Yto Barrada’s Beau Geste (2009). The individual tactics developed by Fernando Piola for his Tutoia Operation (2007-2012) also offered a playful twist on intervening with public space. In order to uncover the concealed memory of dictatorial state oppression, Piola endeavoured to exchange the green foliage of a public square in São Paulo with red plants to turn it into a ‘Red Square’. Since he couldn’t realise the original project due to permission problems, this time he introduced himself as a hobbyist gardener aiming to upgrade the neighbourhood. Switching the plants one by one as his daily work, he was able to replace all the plants with red foliage, introducing new meanings into the square.
Maider López’s Making Ways (2013) revealed the latent potential in the daily practices of Istanbullites to find spontaneous collective solutions to the ever emerging situations or obstacles one often comes across on the street. She concentrated on the pedestrian crossing in Karaköy, a major central transportation hub where traffic and pedestrians coexist side by side. She filmed this crossing from an aerial perspective and extracted and highlighted the random routes that pedestrians take. Having mined the practice of self-organisation through simple daily actions, she created a ‘user’s manual’ providing possible instructions on how to cross the roads, and perhaps more: ‘If unsure, follow a person who appears to be doing it well’, ‘Taking action is easier when a group is generated’, or ‘Self-organisation creates collective ways’.
In Antrepo, the main avenue leading to the first square was occupied by works articulating dystopia and utopia, such as Zgibniew Libera’s staged photographs History Lesson (2012) and First Day of Freedom (2012), depicting a dystopic image of the future and freedom; The Century [O Século] (2011), a video by Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, choreographing a critical epochal struggle in a lyrical manner, and Freee’s billboard-size poster Protest Drives History (2008), creating a horizon in a closed landscape through the banner featuring the statement. In the back streets sat the series of photographs Expansion [Expansión] (2009– ongoing), New Hope [Nueva Esperanza] (2011–ongoing), and Construction II [Construcción II] (2009– ongoing) by Edi Hirose, depicting informal urbanism in Lima, Peru; the unrealised project Gecekondu/ Landed by Night (Ghetto) (2013) planned for Taksim Square, Tarlabaşı Boulevard, and Karaköy by Tadashi Kawamata; the video installation showing moonlight cast on the running water of five dams by Murat Akagündüz; and a series of enigmatic paintings of Argentinian history and culture by Lux Lindner.
The second square hosted historical works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Nil Yalter and Judy Blum, and Provo on urban transformation in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam in the 1970s, juxtaposed with the more recent works of LaToya Ruby Frazier and HONF (House of Natural Fiber). Two of Gordon Matta-Clark’s famous ‘cuttings’, a unique performative practice that Matta-Clark developed in the 1970s in response to the urban transformation and gentrification processes in New York through the use of derelict buildings to be demolished for sculptural interventions, Splitting (1974) and Conical Intersect (1975) were presented side by side with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series of black-and-white photographs (2007–11) documenting urban transformation and gentrification in the town of Braddock in Pennsylvania, where she was born and grew up, from a very personal angle of the artist as a woman, a daughter/granddaughter, and a political activist. While Gordon Matta-Clark’s spiral cutting of two 17th century buildings that are planned to demolish next
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to the construction site of Centre Pompidou, Conical Intersect (1975) produced for the 9th Paris Biennial points to art’s impact on gentrification through Pompidou’s effect on the district, Frazier’s photographs show it through her personal experience.
Also in this square, two collectively created projects by Nil Yalter & Judy Blum and by the protagonists of the Provo movement—a loose collective of mostly artists, writers, and political activists from Amsterdam—were shown next to each other. Yalter and Blum created Paris City of Light [Paris Ville Lumière] (1974) as a personalised commentary by two ‘strangers’, two immigrant female artists, on the maledominated field of urbanism, the 20 districts of Paris. Rather than presenting the results of an academically developed research, the work offers the hybrid, fragmented, fleeting nature of perception in experiencing a city. Looking at the city in flux from a gender perspective, they juxtaposed the physicality of the city with the emotional, spatial, cultural, and political coordinates that they were caught up in. With sewn (a genderassociated act) photographs and drawings on textiles in a collagelike organisation combined with handwritten texts, the form of the work reflects the hybrid and eclectic experience of the city, referring to the unauthorised
banners hung illegally in cities and alluding to the aesthetics of contemporary fanzines. For instance in the fourth-district pane (Notredame, Chatelet, B.H.V. Department of Police), they included the photographs and drawings of the construction site of the Centre Pompidou and named the Beauborg area as ‘The Big Hole of Culture’, whereas in the pane of the 18th district, Pigalle, they interpreted the area as a place where women’s bodies become the site of spectacle and exploitation. The Provo posters, on the other hand, were intended and produced for city walls, carrying unique graphic and visual articulations. The multilingual visual language of the posters reflects the styles of multiple authors, artists, and designers, presenting polyphony in form and message. The nonviolent agenda of Provo was processed in humorous and poetic activism informed by the avant-garde forms of performance and happenings of the 1960s while voicing a variety of issues related to capitalism, society, and the city, such as overconsumption, urban transformation, motorized city traffic, and even smoking. Seemingly unrelated in form and purpose, both projects highlighted how cities are designed to accommodate a specific type of society and devised critical reflections on ideological living practices forced on residents/ citizens.
Facing the back of The Castle [El Castillo] (2007), in the square surrounded mostly by historical projects on urbanism and living practices, the work of HONF—somewhere between a technological model and a sculptural installation—stood in the middle to remind us of the inevitable unity between civilisation and nature, making the voice of the plants unexpectedly perceptible.
The avenues and side streets between the second and third squares hosted projects by Yto Barrada, Rob Johannesma, Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Carla Filipe, Hito Steyerl, Mika Rottenberg, Claire Pentecost, and Guillaume Bijl. One might ask what the relationship is between the Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen, Norway, the Millenium Challenge Corporation at Benin, and the TOKI in Istanbul. They have no connection other than being instruments of the aggressive assault of global capitalism, and also sites in the ‘silent’ film In the Stomach of the Predators (2012-2013) by Creischer and Siekmann. In a Brechtian setting with wild-animal masks and graphically designed emblematic costumes, the protagonists move from one place to another, and finally end up at the ancient Hippodrome in Istanbul—a sporting and social centre in the Byzantine Constantinople—in front of the obelisk with the Latin phrase res nullius, meaning ‘nobody’s property’, insinuating that what is considered common property is now under global attack. In The Equitable Principle (2012–ongoing), on the other hand, Benera and Estefan brought forth the historic territorial dispute between Romania and the Ukraine over a small rocky island—the Snake Island—after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ensuing intervention of international agencies and multinational companies due to economic interests. While the two projects deal with global and international issues, Carla Filipe’s If there is no culture there is nothing [Se não há cultura, não há nada] (2011-2013), a portrait of Moreira da Costa bookstore, which is under pressure to survive against gentrification in the neighbourhood, and Rorschach Installation [Instalação Rorschach] (2011-2013), a presentation of antique books from this bookstore eaten up by book insects and worms, focus on the cultural impact of the global financial crisis at the local level, reminding us that if culture is abandoned, it will gradually disintegrate and be overpowered by nature. In the age of abundance of visuals in constant flux and circulation, Rob Johannesma, instead of creating new images, preferred to reselect, reframe, and recompose the already-existing ones that he has been collecting since 2008—the date that marked the turn of the global financial crisis—from diverse media in Spots of Time (2013), a
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multichannel digital slideshow, to unfold the subliminal ideological layers and reload them with new meanings and a renewed perception. Similarly, by rephrasing the 1970s motto for the Internet, .another internet is possible!_ (2009), a projection by .-_-., encourages us to think differently about social media and the Internet while emphasising their eminent role in today’s society and the organisation of collective action. In the side streets and avenues,
there were the works by David Moreno, İnci Eviner, İpek Duben, Ádám Kokesch, and Shahzia Sikander leading up to the third square. The third square was reserved for the documentation of temporary, performative, and ephemeral actions and projects, including iconic historic examples, that challenge the conception of conventional works of art in the public domain and revisit and problematise the concept of monument/memorial.11 In this square were several projects questioning the impact of art projects in the public domain or monuments/memorials, including their debated role—ranging from causing temporary economic revival or urban regeneration to city branding—and their relation with diverse publics. Diagonally in the middle of the square stood the ninemeter- long MDF panel Timeline: Work in Public Space (2012) by Thomas Hirschhorn. The ‘timeline’ consists of a collage of documents, texts, and images of a selection of the artist’s previous projects and ‘monuments’ in public spaces such as the ones on Bataille, Spinoza, and Deleuze that he realised in collaboration with migrant communities.
