Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)

The curators of this year's Istanbul Biennial, Jens Hoffman and Adriano Pedrosa, deflate the overblown biennial format, tossed out locality as a topic of debate and funneled an entire biennial – comprising five group shows and 55 solo exhibitions – into two waterside warehouses. Sidelining ‘nostalgic or romantic’ views of the city as a crossroads between East and West, a tendency of earlier editions, they declare allegiance to ‘aesthetic concerns’: put that art back where it belongs.

Their title, Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), plays on the titles of the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres and is echoed in the group shows, each of which adapts the name of one of his works. This pairing – a neutral signifier plus a parenthetical nod to a field of meaning – crisply announces that meaning is mutable, and that the biennial's business commences from there. González-Torres himself is absent but for a single wall text in each group describing his work. Hoffman and Pedrosa suggest that his role should be thought of no differently than more typical uses of literature, music or political events as curatorial inspiration.

Just how little these group exhibitions depart from their allegedly flexible premises is the biennial's major disappointment. Each grouping relentlessly strikes a single note over and over again, swelling into a sort of dogmatic march where guns are bad toys for bad boys, in Untitled (Death by Gun); being gay is about men having sex with men, in Untitled (Ross); and more than a dozen art works feature the written page as a means to address the historical record, in Untitled (History). Still, such tone-deaf statements are nuanced by the solo exhibitions that cluster around them in a warren of free-standing white cubes designed by the Tokyo-based architect Ryue Nishizawa. These demonstrate a higher sensitivity to the intersecting politics of geography, gender and media. (A majority of artists come from the Middle East and Latin America).

A series of revelatory rooms feature the work of women artists from the 1950s to the ’70s is the biennial's major strength. Peruvian Teresa Burga's dry 1978 catalog of her body's form and functions, Elizabeth Catlett's 1920s linocuts and prints of African-American sharecroppers, and Turkish sculptor Füsun Onur's work with ceramic, wood, and fabric, lay the formal ground for a biennial that seeks to counter the bombast of recent mega-exhibitions with a quieter programme of photography, drawings, prints, textiles and sculpture. (There are almost no videos or large installations, and hardly a hint of the Internet or events of the last decade; next door, the Istanbul Modern's flashy Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey is a study in contrasts.)

Their use of media also carries the historical weight of life under authoritarian regimes, a significant issue in Turkey where, over the last decade, efforts to recover the country's forgotten 20th-century artists have multiplied exponentially. Brătescu's Vestigii (1978), patches of layered fabric scraps hovering between abstraction and figuration, came out of her experiences working outside accepted artistic norms in rural Communist Romania. Arun's black and white photographs of 1950s Anatolia – villagers, camels, a horse-drawn cart parading movie posters through a village – provide little-seen images of Cold War Turkey, where a booming film industry played a major role in international relations.


Untitled (Death by Gun), in which the few women artists included produce domesticated testimonies to violence largely perpetrated by men, makes for a surprising shift from the deft selections and thoughtful gender politics of many of the solo shows. Rózsa Polgár and Ella Littwitz present a blanket and a sheet riddled with bullet holes, respectively; Jazmín López films violent child's play. Iconic photojournalism (Mathew Brady's American Civil war images, Eddie Adams' Street Execution of a Viet Cong Prisoner, Weegee's New York homicides) sits uneasily alongside Raymond Pettibon drawings, Chris Burden's Shoot (1971), and Mat Collishaw's emblematic Bullet Hole (1988). The fact that this is one of the only rooms where American and British artists dominate already signals the difficulty of treating “gun violence” as an invariable concept in contexts with wildly different political and legislative histories. (Death by Gun) hews close to the curatorial strategy used by Hoffmann in his trilogy of illustrative ‘book shows’ at the CCA Wattis over the last few years. In Istanbul, a range of artworks are forced to conform to a narrative pattern where ‘death by gun’ aborts the action, but we are denied anything further, including responsibility.

Untitled (Abstraction) pushes the programme of injecting Modernist abstraction with life. In a winning grouping, a series of photographs taken from the interior of a glass box with a black line around its center, by the little-known Hungarian conceptualist Dóra Maurer, is matched with Ed Krasinski's Intervention (1981), a horizontal stripe of his signature blue tape stretching across the wall; Alexander Gutke's Singularity (2010), a 16mm film spooled between the corners of the space, frames the ensemble.