Through his ‘monuments’, with their physically evident energy, urgency, and tension reflected in the action of wrapping large amounts of cardboard and unprocessed wood with duct tape, Hirschhorn reverses the usual visual language of monuments. They are neither grandiose nor monumental nor complete. Against the frozen social space and hierarchical distance that the traditional monuments generate in regard to their relation to the audience, the ones Hirschhorn produced function as social hubs that people gather in and around. In contrast to its humble claim of visibility in comparison with his typical works, the Timeline had a monumental impact on the space, occupying the central axis along with its contribution to the discussion about the art in the public domain around the square.
Juxtaposed with current projects around the square were documentations of early guerrilla-type political actions by Akademia Ruchu (Academy of Movement) that disrupt the routine of daily life in public space, together with Jiří Kovanda’s modest intimate actions that open the possibility of unexpected encounters and nonverbal communication. In Stumble I [Potknięcie I] and Stumble II [Potknięcie II] (both 1977) by the Akademia Ruchu, the members of the collective stumble at regular intervals at the same spots in crowded public spaces in different cities in Poland. Kovanda performed Untitled (Escalator) on September 3, 1977 at Wenceslas Square in Prague, where he took an escalator and then turned around and looked into the eyes of the person who stood behind him. Similarly, in Theater (1976), he performed a non-theatrical act by standing in front of the National Museum in Prague and declaring that he followed ‘a previously written script to the letter. Gestures and movements have been selected so that passersby will not suspect that they are watching a “performance”.’ Considering that such actions took place in the over-controlled public spaces of Soviet Czechoslovakia and Poland, they had strong political implications. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s pioneering performative Maintenance Art projects were placed next to Amal Kenawy’s daring performance with day labourers that ended up in police custody.
The projects by Gonzalo Lebrija, Santiago Sierra, and Wouter Osterholt & Elke Uitentuis question the raison d’être of public monuments in the urban public spaces, disclosing their top-down ideological nature. While the Conceptual Monument (2012–13) by Santiago Sierra, an adaptation of his project proposal for a competition for the Leipzig Freedom and Unity Memorial in Germany for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, proposes a radical deconstruction of the idea of monuments that can be applied to any city around the globe, the works by Lebrija and Osterholt & Uitentuis proposed two examples related to the specific context of two cities: Guadalajara in Mexico, and Kars, which is a border city between Turkey and Armenia.
Starting from dematerialising the monument, Sierra proposed in his ‘manifesto’ that Wilhelm Leuschner Square would be declared an extraterritorial area where no authority, except the authority of the people, would be valid. Furthermore, the manifesto asserted that the people of Leipzig would decide freely the use of the money (6.5 million Euros) allocated for the construction of the monument. Very conscious of the fact that monuments/memorials and art projects in public spaces are used as pretexts for urban regeneration and gentrification by authorities, in the appendix Sierra specifically mentions that the square would not be modified architecturally, as the ‘conceptual monument’ is aimed at creating a social reality. Sierra’s collaborative video with Jorge Galindo, Los Encargados (2012), on the other hand, can be regarded as an
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antimemorial/ anti-monument for the rulers of Spain, disgracing their governance through a procession of seven cars that recalls a funeral, each carrying a giant upside-down portrait of the prime ministers after Franco together with that of the king on Madrid’s main street, Grand Via.
Gonzalo Lebrija’s tiny sculpture of a solitary man in deep pathos, Lamento (2007), was initially planned as a large-scale public sculpture mourning the city of Guadalajara, which has been under severe urban regeneration that has largely ignored its history, culture, and life. In order to raise funds for this project, the artist began to make smaller copies of it for sale. However, in due course, Lebrija changed his mind, since the giant white mass of the figure would add to the ugly piles of newly developed buildings he wished to challenge through the work. Thus, he cancelled the project itself, but the smaller versions continue to lament for each city they are presented in, implying the impotence of individual citizens against the crimes of neoliberal urban policies.
(2007), was initially planned as a large-scale public sculpture mourning the city of Guadalajara, which has been under severe urban regeneration that has largely ignored its history, culture, and life. In order to raise funds for this project, the artist began to make smaller copies of it for sale. However, in due course, Lebrija changed his mind, since the giant white mass of the figure would add to the ugly piles of newly developed buildings he wished to challenge through the work. Thus, he cancelled the project itself, but the smaller versions continue to lament for each city they are presented in, implying the impotence of individual citizens against the crimes of neoliberal urban policies.
Monument to Humanity—Helping Hands (2011–2013) by Wouter Osterholt & Elke Uitentuis focuses on the public debate that arose after the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the Humanity Monument by the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy in Kars a ‘freak’ and ordered its demolition. When the artist duo were in a residency program in Istanbul in 2011, they found themselves in the middle of intense discussions: on the one hand, the order to demolish the monument created heated reactions, as it was clearly anti-democratic; on the other, it was supported by some intelligentsia, as they regarded this ‘peace’ monument a cover-up of the deep-rooted Turkish-Armenian conflict.
When the monument was demolished, there was only one hand waiting to be installed. The artist duo made a small replica of the hand and wheeled it on a cart in the streets of Istanbul asking the opinions of people they encountered and requesting that they express their thoughts and feelings on this situation with hand gestures, which the artists took molds of and cast afterward. They interviewed more than 120 people, and the casted hands became an alternative monument to humanity temporarily installed on a hillside in Kars in 2011, expressing the feelings of the people rather than the ideology of the state.
Departing from Chantal Mouffe’s definition of critical art, we can claim that the raison d’être of works of art in the public domain is to open up implicit social and political conflicts to debate. However, at the same time, public monuments can be taken as artistic-political structures that permanently impose official ideology on urban public places—in this sense not opening, but rather covering up, existing or hidden conflicts. From this point of view, perhaps the demolition of Mehmet Aksoy’s Monument to Humanity created a more significant public debate than its presence did. The polarised discussion around this event could be reopened through the more impartial outsider perspective/distance of the artist duo.
The light installation Intensive Care by Rietveld Landscape, designed to mark the obscure future of the contested Atatürk Cultural Centre at Taksim Square, couldn’t be realised. But it was transformed into an interior installation. The idea was to make the building ‘breathe’ with certain moments of crisis to signify its precarious ‘in-between’ situation: whether the building is still alive or if it is dying. Although this was one of the earliest projects for which the biennial applied to the Ministry of Culture for permission, only during the Gezi occupation were we able to learn that the building was actually under demolition.
In this square, there were two other prominent works: Nathan Coley’s Gathering of Strangers (2007) and David Moreno’s Silence (1995–2012).
They proposed two extremes: speaking out loud and listening. What brings together people who are not ostensibly related? It may be belief, worldview, opinion, interest, politics, anger, or pathos. But what type of congregation does Coley’s work suggest? It can be perceived as a reference to the present framework of ongoing protests and social movements around the globe, or, in the exhibition context, to people
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congregated around art. Considering the rainbow colour scale of the lightbulbs that form the text, the work evokes the assembly of a multiplicity of people, different worlds, even contrasting ones, in a collective action such as the ones during the opening days of the biennial: the stairs in the street near the Antrepos were painted in rainbow colours, but re-coated to grey by city authorities, and the action became a method of protest all over the country.
In reference to the 4’33” performance of silence by John Cage, at which he had audiences listen to the sound of silence and random environmental noises, Silence (1995–2012) by David Moreno suggests listening even to those who do not speak any more. Focusing on the relation of materiality and sound, Moreno solidifies, and even amplifies, silence through his installation consisting of paper horns resembling megaphones attached to photographs of masks of dead thinkers, writers, composers, et cetera, compiled in a book by Ernst Benkard in 1927. The work also emphasises the importance of the act of listening even when there is no recognisable speech or sound to hear. As opposed to Gathering of Strangers, it proposes rather a solitary act in order to open oneself up to the ‘otherwise’, even though in the moment it may be imperceptible.