Grids of fruit, hair, faces and ants are the less felicitous results of a literalizing impulse that unites all of the five group exhibitions. (Though this emphasis on clarity also produces wonderfully lucid exhibition texts.) The written page is redacted, shredded, photographed, stamped, pulverized, and rolled into pearls in Untitled (History), strangely blind to alternative ways that history is written now (from Wikileaks to Twitter), or the potential of an art exhibition to interrogate specifically visual, rather than textual, strategies of chronicling events. In Untitled (Passport) maps are rotated, voided, cut up, redrawn and woven into rugs, often by Palestinians. But American artists like Tom Burr, Collier Schorr, and Colter Jacobsen get the lease on AIDS and gay sex, with a strong representation in Untitled (Ross), where a promising interpretation of González-Torres's 1991 candy pour (a portrait of his late partner Ross Laycock) gets lost in a slew of beds and bodies.

From this room, Kutluğ Ataman's Jarse (2011) – an altered military health report that catalogues his long-standing interest in men – was a major preoccupation for the Turkish media, building on the momentum of a Turkish football team Trabzonspor coach's recent denunciation of Ataman's 2004 work Kuba as “terrorist propaganda” at a football press conference. The mainstream paper Hürriyet listed Jarse as a ‘must-see’, alongside an advisory for local school teachers to sign up for a biennial educators' conference. Turkey has been relatively at ease with alternative sexualities for some time, and it's disappointing to see an opportunity missed to push public discussion into more complicated territory.

In the solo shows, photography abets a number of projects that claim happy participation in the cult of a look gone by. Simryn Gill's entropic photographs of abandoned housing near Kuala Lumpur; Akram Zaatari's recovered Beirut studio portraits; and Jonathas de Andrade's and Marwa Arsanios's snapshot-based investigations of tropical Modernism continue a genre that romanticizes histories of Modernism ‘at the margins’. Often these say more about the anxieties of current generations – distant enough to appreciate enduring relics, fraught by their impending disappearance – than the ultimate aim of all this preservation.

Another strain of work melds craft, humour and stark political messages. A South African collective, the Ardmore Ceramic Art Studio’s ceramics are partially produced by all of its members, carrying the marks of many hands' work in the service of a community: their narrative texts and bright animated figures are geared towards HIV/AIDS awareness, and is one of the only examples in the biennial of what could be called ‘social practice’. Australian artist Newell Harry's Gift Mats (2011), a form of currency in the South Pacific, are commissioned from local weavers and comment slyly on race in Harry's own rhythmic argot: ‘White Whine, Clean Skins’; ‘Stret Street, Sly Store’.

Hoffman and Pedrosa have deliberately put a full-stop to the last half-decade of the Istanbul Biennial's history. (The only accompanying event was a conference last November that convened former curators, resulting in the publication Remembering Istanbul.) Following Charles Esche and Vasıf Kortun's 2005 edition, Istanbul, recent iterations have gradually seeped from the city's historical core into its old apartment buildings, abandoned factories and busy commercial districts, tracing a partial history of Istanbul's modernization along the way. Although Hoffman and Pedrosa have adopted the museum's guise and discarded the habitual eulogistic ‘engagement’ with the city itself, they haven’t pressured the biennial format beyond recognition. Rather, they have made use of its sheer volume and international pull to enact some tried and true agendas, recovering unknowns and diagnosing shared impulses. Unlike many former curators, they have the luxury of an established international viewership and a local audience educated at the biennial itself – last week, for the first time, I overheard it called ‘mainstream’.

Originally appeared frieze magazine.