At the end of exhibition in Antrepo no.3, the very first work at the start of the exhibition hall, Lutz Bacher’s The Celestial Handbook (2011), pages from a book compiled by the famous amateur astronomer Robert Burnham Jr., and the very last one by Nicholas Mangan, A World Undone (2012), a film of earth dusts, brought together the earth and the celestial, the world and the universe. In Mangan’s work, the dust and particles of the oldest geological material found in Jackhills, Western Australia in 2003 are filmed in motion in space. Watching the film, it is difficult to assess if we are witnessing a meteorite shower, a primordial moment of the birth of a star, or earth dust flying in the air. The Celestial Handbook (2011) is a work consisting of a selection of 85 photographs of celestial objects—astronomical systems, planets, stars, meteorites— out of the 7,000 photographs from a 2,138-page book in three volumes. While the vigour of work of collecting and cataloguing this vast material inspires us, the enjoyable uneven amateur language employed in the descriptions of the photographs surfaces the refreshing spirit of amateurship as opposed to professionalism. A selection of these photographs was displayed throughout all the venues of the biennial, like a chorus, connecting them while giving a universal perspective to the exhibition and the present day.
The Galata Greek Primary School
Because of its former function as an educational institution, the Galata Greek Primary School hosted mostly site-specific and context-responsive projects, questioning issues related to education as a top-down system (control and discipline) and learning as a ground-up act, with the backdrop of the concepts of civilisation and barbarity, subjectivity and system, utopia and dystopia. The meeting hall located at the ground floor hosted the ongoing performative project by İnci Eviner, the Co-action Device: A Study, (2013) a ground-up learning device exploring how art can be a tool in learning processes, and by and large in sociopolitical change. With the participation of 40 young artists, actors, writers, performers, and students,12 after more than a month of workshops prior to the opening, the group developed ideas and methods of working together and collective decision making. Continuously open to the gaze of the audience, they practised scripted and impromptu actions and performances situated in between the surrealist theatre, studio workshops, and rehearsals during the course of the exhibition.13 The activities could be watched from the galleries upstairs, providing a panoptical view for the audiences, where Rosella Biscotti’s sculptural installation and the videos of Santa Stefano prison, the first prison in Italy to be built using a panoptical plan, was also located.
The staircases between the floors were occupied by the overtly witty and ironic photographic series Follow Me (2003), Follow Him (2010), and Follow You (2013) by Wang Qingsong, referring to the popular English- language teaching program introduced by China Central Television (CCTV) in 1982, through which he criticises the modernist idea of progress and development and specifically questions education as an ideological tool. Similarly, Mahir Yavuz and Orkan Telhan’s The Road of Cones: The Eviction of Social Memory (2013) visually unfolds the culture of data/ information emitted through online media in Turkey and how they are used to replace public memory with new narratives to support the ruling class. Toril Johannessen’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions (2012), a peculiar installation with a video component, put the indisputable certainties of scientific knowledge, the litmus paper of Western civilisation, into question. Subsequently, the offspring of the modernist idea of progress, the utopia, was critically articulated through revisiting the Polish hippi movement by Agnieszka Polska in her film Hair[Wlosy] (2012).
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Erasing the distinction between the camera/director and the event, Jean Rouch’s Mad Masters [Les Maîtres Fous] is the earliest and unique example of Ciné-Ethnography (cinema vérité) that mirrors ‘civilisation’ from the eye of the colonised and through the bodies of the performers, blurring established distinctions between civilised and barbaric. Similarly, Falke Pisano’s Disordered Bodies Fractured Minds (Private M., Patient A. & Traveller H.) videos and installation read Western history through its impact on the body. In different ways, Martin Cordiano and Tomás Espina envision the terror and trauma of order and the ordinary
in their thrillingly calm installation DOMAIN [DOMINIO] (2011), in which every single object in a living room is cracked into pieces, then reassembled and glued together. Though at first sight everything seems at peace, the horror of realising the cracks vibrates in our fragile daily order under capitalism.
The abstract sculptural installation Ruses and Legacies (2013) by Peter Robinson visualises the dynamics between subjectivity versus structure, individual versus universal, and order versus chaos, with an accent on urban chaos and struggles. While 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World (2011), a video by Basim Magdy, portrays the ambiguous, even defeated, position of the individual in today’s civilisation through the rules uttered by tulips, the extreme other or outcast without a voice, the Violent Green (2013) video by Lâle Muldür & Kaan Karacehennem & Franz Bodelschwingh incarnated the artistic subjectivity as a ‘mischievous’ other. On the other hand, Elmgreen and Dragset’s Istanbul Diaries (2013) delved into the narrow lanes of subjectivity in an exalted moment in the history of Turkey, during the Gezi resistance, a unique civic awakening, by having seven young men from diverse social strata, backgrounds, and sexual orientations write their diaries in the presence of audiences in a former classroom.
The attic and the terrace of the school were designed to function as a forum space for projects focusing on urban transformation, multiple publics, and self-organisation. En route to the forum area were projects related to gentrification and urban transformation such as Bertille Bak’s extraordinary resistance project in Bangkok, or Annika Erikson’s poetic video narrating the current process in Istanbul from the eye of a street dog, or The Residence (a wager for the afterlife), a video work by Vermeir and Hiereman about art’s relation to gentrification. Nathan Coley’s wall text We Must Cultivate Our Garden is a proposal
to slow down the capitalist heat and pace, as well as an alternative to current urban living, referring to ‘work’ as an ethical question on its own. It is the last sentence from Voltaire’s Candide in which the protagonist ends up in Constantinople, referring to the philosophy of a Turkish farmer who devoted himself to the simple work of cultivating his land instead of subscribing to a preconceived optimistic schema of ‘all is (designed) for the best’.
The forum was introduced by two photographic works in which Şener Özmen uses himself as his own model. His emblematic series of photographs Untitled (2005), where he portrays himself as an artist and a citizen questioning the impact of his artistic voice while bringing out the extreme lack of freedom of speech, especially for Kurdish citizens, were originally conceived and displayed in urban public spaces.
In Optical Propaganda (2012) he posed lying on a couch like a fashion model with his clothes—a suit, shirt, tie, shoes, and even the couch— made out of Keffiyeh, known as ‘Palestinian Scarf’, which became the symbol of leftist resistance after Arafat and also refers to the Kurdish movement. The photograph was mounted on wallpaper of perfect computer-produced Keffiyeh, as opposed to the customary handmade ones. He not only comments on the leftist movements’ appropriation of capitalism by marketing and publicity fever, but also the ongoing fashionable ‘peace process’ between the Turkish government and the PKK.
The forum area in the attic housed several projects, at the centre of which were maps by the Network of Dispossession revealing the connections between developers, media, and government, and Sulukule Platform’s timeline, a seven-year-old citizens’ initiative formed by artists, designers, and scholars (mostly women) to resist gentrification and the transformation of the Sulukule neighbourhood as well as to empower the Roma community by establishing informal art and music classes for children. Additionally, the space accommodated the Liliana Maresca Secondary School Project [Proyecto Secundario Liliana Maresca], initiated and run by a group of artists in the deprived Fiorito ghetto in Buenos Aires, and the Newspaper Reading Club (Fiona Connor & Michala Paludan), a collective reading exercise intended to bring individual criticism to the news and articles in popular newspapers. Serkan Taycan’s Between Two Seas (2013) fashioned a route through his act of walking the 66-kilometer- long line almost parallel to the Bosphorus
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between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea where Kanal Istanbul, a mega urban transformation project, is planned, with two new cities on the banks to house one million residents each. Finally, Volkan Aslan’s neon sculpture commented on the possible destruction the Olympics could bring to the city.
The terrace and the attic also hosted workshops, talks, music performances, and screenings, and it functioned as a social hub for audiences to take a rest with a harbour view of Istanbul.
ARTER
The exhibition in ARTER was conceived to embody the distilled idea of the biennial concept and the DNA of its artistic atmosphere in a way that would rhyme with the main trails of the exhibition. Issues related to the intrinsic connection between poetry, visuality, and music/sound were exemplified in the works of Jorge Méndez Blake, Angelica Mesiti, Héctor Zamora, Carla Filipe and Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Angelica Mesiti’s Citizen Band (2012), in which four musicians from diverse geographies and cultures—Algiers, Cameroon, Sudan, and Mongolia—perform music through the agency of their bodies in the urban public spaces of Paris, Brisbane, and Sydney, letting their personal feelings and cultural origins resonate in the social spaces of those cities, echoed with the musicians performing on Istiklal Street of Istanbul, where ARTER is located. Whereas the video installation of Héctor Zamora, Material Inconstancy (2013), edited from performances realised in the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University during the opening days, sounded the incantation of the 36 bricklayers tossing bricks to each other, Carla Filipe’s sound installation Workers’ Songs [Músicas de Trabalho] (2010) brought out the old revolutionary folk songs from Portugal. The digital buzzing sound in the video Incidental Insurgents: The part about the Bandits (Chapter 2) (2012) of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou- Rahme intensified the feeling of impotence and being trapped, experienced through the desperate voyages of the two male protagonists, who wander through the ruined landscape of occupied Palestine.
Minute gestures related to citizenship and collective action were at the very centre of the works by Maider López, Fernando Ortega, and Cinthia Marcelle. Marcelle’s Confronto (2005) video, in which she documents a staged performance by street fire acrobats performing during the intervals of red lights to earn money from the cars waiting at a busy pedestrian crossing in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, articulates how even the simple acts of spectacle, with a subtle shift, can be converted into powerful acts of resistance. Meanwhile, Maider López’s Ataskoa (Traffic Jam) (2005) creates an impossible situation—a traffic jam in the mountains of Basque country—by bringing together contrasting voices, such as environmentalists who come to the mountain to protest automotive pollution and car collectors who want to show off their antique cars. Fernando Ortega’s Short Cut I and II (2010) series of photographs depicts a slight human intervention in nature—two leaves pinned to each other to create a bridge on which ants travel—showing that even the minute interference of civilisation may be useful, but it is almost always violent as well.
Art, capital, and labour in relation to systems and society were accentuated in the works of Stephen Willats, José Antonio Vega Macotela, Héctor Zamora, Praneet Soi, and Carla Filipe. Willats seeks a direct correlation between art and society, and thus exhibited his work in residential areas, community centres, and local libraries. He proposes that art can have a social function in structuring society and empowering individuals. Inspired by information technology and cybernetics, Willats’s diagrams suggest not only a tool for mapping out systems and socioeconomic relations, especially systems of self-organisation with Stephen Willats, a focus on community, but also a new form for social art. In the exhibition, Willats’s rich oeuvre from the late 1960s and early 1970s was juxtaposed with José Antonio Vega Macotela’s ‘time exchanges’ with the inmates of Santa Martha Acatitlan prison in Mexico City which transform socially engaged art into an alternative economy.
The works by Jananne Al-Ani, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, and Didem Erk in this venue deal with the politics and poetics of spaces, places, and cities. All are related to conflict zones—Jordan, Palestine, and Cyprus—but they present diverse contents in diverse forms. While Erk’s performance video depicts her walking and reading a novel in the buffer zone at Cyprus, Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s scripted film brings out the experience of abandoned, ruined places through two male ‘vagabonds’ that the audience only sees from the back, as in Romantic paintings or computer games. The poetic Shadow Sites II (2011) and Excavators (2010) by Jananne Al-Ani put forward a stark contrast of micro versus macro views. In the former, the artist depicts on a wall- size screen an aerial view of haunting traces of human settlements, military bases and trenches, archaeological sites, fields, and so forth without any trace of human beings, in
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a style mimicking aerial footage of warfare, accompaniedby the noise of the airplane. Whereas on the small screen, we witness the nest/ home-making activities of ants. They run in and out of a hole in the sand, contrasting with the poetic but eerie vision of human settlements.
At the entrance of ARTER stood The Doorman (2009) by Jimmie Durham, atotemic lame figure framing the conflict in terms of meaning and material, greeting the audiences. It is made out of contrasting materials—some valuable, some junk—for instance gold, obsidian, Murano glass, iron, pipes, cables, wires, security cameras, even something like a periscope. This figure with a red obsidian heart personifies Tezcatlipoca (which means ‘smoking
mirror’), a complementary deity in Aztec mythology associated with the creation of the world, but also with war and strife; it also signifies a ‘doorman’, a figure who holds a relatively low socioeconomic position in big cities. Often doormen are immigrants and quite poor, living in the basements of buildings. Likewise, the entrance of SALT Beyoğlu was occupied by the Guard (2012) of Halil Altındere, a realistic dwarf wax figure of a private security guard also embedded with the conflict of Durham’s Doorman. Unfolding the contrast between the weakness and vulnerability of the figures and the positions they hold, both ironically allude to the excessive security measures in the streets and private spaces in Istanbul.
SALT Beyoğlu
The projects in SALT Beyoğlu were selected in accordance with the venue’s spatial proximity to Istiklal Street, a major pedestrian zone and shopping and social hub in the city; approximately one and a half million people pass through daily. Diego Bianchi’s Market or Die (2013), an installation activated with performances, directly responded to its immediate context, the excess and corrosion of capitalism, and the dark side of consumerism. Bianchi created an open-ended decomposition of the market, chic shops, and window panes, using all types of junk materials, newspapers and shiny magazines, cardboard, packing tape, the residue of common consumer items such as perfume, shampoo, or lotion bottles, boxes and packaging, garbage bags, abandoned construction materials like broken gypsum board panels, MDF panels, wooden supports, and wire, or specific items related to Istanbul such as simits (a kind of bagel) or mussel shells like those sold by Istanbul restaurants and street vendors. Also he used lines of cigarette butts, which referred to Istanbul too, as although smoking is forbidden legally in restaurants, cafés, hotels, and public offices, Turkey is still one of the biggest markets for multinational cigarette companies. Besides his surreal anthropomorphic sculptures and objects, during the weekends, there were performers mimicking salespeople in surreal manners and actions. This almost absurd backstage of neoliberal market and consumerist delirium tremens could be intervened in by visitors, who added to the junk or wrote on the surfaces of the installation under the supervision and control of the SALT Beyoğlu administration.
In the same venue, Crime Scene (2011) by Amar Kanwar was shown in the open cinema, depicting in epic style the violence and destruction of capitalism and neoliberal land transfer policies on a global scale through the case of Odisha, in eastern India, narrating the conflicting interests in natural resources between the government, corporations, and local communities.
5533
Finally, 5533, an artist-run space, a former shop in the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market initiated by Nancy Atakan and Volkan Aslan after it was used as a part of World Factory in the 10th Istanbul Biennial, hosted Maxime Hourani’s collaborative project A Book of Songs and Places (2013). The project consisted of ongoing songwriting workshops at specific locations in the peripheries of Istanbul, between urban and increasingly eroded rural areas. Starting on September 2, 2013, Hourani organised three workshops, each six days long, including several field trips to Tuzla, Arnavutköy, and Çatalca, along with research, lectures, performances, specific workshops in collaboration with artists, architects, art historians, sociologists, activists, musicians and singers such as Pelin Tan (urban sociologist), Saadet
Türköz (vocalist-performer), Mabel Matiz (singer), Serkan Taycan (artist), Korhan Erel (sound researcher-musician), Semra Germaner (art historian) and Bahar Deniz Çalış-Kural (scholar in architecture and urbanism). Individually and collectively, they researched the area and created visual, audio, and written notes, then wrote songs for the specific locations. Bringing together geographies, cultures, and creativity,
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they produced drawings, photographs, lyrics, and music displayed in shifts at 5533, which became an ongoing project space open to the audiences, neighbouring shops, and passersby.
POSTSCRIPT:
And there was one herd of many swine feeding on this mountain, and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the swine, and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake and were choked. When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country. Then they went out to see what was done, and came to Jesus and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial overlapped with a most striking—and unique— civic awakening, the Gezi Resistance, which erupted in summer 2013 in Istanbul and other cities across Turkey. They converged not only in terms of time, but also in terms of the questions they posed. The biennial centred on themes related to the public domain and the city’s function as the spatial component of the democratic apparatus—issues that were also at the root of the collective resistance triggered by imminent plans to transform Gezi Park in Taksim Square into a shopping mall.
The Gezi Resistance and the ensuing public protests exposed the local authorities’ lack of responsiveness and unwillingness to engage in dialogue. Instead of listening and responding to the desperate voices in the streets, the authorities chose to violently repress these voices through police force. For this reason, we began to question what it means to realise art projects in urban public spaces, with the permission of the same authorities curtailing their own citizens’ freedom of expression and movement. In two forums that we organised in a neighbourhood park at the end of July, we discussed such questions, insights, and possible further actions with artists, activists, and other participants.
In the conceptual framework, we put forward that the raison d’être of any art project in the public domain is to open up conflict and make it visible and debatable. However, the Gezi Resistance had already made the conflict manifest and public. To collaborate with the authorities in these circumstances would imply affording them the opportunity to regain their lost prestige and legitimacy after Gezi. This would have led to the instrumentalisation of art in favour of the authorities and the covering up of conflict. Besides, the so-called public spaces in the city were and are totally occupied and controlled by the police. In order not to collaborate with these very same authorities, we decided to withdraw from urban public spaces and to continue the discussion in the exhibition venues. In this way, as in John Cage’s silent composition 4’33”, we wanted to mark presence through absence: by asking the audience to listen to the voices of the streets.