Yoshua Okón - Hammer Museum, LA

The term ‘banana republic’ emerged at the turn of the century, inspired by the countries of Honduras and Guatemala, which fell in thrall to international corporations eager to export the newly popular fruit. CIA-supported corporate interests violently divested rural Mayan populations of both land and livelihood, feeding into decades of poverty and unrest across Central America. The American corporation the United Fruit Company earned itself the nickname ‘El Pulpo’ (The Octopus) for its perfidious and far-reaching involvement in these nations' economies. It was bitterly denounced by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in his 1950 poem United Fruit Co., whose opening lines are later followed by an evocation of the ‘comic opera’ of CIA-supported puppet governments, and a roster of colluding dictators: ‘When the trumpet blared everything / on earth was prepared / and Jehovah distributed the world / to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda, / Ford Mothers, and other entities: / United Fruit, Inc. / reserved itself the juiciest, / the central seaboard of my land, / America’s sweet waist.’

Yoshua Okón's four-channel video installation Octopus (2011) – produced during a residency at the Hammer Museum – quietly invokes the recent history of these Central American banana republics while focusing on a group of Guatemalan Mayan men in Los Angeles today. The setting is the car park of Home Depot (‘California's Home Improvement Warehouse’) in Cypress Park, a working-class neighbourhood largely populated by immigrants, where the video's subjects spend most of their days waiting for employment as day labourers – as do countless other men at Home Depot lots across the city. Divided into two groups, they wordlessly play out short, scripted scenes that draw loosely on their experiences fighting as guerillas or in the military during the civil wars that raged in Guatemala between 1954 (when president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was deposed in a CIA-supported coup d'état) and 1996 (when the United Nations helped broker a peace agreement).

The ‘action’ is low-key and verges on slow-motion, the sounds of the car park muted. Never clashing directly, the two camps scout out the terrain, perching atop shopping carts with imaginary binoculars, shimmying out from underneath cars on their shoulder blades, and crouching behind potted plants as cars and shoppers pass by. At one point, silently and cautiously, two men emerge from between a row of parked cars. Arms outstretched like mock-machine guns, they swivel slowly, surveying the terrain as they move across the asphalt no-man's land toward the shelter of the next parked row. Five or six others appear behind them, dropping quickly to the ground and somersaulting to safety. A pick-up truck drives by with a sticker on its rear bumper: ‘Voter for a New Foreign Policy.’

Their strategic movements through the parking lot of Home Depot re-territorialize this supposedly Guatemalan history, as the former participants superimpose instances of Guatemalan conflict on the topography of labour in LA. Octopus is thus also a revisionist move of significant local import, a playful but resolute intervention that cuts across anti-immigration rhetoric, counters stereotypes about the demographic make-up of immigrant populations in Southern California, and illuminates the historical circumstances that bring undocumented workers to sites like the Home Depot lot. The US is host to the largest Guatemalan diaspora in the world, and Okón's investigation of these Guatemalan Mayans' 'marginal' presence at the center of a highly visible informal labour economy in L.A. resonates with earlier projects addressing the ways marginalized individuals or communities function within the mainstream. Similar questions shoot through Okón's Southern California-based projects – like Hipnostasis, a 2009 collaboration with Raymond Pettibon, featured Venice Beach bums who have knocked about the LA beach for several decades, and White Russians (2008), a collaboration with residents of an isolated High Desert community – to sites slightly further afield, as in Tarzan (2003), about the 1970s Turkish movie star who played Tarzan and continues to be known as such on the streets of Istanbul today, or Bocanegra (2007), which records the activities of a mixed group of Nazi aficionados in Mexico City.

Octopus is not about breaking out, acting up, wreaking havoc – if anything, the actions of Okón's protagonists appear less of consequence in the parking lot than in the museum, where, under the artist’s crisp editing, they take on the shape of an alternative form of history-writing. Although, in Okón's words, the day workers have moved out of a state of ‘invisibility’ to the position of ‘protagonists’, their new mode of occupying space does not appear to conflict dramatically with the ebb and flow of the parking lot (ironically, one of L.A.’s most pedestrianized zones). As distinct from the tradition of historical reenactment – whose replication of specific incidents secures the original event all the more firmly in the past – Okón's two-track approach works against a vision of history as episodic, conclusive, or even particularly past.

Originally appeared frieze magazine.