Of course this decision was followed by many conceptual, practical, relational, and spatial complications. Only at the end of the first week of August were we able to secure the three additional venues, and then we needed to renegotiate the projects and readapt our plans in a very short time. Thanks to the endless efforts and energy of the biennial team, the curatorial collaborators, and the artists, it became possible.
Out of 20 projects and performances that were planned for urban public spaces, seven projects were lost. In all the other cases, the artists were able to adapt their ideas for interior exhibition spaces or create new projects. For instance, Elmgreen and Dragset adapted their previous project Paris Diaries (2003) to Istanbul, while Tadashi Kawamata presented the initial drawings of his project proposal, Gecekondu/ Landed-by-night (Ghetto) (2013), in which he planned to bring the gecekondus (shantytowns) that were pushed out to the periphery back to the centre of the city.
Through workshops with art and architecture students, Kawamata was to create bird’s-nest-type wooden structures on the light posts, roofs, and facades of buildings in and around Taksim as if they had landed overnight. The light installation Intensive Care by Rietveld Landscape, designed to point to the obscure future of the contested Ataturk Cultural Centre at Taksim Square, was transformed into an interior installation.
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The graphic design concept of the biennial was also totally revised. Previously, it was based on the fragmentation of public spaces and polarisation of people. After Gezi, the collective action and alchemical movement of people gathering together formed the heart of the design concept.16 The new design was shifted toward the concept of the spontaneous self-organising of people in reference to Maider López’s Making Ways, where she recorded the individual routes people created/took at the main pedestrian crossing in Karakoy in two minutes and fifteen seconds between 06:03 pm and 06:05 pm on August 2, 2013 and abstracted them to visualise the collective routes they created.
Since we had decided not to collaborate with the city authorities and made our decision public, the biennial was not promoted on billboards in the city. Fortunately, this didn’t have much impact on the number of visitors, as we were able to make the exhibition free of charge, which made it more public and visible despite our withdrawal from urban public spaces.
In order to make the entrance free, we had to cut down on expenses, and the decision was made to shorten the period of the exhibition to five weeks. We cancelled the opening cocktails, dinners, et cetera, and held the opening without any special invitations or parties, taking this as an opportunity to make the opening accessible to everyone.
Moreover, we radically revised the public programme to change the focus from theory to practise-based events. In the five-week period of the exhibition, more than 40 events were realised. These were mostly ground-up artist-organised-events such as workshops, walks, tours,talks, performances, music sessions, screenings, and lectures by artists or collectives such as Networks of Dispossession, Sulukule Platform, the Newspaper Reading Club, Maxime Hourani, Serkan Taycan, Héctor Zamora, Shahzia Sikander, Hito Steyerl, and others. Mere Phantoms (Maya Ersan and Jaimie Robson) conducted ongoing workshops with children based on their urban-scape installation Come Out and Play (2013). The closing event was performed by KOROçapulPORTE (conceived and realised by Yaprak Sandalcı and Aslı İçözü with the participation of 41 vocalists, composers and musicians).
The reaction toward the exhibition was quite mixed. Some criticised it for not having taken place in urban public spaces, which they saw as a sign of giving up—a missed opportunity—or for not reflecting Gezi more directly. For others, the exhibition articulated, contemplated, and complemented the questions posed by Gezi, fully deploying the power of art without appropriating the resistance movement. It certainly opened up a long- awaited debate. Although the biennial withdrew from urban public spaces to private indoor venues, thanks to intense public interest (we had 337,429 visitors in five weeks), the venues themselves became public spaces in which people gathered.
Istanbul, April 2014
A.2.2 The Future Is Not What It Used to Be, Curator’s Text
Under the overarching title The Future is Not What it Used to Be, the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial asks, "What is the future now?" The Biennial invites designers to rethink the manifesto, harnessing this powerful and fertile genre as a platform for reconsidering where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going.
Throughout history, manifestos have functioned as statements of purpose, stimulating dialogue without limitations and pursuing inquiry as a radical process. Manifestos have typically been produced as texts that lie somewhere between declaration and desire. In the new context of today, how can we reclaim the manifesto as a catalyst for critical thinking in design? Reinvented as an action, a service, a provocation, or an object, what new potentials might the manifesto have for generating inventive outcomes that address both positive and negative consequences?
Istanbul, a city undergoing rapid transformation, is a hub for alternative thinking about design and its relationship to daily life. It is therefore an ideal place for a biennial that will bring together a diverse cross section of design ideas for the emerging conditions of our world. Using the city as a dynamic space for projects, talks, workshops, publications, and actions [as well as generating online initiatives], the biennial will present an international range of projects that open up new attitudes and sensibilities, foregrounding
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underexplored or overlooked aspects of society, and prompting investigation and exchange about our designed, constructed, and digitized age.
The word "manifesto" is derived from the Latin verb manifestare, which means "to bring into the open, to make manifest" and refers to the act of making visible. Manifestos emerge at moments of rapid change and questioning, when present conditions afford multiple potential visions for the future. Productive moments in history are not for the faint of heart. Indeed, many early-twentieth-century manifestos favored collective action and called for violence, destruction, and societal rupture to allow for a fresh start [Futurist Manifesto, F.T. Marinetti, 1909; Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos, 1910]. Others have employed the manifesto to rethink disciplines through site-specific analysis [Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, 1972] or to conflate the past and the present to form a new portrait of the world in which we live [Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas, 1976]. Still others have suggested best practices or alternative methodologies [Ten Principles for Good Design, Dieter Rams, 1980s; Critical Design, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, 1999]. As diverse as the designers who have created them, design manifestos have addressed issues as far ranging as ecology, science fiction, sustainability, play, color, clothing, responsibility, urbanism, normalism, DIY, storytelling, alternative methodologies, open source, and pesto!
As the 20th century came to an end, however, there was a sense that the age of the manifesto was over. Manifestos were deemed outdated and historical; the utopian project no longer seemed current or relevant. As we move further into the 21st century, new languages, forms, and methods are being sought to readdress urgent challenges, particularly the global balance of equality. It is therefore an appropriate time to reconsider the manifesto, harnessing its declarative power and ability to frame pertinent questions, while rethinking what a manifesto can be.
Seeding ideas and fostering dialogue and debate, the biennial will feature new commissions and projects selected through a two-stage call for ideas [see below for more information]. The biennial will embrace designs that are visionary yet grounded in everyday realities-projects whose innovative approaches are transforming how we see, interact with, and understand the world. The biennial will articulate a portrait of design activity today, mapping the often unexpected ways the field intersects with contemporary life: with basic human needs such as food, shelter, health, and safety, but also with less tangible issues, including love, play, fear, discord, abundance, sustainability, mobility, accessibility, community, and geopolitics.
We are looking for manifestos [whether texts, actions, services, objects, or something else] that imagine a new future and instigate change by building on and reinterpreting history, changing both in the process. Rather than merely highlighting large claims and loud voices, the biennial seeks nuanced and layered approaches, manifestos that question the role of design and suggest alternatives from multiple points of view, generations, and places. Neither a means to an end, nor an end in itself, the biennial encourages interaction and participation. This is an occasion to explore the changing scope of design across various fields of practice and to shed light on current global challenges.
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A.2.3 A Good Neighbor, Curator’s Text
In 1994, we both lived in a diverse leftist area just north of the fake lakes in central Copenhagen. Like most urban neighbours, we were completely unaware of each other’s existence. That was until one April night, when we met in the one and only local gay club, called After Dark.
To the classic disco soundtrack of Anita Ward’s Ring My Bell, we eyed each other across the dance floor, both noticeable for being the only ones on these premises sporting red shoe-laced Dr Marten’s boots and Dennis Rodman-inspired hair. We mutually spoted an opportunity to escape this streamlined and sanitised version of sexual minority night-life fun, and went across the street to Cosy Bar, a more seedy establishment, which was said to have catered to sailors and other adventurers since the early twentieth century. In our days, it was run by the larger-thanlife, bleached-blond Brita, who earned some extra pennies by playing dice on the counter with the drunken regulars. When the time came to head home, we realised that we not only lived in the same neighbourhood, but on the same street, and even in the very same four-storey building. That made the decision to walk home together so much easier.