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art

Doha, Qatar

Speculation about the museum boom in the Middle East has been dominated by the projects’ staggering scale. This rapidly evolving tale of ambition is narrated with names and numbers: Frank Gehry has designed a fifth Guggenheim (the largest to date) and Jean Nouvel is tackling the Louvre (exclusive use of the French museum’s name in the region was won for a reported US$1.3 billion). These are just two of the six new museums – each designed by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect – on the US$27 billion dollar Saadiyat Island development in Abu Dhabi, which is due to open next year; further up the Gulf, at the heart of Dubai’s Culture Village, a Zaha Hadid-designed opera house and gallery complex is currently under construction. Until recently the audacity of these projects diverted attention from the more long-term question of the collections (and audiences) that will fill them. But the inauguration of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, at the end of December has pushed issues of collecting to the fore. The new institution’s three inaugural exhibitions of modern and contemporary art – which together comprise almost 150 artists – testify to the challenges of writing of art history outside the West, providing one of the most significant opportunities to think about non-Western art in the museum since ‘Magiciens de la Terre’, Jean-Hubert Martin’s 1989 Centre Pompidou survey.

As a public museum based around a private collection, Mathaf (Arabic for ‘museum’) is a rare thing in the Arab world, where most modern art collections are privately owned but kept behind closed doors. In place of a starchitect design, the institution temporarily occupies a former school, a 5,500 square-metre building that has been subtly renovated by French architect Jean-François Bodin. Mathaf is situated west of the downtown area in Doha’s low-key Education City, home to several Qatar branches of US university campuses; the 15-minute drive out there takes you past a smattering of skyscrapers – bulbous, mirrored or zigzagging – and a camel-racing stadium. The collection is that of Mathaf’s founder, Sheikh Hassan, a member of the ruling al-Thani family which has been in power since the early 19th century, and consists of some 6,000 art works spanning 1840 to the present (making it the most extensive collection of modern Arab art in world). Aside from the obligatory café and shop, the site comprises two floors of exhibition space, a library and education department; its screen-wrapped white façade is reminiscent of scaffolding, as though to emphasize that this is an institution-in-progress. This is an important concession in an area that has few art schools or well-established studios, museums and commercial galleries, and suggests a more considered path than that which is currently being taken by the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Mathaf is one of four museums in Doha overseen by the state-run Qatar Museums Authority. The first was IM Pei’s stunning Museum of Islamic Art, an impeccably installed building that opened in 2008 and sits on a manmade island 60 metres off the Corniche. Nearby, and due to open in 2013, is a Nouvel-designed National Museum, a series of low-lying, interlocking pavilions that mimic a desert rose. An Orientalist Museum is also on the horizon (part of its unparalleled collection is currently on view at the Museum of Islamic Art, and in the travelling exhibition ‘From Delacroix to Kandinsky: Orientalism in Europe’). This cluster of new exhibition spaces both institutionalizes and problematizes the art-historical roles traditionally assigned to art of the Middle East.

Why, then, are Mathaf’s cosmopolitan ambitions constricted under its designation as the ‘Arab’ Museum of Modern Art (rather than the Doha MoMA, for example)? Though acting director Wassan al-Khudairi notes that the institution aims to provide an Arab perspective on modernity (rather than a collection and exhibition programme limited to Arab art), its name quietly asserts a language- and ethnicity-based viewpoint that clearly excludes Turkish and Iranian artists (who are all but absent from the three vast survey shows). The subtitle of ‘Sajjil’ (To Record), one of the three opening shows, is ‘A Century of Modern Art’, but – with more than half of the selected artists coming from Egypt and Iraq, and only a handful from the Gulf – the story seems far from complete. Spread across Mathaf’s 12 double-height galleries, the sweeping survey rarely includes more than a single work by a selected artist, and is ordered into ten thematic categories (nature, abstraction, calligraphy, and so on). In this the exhibition conforms to the tried and tested stereotypes of exhibiting art from the region, as seen in both the New York MoMA’s much-criticized ‘Without Boundary’ (2006) and, since opening in 2005, the Istanbul Modern Art Museum’s installation of its permanent collection. This is undoubtedly an important early step to writing a largely unwritten history, but Mathaf’s approach seems also to testify to a certain unwillingness to take a second stride. While it purposefully sets out not to write a national art history, its allegedly looser boundaries nevertheless often turn out to be more restrictive than they first appear.

The counterpoint to this thematic survey of 20th-century works is the first large-scale presentation of contemporary art in Qatar. Co-curated by curatorial consultants Sam Bardouil and Till Fellrath, ‘Told / Untold / Retold’ comprises 23 specially commissioned works by some of the more widely-exhibited artists affiliated with the region – Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Lamia Joreige, Mounir Fatmi and Kader Attia. Installed in a fluid, three-part labyrinth in a temporary exhibition hall (built for a forthcoming Takeshi Murakami show) in the grounds of the Museum of Islamic Art, the show explores story-telling in different tenses while insisting on an idea of ‘transmodern reality’ (think: Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’ theory). Some works push beyond the dominant aesthetics of large-scale glitz and the oppressively symbolic, in particular the paintings by Jeffar Khaldi and a new installment of Khalil Rabah’s ongoing ‘United States of Palestine’ project. Still, at the opening the organizers were frustratingly vague about what will become of these commissions – none seem to belong to the Mathaf collection yet, nor is there any guarantee of this happening. In the same exhibition hall, ‘Interventions’ is curated by art historian Nada Shabout and features five solo presentations of old and newly commissioned work by senior artists already included in Mathaf’s permanent collection. The central argument here, as in an accompanying two-day academic conference, is against a reductive account of Middle Eastern art as merely derivative of the Western Modernist project.

But the largest challenge cited in the conference and three inaugural exhibitions is what is yet to be done. With little awareness of 20th-century art and limited local audiences, lack is routinely cited as a condition of production in the region. Whether, and how, the perception of this absence continues is pressing for both Mathaf and the other soon-to-be-completed institutions in the Gulf. As architecture critic Shumon Basar has noted, the oil-rich Gulf states often fail the Western critic’s litmus test of what passes for a ‘good city’, in that Enlightenment values or forums, political representation and cultural institutions do not appear in their familiar guises or, sometimes, at all. That many commentators in the West continue to display some resistance to the Gulf’s museum boom points to a current refusal to differentiate between the aspirations of these new institutions and those of the resorts that are being developed in tandem with them. At one Mathaf panel discussion, one of the curators of ‘Told…’ recited a touching anecdote about his epiphany, three days before the opening, that the exhibition might also appeal to the workers currently building the gallery walls around him. While this should be judiciously weighed against the general thoughtfulness of Mathaf’s overall project, the comment did point toward the next set of questions. How serious Doha’s intentions are to develop broader understanding and local audiences, or to continue to loosen the Mathaf collection’s own boundaries, remains to be seen.

With Sam Thorne. Originally appeared Frieze March 2011.

Decolonizing Architecture - REDCAT

In August, 1993, a red line was drawn on a map of the West Bank, dividing it into three zones: one in Israeli hands, one under Palestinian control, and one under shared (Israeli military) and (Palestinian civilian) supervision, in an arrangement known as the Oslo Accords. In "Decolonizing Architecture," a recent exhibition project at REDCAT, this thread of a line is spatialized, transformed into a five-and-a-half-meter stripe, and projected deep into a series of photographic landscapes. Re-scaled at 1:20,000, red ink razors across empty territory and through dividing walls, bleeding indiscriminately into the real space of local communities. The width of the line is presented as an undefined, extraterritorial space where prevailing legal contingencies are void and indeterminate possibilities open up. Titled The Red Castle and the Lawless Line (after a newly-built castle that falls in its trajectory), the project is one of a trio that make up this exhibition, where territorial surveys, research reports, architectural plans, photographs, and architectural models provide a site for politics and poetics to converge.

Founded in 2007, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) focuses on Palestine as a prism through which to view larger issues of architecture and decolonization in general. The REDCAT exhibit marks the first time that the Bethlehem-based DAAR has shown in the U.S, and though the exhibition bears the names of Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, the group cites a range of other resident-collaborators. At his opening talk, Weizman framed DAAR’s activities as a search for a “third way” to inhabit defunct colonial infrastructures—an approach that would neither resort to pure destruction, nor continue to trace the well-worn paths of colonial use once power had shifted.