In the twenty-three years that have since passed, we have lived in many different places, both separately and together, in Copenhagen, New York, Stockholm and London, but mostly in Berlin. And at the moment of writing, we are both staying in apartments at the Adahan Hotel, in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul. The hotel is owned by an architect and her husband, and her elderly mother is also part of the household, situated on the rooftop floor of the hotel, just behind the common breakfast room. The old lady greets us in German every morning. She jokingly thanks us for having made her an ‘internet star’, by which she means that she was part of the first press conference for the 15th Istanbul Biennial, which took place in December 2016. In a darkened room, forty people of different ages and backgrounds came on stage, one after the other, each asking one of forty questions that we had writen about what a good neighbour could be: ‘Is a good neighbour someone who reads the same newspaper as you?’, was the question we asked her to pose. This question seemed particularly relevant in a time when several news outlets had recently been closed and a number of journalists and editors had been arrested – some of whom have later been released, while others remain in custody, awaiting trial.
It has been sixteen years since we first visited Istanbul, where we took part in the 7th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Not only Beyoğlu – which includes Tünel Square, İstiklal and Taksim Square – but the city as a whole has changed tremendously since then. Today, we encounter a completely modernised urban landscape. However, this change probably cannot even be compared to the extreme transformation through which Istanbul must have gone from 1950 to 2000, when its population grew from roughly one million to about nine million citizens. Currently, the population is approaching sixteen million. Since our first research trip to Istanbul, whole areas that used to be inhabited by small businesses such as hardware stores and wood workshops have morphed into trendy neighbourhoods with cafés, design shops and boutique hotels, while others, like Tarlabaşı near Taksim Square – where bars with transsexual sex workers and others once offered a variety of services – have been demolished to make way for large, international hotel chains. Other parts of the city, less frequented by tourists, have seen a surge in new shopping malls of all levels, from discount to luxury. And an expansion of the city towards the north is happening at rapid speed. In close proximity to where a new airport is under construction, huge lower- to-middle-class developments – so-called TOKİ complexes – are shooting up like mushrooms, which brings us to a question asked at our first press conference by another performer: ‘Is a good neighbour someone who lives the same way as you?’
Both for that 2001 Biennial, and for a subsequent exhibition in Istanbul called ‘Pedestrian Projects’, which was curated by Fulya Erdemci in 2005, we created ruins, or replicas of such. Ruins that had no history, but could be seen as the beginning of something. In 2001, there was still no museum of modern art in the city, and neither were there many commercial galleries. Art – outside the Biennial – was for a large part presented in showrooms on the ground floors of bank buildings. The one major exemption to this was Platform, under the initiative and directorship of Vasıf Kortun – an art space, a meeting point and, perhaps most importantly, an artistic archive that had facilitated exchange between the Turkish art scene and the international art community in a time before homepages and online sharing became the norm.
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The first ‘ruin’ we made in Istanbul was embedded into the lawn in front of the old Mint, a stone’s throw from Hagia Sofia and other historic buildings. The structure alluded to a white cube museum space with a translucent, tiled skylight, sinking into the ground. Atop the double metal doors, barely visible above ground, one could read ‘…TEMPORARY ART’, hinting that the first part of the word – ‘CON…’ – had been buried underground. This was three years before Istanbul Modern, the city’s first museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art, opened its doors.
The second ‘ruin’ was a half-finished modernist structure built in Karaköy park, which at that time, when the gentrification of Karaköy had yet to take full effect, was frequented mostly by fishermen on leave and homeless people. The small building had no signs nor any instructions and could be used as people pleased. It included a minimal fireplace, a bench, and, pointedly, a panoramic window facing the historic peninsula on the other side of the Bosphorus.
At the time of our first visit to Istanbul, we had moved to Berlin for the second time in our lives, on this occasion, to stay. A friend of ours, the artist Kirsten Pieroth, had spoted an empty looking apartment in the not-yet-renovated building where she was living herself, in Mite – before this neighbourhood’s ‘Sohofication’. Kirsten resided one floor diagonally above us, and we could see each other and communicate through the windows facing the backyard. We had 42 a lot of parties at the time, sometimes spanning both her apartment and ours, but nobody ever complained. Not about the noise, at least. But our next-door neighbour, rumoured to have been an actor with the famous East German theatre Volksbühne before the fall of the Wall, often came knocking on our door. He was clinically paranoid, and thought that the Stasi – the GDR security service – was spying on us, and on him in particular, from every nook and corner. If we left anything in the hallway, whether a broom or a bin-bag, minutes later he would be standing at our door and whispering with a fearful, sideways look in his eye: ‘They’re looking at us from inside that thing. You beter remove it right away!’ And we, the polite Scandinavians, did as instructed, of course.
Why these personal anecdotes? Don’t they seem rather insignificant and self-referential in relation to a prominent, international biennial, especially in the face of the grim political reality surrounding biennials right now? Yes, of course. But as individuals, artists or curators, we have litle power alone, and would have even less if we did not continue to share our stories. Often, we cannot take on the big fight in the grand arena of politics and mainstream media, but we can break out of our isolation by communicating our personal stories with each other. Many people all over the world have to fight daily just to be accepted for who they are. In a statistical survey conducted by the World Values Survey in Turkey in 2009, people were asked who they would least prefer as their neighbour.1 In the top spots came a homosexual, an alcoholic, an American, a Christian and a Jew. Of course one can’t come to any conclusion based on such statistics, since many factors might have influenced the answers. But the point is that it maters for people who their neighbours are, and the small tensions on our streets or in our neighbourhoods are often symptomatic of society at large. Politics are made by and felt by individuals.
Artists often tell stories, but in the form of painting, sculpture, installation, film, sound, assemblage, performance or through actions. For many artists, it is their personal biographies that are the driving force, their starting point, their guideline and their material. An artist’s work is beter understood in the light of his or her background, and as generations of artists have shown, the personal can become political.
If asked, many people would probably say they’d prefer not to have an artist as a neighbour.
You will notice that we constantly shift between the terms ‘home’ and ‘neighbour’ in this introduction. The 15th Istanbul Biennial explores how our perception of home has changed over the past decades, how we protect, shelter and express our identities within our domestic setings, but also how these private spheres, our homes, function next to each other. By naming the exhibition ‘a good neighbour’, we aim to steer the focus away from home as dwelling and design, and instead to focus on those who are living side-by-side.
The term neighbour is of course also applicable to oneself. How do we become good neighbours? Do we accept the differences we might have in relation to the people next to us? Our reactions towards our neighbours say quite a bit about ourselves. As Nancy L. Rosenblum puts it: ‘We don’t always have the wherewithal – the imaginative probing, patience, or common sense – for self-reflection. We don’t atend to ourselves. Neighbours may draw back that curtain of inatention and prod us into minding our own
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business.’2 By ‘minding our own business’ she doesn’t mean staying out of others’ business, but truly engaging with ourselves in the light of other people’s lives.
Matters concerning belonging, living modes and the divide between public and private have long been part of our own research as artists. Some of what we have discovered along the way has been useful in curating the 15th Istanbul Biennial. But in our meetings with artists from other places in the world, the scope has widened far beyond anything that we could have imagined on our own. Home and belonging is as multilayered a theme as can be. Still, it is a subject matter that is relevant for everyone; that anyone can speak about from personal experience. Right now, in a climate of conflict in many geographical regions, we find this important for a biennial that is visited by hundreds of thousands of people. In times where political problems are looming so large they seem ungraspable, inaccessible and unfathomable to us as individuals, we hope to bring politics home – back to its roots. The microcosm reflects the macrocosm and vice versa.
‘I travelled a great deal at the bottom of my bed’, writes Georges Perec at the beginning of Species of Spaces. 3 Just like Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, Perec seems to value the importance of day-dreaming, of the home being a natural, protective seting for the immense power of human imagination. But he doesn’t want us to stay in bed all day. Amongst many other things, he lists ‘Things we ought to do systematically from time to time’, which begins:
In the building you live in: go and call on your neighbours; look at what there is on the party wall, for example; confirm, or belie, the homotopology of the accommodation. See what use they have made of it; notice how unfamiliar things may come to seem as a result of taking staircase B instead of staircase A, or of going up to the fifth floor when you live on the second; try to imagine on what a collective existence might be based, within the confines of this same building.
Within the institutional and spatial confines of the sites we are using for ‘a good neighbour’, we imagine the co-existence of multiple identities. Five out of the six venues that we have selected are within walking distance of each other, and together they constitute a sort of neighbourhood in themselves. It might only be for a short time, but hopefully such an imagined community on a smaller, symbolic scale, can help to inspire real-life communities on a larger scale.
Later on, Perec leads us out onto the street:
Carry on
Until the scene becomes improbable until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, beter still, until you can no longer understand what is happening, until the whole place becomes strange, until you no longer understand that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements … Make torrential rain fall, smash everything, make grass grow, Replace the people by cows.
And this is what artists do. In our exhibition, Tsang Kin-Wah lets floods of religious dogmas pour down over you, Latifa Echakhch chips away murals that once depicted people gathering at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, Lungiswa Gqunta plants a lawn where broken Coca Cola botles act as leaves of grass, and Xiao Yu invites two Mongolian farmers and their donkey to plough a field of concrete amongst the developments on the Bosphorus harbour.
As artists, we often try to exhaust the conventional signs and control mechanisms within our urban landscapes: by bending the rules, by adding beauty to what already exists, by questioning the established. The artist Burçak Bingöl adds even more surveillance cameras on public facades, although her dysfunctional surveillance devices are made of porcelain with wilted flowers caught in their glazing. Her fellow Turkish artist Candeğer Furtun has made a row of ceramic male legs, displaying a culture of machismo through the way each pair is spread wide open. The masculine element is apparent, even though the legs are smooth, and there are no genitals atached to them. Just through their positions we know that we are being confronted with a psychological image of the male body. At a visit to her Istanbul studio, which Furtun has had since 1964, she told us that when she made this work in the early 1990s, she used her small-framed assistant as a model, to ensure that the forms would fit into her kiln – which was already the biggest one that the local municipality would allow her in the middle of Istanbul.
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Species of Spaces starts out by dissecting the meaning of the bed, in the minute detail and anecdotal sprawl typical of Perec, then moves from the bed to describing the parts that make up an apartment, then moves out onto the street, into the neighbourhood, on to the town, out to the countryside, onwards to the country as a whole, then the world. The later part is for the most part made up of musings on space:
I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin:
My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grown (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the atic of my childhood filled with intact memories … Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.
If we accept that our own lives don’t automatically offer real spaces of stability, that even our memory of a stable and comforting place is always compromised by the passage of time, then perhaps we’ll be more accepting of spaces and future realities that are seemingly unpredictable and challenged by outside forces; perhaps we’ll be less afraid of the unfamiliar.
Perec does not possess a particularly romantic view of space, which is also apparent in his thoughts on the meaning of home and neighbourhood. He proposes a different way of living, where, rather than having a room for every function in one apartment, he would have rooms spread over many different neighbourhoods. He would bathe and shower in one neighbourhood, cook in another, sleep somewhere else and listen to music in yet another.
This instability of space in the form of home is found in several of the works in the 15th Istanbul Biennial, starting ‘from the cradle’ so to speak, with Aude Pariset’s worms eating away at a styrofoam matress in a baby’s cot, ending with Vajiko Chachkhiani’s calm but disturbing video of a man staring out of the window from a hospice, and reaching even somewhere beyond the grave with both Dan Stockholm’s and Kim Heecheon’s atempts to recall the memories of each of their late fathers. Another of the forty questions that constituted our first press release was: ‘Is a good neighbour just one of those sentimental childhood memories?’
Moving beyond childhood to early adulthood, Young-Jun Tak’s second studio apartment in Seoul is rendered at its full scale in the form of a 24-square-metre white sculpture hanging upside down, low above our heads, as we enter Istanbul Modern. Further inside the museum, Volkan Aslan’s three-channel film Home Sweet Home is screened. At first glance everything seems perfectly normal here – a young woman re-poting a plant, another rolling a cigarete – until you realise that one home is stacked upon another as they both sail away on an unknown journey down the Bosphorus. Aslan presented his hand-drawn storyboard to us last autumn and we are happy that the Biennial was able to commission this work, some elements of which remind us of one of our favourite film directors, Federico Fellini.
In the artist collective Yoğunluk’s apartment, everything is dark, and the black, latex-covered surfaces are hardly recognisable through touch – here we really become estranged in the way described by Perec: only the sound from behind the walls gives you a hint of where you are. In the apartment we lose orientation as if trapped inside a spooky movie. This is not unlike the claustrophobic feeling one experiences when in the midst of Leander Schönweger’s endless series of doorways, which he has installed in the atic of the Galata Greek Primary School. On the ground floor of the same building, Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s anonymous, non-descript home literally splits apart horizontally, the objects in constant movement, driven by performers as though they were an otherworldly force.
A particularly haunting picture of a home in peril and in ruin is performed by the deaf-mute child in Erkan Özgen’s film Wonderland. In a time of one of the world’s largest migrant crises to date, the Syrian boy stands alone on a bare rug in his newfound home in Turkey, desperately trying to convey to us with gestures, louder than words and stronger than images on the news can do, what horrors he, and many other migrants, have been through.
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Issues around the loss of a safe home, in a physical or emotional sense, and the ensuing migration are also dealt with in other works in the exhibition. In Heba Y. Amin’s film As Birds Flying, the migration of birds across borders plays a poignant, symbolic role. Close to where this poetic film is presented, Olaf Metzel has created a new version of his installation Sammelstelle, which was first made in 1992, at the start of the Yugoslavian wars. The enclosed space is covered with corrugated metal sheets and trash cans, and is only accessible through a revolving metal door, which you’re unsure will operate the opposite way to ever let you out again. When visiting our studio in Berlin to discuss his project, Metzel, who now lives in Munich, could tell us plenty of anecdotes about our neighbourhood, Neukölln, where he grew up in the 1960s. In Neukölln, he witnessed the first immigration to Germany from Turkey, and early on formed friendships within the Turkish communities. He told us that these experiences with cultures different from his own have been of great importance for his work as an artist.
On another floor you find Mahmoud Obaidi’s series of eight books, Compact Home Project, with metal covers and mesh for paper, containing his sketches, newspaper clippings, leters and notes. The durable books were conceived to protect scraps of the artist’s life as he had to flee war in his native Iraq. In a similar manner, Mirak Jamal has created a passageway flanked by his works on plasterboard, which contains fragments and transfers of drawings he did as a child. Some depict scenes from Iran before he and his family left the country, seen through a child’s eyes.
What happened to the optimism of the last half of the twentieth century? It is not that long ago that most people – in the West at least – believed in constant progress, expansion and development. Fernando Lanhas was a painter and an architect, and in his architectural collages from the 1960s, we see early signs that the utopian dream of the perfect, smooth, minimal and functional modernist home is cracking. Klara Lidén is also working with the failure of modernist ideals, but from a contemporary perspective. At Istanbul Modern, which is soon to be replaced by the museum’s new building, Lidén has installed a long construction fence, the back of which she has personalised into a domestic-looking space by adding makeshift seating and simple self-made lamps. Fences often come up in relation to neighbours, as in the line ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ from a poem by American poet Robert Frost. (Jens Hoffmann expands on the perception and intended meaning of this line in his text for the Biennial’s story book.) Compared to Lidén’s rough construction barrier, Kasia Fudakowski’s fence is more transparent, decorative and suburban in its style. She has given each of its panels a name and an identity, like the individual characters that one might encounter in any neighbourhood.
Physical and social barriers are a result of speculative urban development, where big capital is the big winner. The victims are often students, artists and other low-income groups. At the Galata Greek Primary School, Bilal Yilmaz’s mechanical projection maps the disappearance of traditional crafts workshops in central Istanbul. In the room opposite, Morag Keil and Georgie Netell’s film The Fascism of Everyday Life documents their artist friends’ absurd living condi- 47 tions in a gentrifying part of East London, while Sim Chi Yin’s photographic series The Rat Tribe at the Pera Museum shows how Chinese workers and students live illegally in small, windowless bunker rooms in the basements of Beijing buildings. How can such social disparity be avoided? In her beautifully crafted installation consisting of a sparse wooden interior, Dayanita Singh seems to propose one solution: let’s all consume less and surround ourselves with fewer items in our everyday lives. In our first meeting with Singh over Skype between New Delhi and Berlin last summer and later at a meeting with her in London, she talked about having based her practice on a rule never to produce anything that wouldn’t fit into her own home.