In How to Inhabit Your Enemy’s House, for example, the collective confront the deserted Israeli settlements left behind in Gaza and the West Bank from 2005 onwards, model suburbs turned post-apocalyptic when they were forcibly emptied out on short notice. Their main proposition is visualized in the literal superimposition of pre-settlement landownership maps over the existing suburban fabric, dual projections printed in a row of glossy research publications (with white gloves to turn white pages), and accompanied by two short videos (one 3-D) and an architectural model. The premise is straightforward: voided domestic spaces might host new public services, including hospitals and schools, in an area where these were previously unable to develop. The literal act of superimposition from above, discussion of “returning public property to the public,” and a palpable phobia of suburban models in general, seemed perplexingly basic, even dogmatic, in the wake of Weizman’s eloquent explanation of the far-from-basic circumstances in which DAAR functions. Is there something more to be gained by recalling the variegated histories of these structures themselves, established for an array of reasons—in some cases, with rabidly ideological intent, in others, because of a literal lack of space in the region?

What remains disappointingly unaltered in How to Inhabit Your Enemy’s House is a vision of these sites as an abstracted territory from which we remain at a comfortable remove (I guess all of these don’t come together in my mind as of a certain ethos…do you mean this is the zeitgeist of how we tend to represent these (kill me) zones of exclusion?; I really just wanted to emphasize that their particular array of representational strategies all add up to a series of abstracted, often mapped, views, that keep us at a remove)—something which the other two portions of the exhibit more successfully move beyond. Shifting registers, the project Return to Nature features a series of photographs, projected alterations for a deserted military base in Oush Grab. In what Weizman memorably described as a “Hitchcockian nightmare,” the unused site has been taken over by migratory birds. Photographs of the project—which is being conducted in cooperation with the Palestinian Wildlife Association—show cement walls encouraged to crumble via a regular grid of perfectly round holes drilled across their surface. What do you do with a military ghost town filled with sepulchral black birds? It’s hard to argue against the addition of a minimalist grid to enhance a process of guided ruination in the face of such surreal circumstances.

In 1995, Francis Alÿs staged The Leak, an embodied reinterpretation of Moshe Dayan’s iconic 1948 gesture of tracing a green line across a map to mark the armistice boundary at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. Alÿs followed the same border on foot, trailing a thin, wobbly stream of green paint behind him, pushing Dayan's historic act of line-drawing to the brink of the absurd. Like Alÿs, the altered digital photographs in The Red Castle and the Lawless Line follows the impulse to shift an abstract cartographic gesture to a new site, in an effort provoke alternative interpretations by engaging with its implications on the ground. But what may initially appear as catchy theorizations on a gallery wall are, in DAAR’s projects, embedded in a range of physical and institutional sites whose very distance from the gallery context is not always a comfortable one. According to Weizman, DAAR hopes to get the thickness of the red Oslo Accords into legislation; the Palestinian Wildlife Association will ostensibly be funding some kind of undertaking at Oush Grab; and when Weizman spoke of the unique power of the architectural model to focus a roomful of people on “transcending their ideological blocks,” one couldn’t help but wonder if this happened at meetings held to discuss the fate of the Israeli settlements, where both Weizman and Condoleeza Rice were present. Because this is first and foremost an architectural project, the concrete (political boundaries, historical facts) and the projected (ideas for the future, into a specific space) carry rather a different valence than they might in work (like Alÿs’s) that we are a bit more accustomed to seeing in the art gallery context. The architectural collective emphasize that their practice is a perpetual process; that it is not solution-oriented; that it is “not design, but an arena of speculation” devoted to “future scenarios for Palestine.” Nevertheless, “Decolonizing Architecture’s” REDCAT debut never makes it entirely clear: where do “speculation” and “execution” begin and end?

Originally appeared Bidoun #24.

Catching up with Vasif Kortun

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

Visit Art in America online for the full post.

In 2001, curator Vasif Kortun, former director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and curator of the 3rd and 9th Istanbul Biennials, founded Istanbul's Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. Over the next few years, Platform offered an international residency program, visiting lecturers series, and open artists archive, all of which drew artists, curators, and scholars to the city. Locally, Platform acted as a social hub for an artist community historically devoid of a gathering place; it provided an alternate art education to that offered by Turkey's conservative fine arts universities; for some artists, it was a portal to the art world beyond Turkey's borders.