In the male section of a disused fifthteen-century hammam in the Yavuz Sultan Selim neighbourhood, are works by two female artists – Monica Bonvicini’s commissioned sculptural work for the Biennial and the choreographer Tuğce Tuna’s site-specific dance piece. The smaller female part of the hammam is dedicated to Stephen G. Rhodes’ immersive installation. Rhodes takes as his starting point natural catastrophe and the lack of adequate government response to poverty and prejudice against race and class in Louisiana where he has spent time. The installation consists of altered footage from American TV media, amusement-park equipment, toys and pop cultural objects that are assembled into a Tower-of-Babel-like universe.
In another separate building, ARK Kültür, back in the Cihangir area, Mahmoud Khaled has created a detailed ‘home museum’ dedicated to a fictive, unnamed immigrant from Egypt, where the artist was born and has lived most of his life. The Proposal for a Museum of an Unknown Crying Man is inspired by the weeping man pictured in an iconic photograph, where he holds a white t-shirt up to his face to cover his
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identity. He was one of a large group of gay men arrested at a party on a boat called The Queen in Egypt in 2001. With furniture, art and artefacts spread over three floors, the house-museum speculates on who this man might have been, what his past was like, and why he fled to Turkey, where homosexuality is not illegal. Khaled’s work is not the only one that touches upon queer identity. Among other important contributions are Henrik Olesen’s Cables, Keys, Glasses, Lights and Gözde İlkin’s embroidered take on her family album.
In addition to all the newly commissioned and recent works by contemporary artists in this Biennial, it has also been important for us to include historic positions from artists who have passed away. We have already mentioned Lanhas, but works by Louise Bourgeois, Liliana Maresca and Lee Miller also play a significant role in this Biennial’s narratives. Bourgeois' photogravure Femme Maison inspired Monica Bonvicini's video installation Hausfrau Swinging, which is displayed in the same room at Pera Museum. In Bonvicini's video, a neutral, white model house is placed atop a woman's naked body, a house-head that she repeatedly bangs against a corner of white walls.
Liliana Maresca was active as an artist as Argentina came out of dictatorship in 1983, and some of her photo performances dealt with this novel freedom, and the new potential it brought with it, in a personal and poetic way. In a series of photos shown at Pera Museum, she is seen holding a small egg – symbolic of the future and growth – against a backdrop of open doors. The Argentinian curator Javier Villa, only one of the many people who have helped us with advice and suggestions in the curatorial process over the past sixteen months, enthusiastically introduced us to Maresca’s work and life over a cup of coffee in Buenos Aires last December, generously showing us the blueprints of his book on her oeuvre. Lee Miller’s iconic photos pay witness to the end of another twentieth-century dictatorship: some depict her siting naked in Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich apartment shortly after he had shot himself in Berlin, while others show female Soviet prisoners of war trying on Eva Braun’s make up.
The historic consciousness is indeed an important part of many of this exhibition’s projects, not least Fred Wilson’s elaborate, multi-disciplinary installation Afro Kismet. It was already clear from our first conversations with Wilson in New York that it would make sense to follow up on some of the themes he had explored in his legendary American Pavilion project at the Venice Biennale in 2004. Historically, the cultural presence of Africans in the Venetian empire was connected to, and paralleled within, the Otoman Empire.
As Perec pointed out, any space needs to be reassessed, to be re-conquered, over and over again. There is no such thing as a static space, not even the personal space that one carries with oneself. More than many others, the people of Turkey have of late experienced shifts in the realities surrounding them. Many had long sensed a process of division and destabilisation, whereas others have become aware of this only in the aftermath of the atempted coup on 15 July 2016. Since we chose the title ‘a good neighbour’ for the Biennial, there has not only been the coup atempt in Turkey, but the world has witnessed the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, and Trump being elected US President, in part by promising to erect a border wall between the US and Mexico. People are losing faith in their futures. The mass media push angles that make fertile ground for more populist politics with short-term solutions for complex problems and sow even more fear. The same questions need to be asked simultaneously in many places across the globe. This is part of the thinking behind initiating an international billboard project as part of the Biennial. The project is a collaboration between the photographer Lukas Wassmann, the graphic designer Rupert Smyth and ourselves. From Manchester to Sydney, and from Moscow to Chicago, we have collaborated with multiple cultural institutions to display a collection of billboards that relate to the Biennial theme. The billboards feature a selection of pho What happened to the optimism of the last half of the twentieth century? tographs by Wassmann that capture unexpected encounters between people. Each photo has been paired with a specific question, asking what makes a good neighbour: 'Is a good neighbour someone who just moved in?', 'Is a good neighbour a stranger you don’t fear?'
Two publications accompany ‘a good neighbour’: One is a book about the exhibition with a foreword by the Biennial director Bige Örer, this curatorial introduction, an essay by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and descriptions of every artist’s work by Pablo Larios. The other is a story book, which supplements the exhibition book by gathering together a wide variety of personal stories and memories about homes, neighbours and neighbourhoods. Contributors include artists, writers, academics and many others. Their accounts take on a myriad of forms and shapes, including short stories, confessional texts, creative essays, leters, dialogues and poems.
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In the early 1980s, when we were very young – practically teens – there was a big hit by the British ska band Madness, called ‘Our House’. It still gets airplay on popular radio stations. The tune has a naïve and familiar sound to it, and is easy to sing along to. The chorus repeatedly goes: ‘Our House, in the middle of our street’, and the verses tell about the banal, daily deeds of a normal working-class family, just going about their lives. But one sentence is sung much faster than the rest and is easily ignored: ‘Something tells you that you’ve got to get away from it.’ The key to the song’s success might be exactly this: that it epitomises our ambivalence towards our family homes. On the one hand we romanticise them; on the other, we distance ourselves from them. The video that accompanied the song, and was played over and over again on MTV in its heyday, showed the band further poking fun at their own lyrics by having one of the young male band members playing the busy-bee mother, and by seting the whole home scene in a Victorian working-class home with 50s wallpaper and furnishings, interspersed with clips showing the Playboy mansion and Buckingham Palace. Neither of us were big fans of the song, but we came to think of it when reading Mary Douglas’ text ‘The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space’ while preparing for this Biennial. It starts by saying:
The more we reflect on the tyranny of the home, the less surprising it is that the young wish to be free of its scrutiny and control. The evident nostalgia in much writing about the idea of home is more surprising. The mixture of nostalgia and resistance explains why the topic is so often treated as humorous.
In this sense, ‘Our House’ was an interesting hit, because it translated to a larger audience the sentiments that were explored by the punk movement. It was part of the post-punk era, which refused to accept normative family values and traditions and mediated this rebellion through popular culture to the masses. It opened up for the exploration of alternative lifestyles both in terms of diversity and accessibility for a larger part of society. It was at some point in these years, in this climate, that Michael wrote a poem that he titled ‘Home is the Place You Left’, a title that we later used for artworks, an exhibition we curated in Ingar’s home town Trondheim, and not least a collection of writings on what ‘home’ meant to many of our friends in 2008. That book can be seen as precursor to the story book that accompanies the 15th Istanbul Biennial.
But a biennial is more than its exhibition and its publications. The public programme, coordinated by Zeyno Pekünlü, kicks off during the opening days. In addition to the international symposia held during the opening and closing weekends, there are periodic events in which the audience has the opportunity to participate in discussions, debates and workshops. The first symposium is titled ‘Chosen Families’ and is closely linked to the theme of non-normative ways of living, which is apparent throughout the exhibition itself. The second symposium is called ‘Mutual Fate’ and looks at the neighbouring relationship between humans and nature, a theme that is also apparent in the exhibition, especially in the work of Mark Dion and Alper Aydın.
We would like to extend a big thank you to the Biennial team at İKSV in Istanbul and to all the artists who have guided and supported and welcomed our baby steps into biennial curatorship. Bige Örer has been the kindest and most supportive director one could wish for, and her core team – Elif Kamışlı, Özkan Cangüven and Gamze Öztürk – has become like family in the process. Another big thank you goes to Sofie Krogh Christensen, our curatorial assistant, without whom we would have lost control long ago. Special thanks also to Rupert Smyth for his great graphic design work and team spirit. We are also very grateful to our galleries and to our own studio in Berlin for everyone’s continued patience with us. And last but not least, we’d like to thank the writers and the editors and co-editors who have made this two-part publication possible.
We thank the citizens of Istanbul for leting us occupy these spaces temporarily, like gentle intruders and friendly viruses, and for allowing us to occupy a bit of their time.
Is a good neighbour too much to ask for?
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