The Istanbul Biennial, founded in 1987, offered similar opportunities for exposure and dialogue on a two-year cycle. But as a permanent institution, Platform — and Kortun — has arguably influenced a local Turkish art scene more than any other.

In 2007 Platform closed its doors to the public to undergo a complete overhaul. By autumn 2011 — Biennial season around here — Platform will be reworked, renamed, and ready to transform the Istanbul art world for the second time around. By the Biennial clock, 2009 marks the halfway point of the institution's four-year revamp. Kortun is laying low during this week's Biennial, finishing up Platform's new mission statement, and continuing to work behind the scenes. I caught up with him at his office on Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's busiest shopping street, to talk about the new "encyclopedic institution" he'll be part of, and how to deal with the growing demand for Turkish art and its history.

Turkey's preeminent hub for contemporary art will combine with the local Ottoman Bank Museum, a historical museum on Turkey's 19th and 20th century social and economic past which hosts exhibitions based in its extensive archive, and Garanti Gallery, an architecture-, and design-focused gallery also funded by the Turkish bank which supports Platform. (The bank is called Garanti - hence the catchy shared name.)

"At the end of the day it is going to be more or less an encyclopedic institution," says Kortun, discussing the Ottoman Bank Museum's research center for economic and social history, a 27,000 sq. ft. contemporary art gallery, a permanent space for "visible archives" including architectural models and plans, and a public library. Ambitious? Yes, but as Kortun points out, they are taking their time. Maybe this is a lesson learned through local observation, since SantralIstanbul, an arts and culture campus of even vaster scope, burned bright at its opening during the 2007 Istanbul Biennial and has proceeded to sputter - though not die - in the following couple years. "Here usually it is the other way around," notes Kortun. "People do a big exhibition, but we are going the other way, taking our time to build up. That doesn't mean we are going to be boring and slow."

11th Istanbul Biennial

Last fall, What, How, and for Whom?, the Zagreb-based curatorial collective behind the 11th Istanbul Biennial, conducted a sort of séance, summoning up a historical ghost whom, it turns out, an exhibition of this size can only engage with in his vaguest form. The biennial was titled after a line in Bertolt Brecht's 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera (“What Keeps Mankind Alive?”). But Brecht's specific inquiry was less important to the exhibition than the broader principle evoked by the famous Marxist figure. As the curators asked, “Is it not possible to think of art the way Brecht understood theater – a mode of 'collective historical elucidation,' an apparatus for constructing truth rather than what amounts to a viewing feast for the bourgeoisie?”

Luckily WHW rooted this abstract inquiry in some solid typography and an unambiguous stance on the role of identity politics in international biennials. This year the Istanbul Biennial brand was all (communist) red and (anarchic) black, blocky lettering with Cyrillic leanings and the occasional star. The schema played on the curators' own regional affiliation (“just East of the West”) to emphasize the seemliness of their involvement in this equally “peripheral” endeavor. It's easy to knock this marketing device, but the simple question of regional affiliation is actually one of the primary ways WHW make good on their promise to “construct new truths.” (Image: VYACHESLEV AKHUNOV, FROM LENINiANA)

Even today, after the hybridity fest of the 1990s or more recent bombast about “globalization” (see: Hou Hanru's 2007 Istanbul Biennial), non-Western artists who trained outside the West, or who continue to live elsewhere, are rarely afforded the same status as (Euro-American) others at international biennials.1 “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” offers a compact statistical retort to these circumstances, reiterated in the exhibition guide, catalog, and a set of display panels: 11-IB artists by country of origin: From the West: 28%. From the “Rest”: 72%. 11-IB artists live and work: In the West: 45%. Elsewhere: 55%. These statistics are accompanied by an “upside-down” map where the former East becomes the West, now the starting point in a left-to-right reading of the world. (The map, too, is red-soaked to indicate biennial artists' origins). WHW are hardly suggesting that we hunt down a trove of undiscovered, non-Western artists as new fuel for the grandes expositions of the 21st century. The four-member, all-female collective – themselves a bit of a statistical anomaly – simply ask: What if someone actually did it, for once?

Hou Hanru's 2007 Istanbul Biennial, “Not Only Possible But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Time of Global War,” was both notoriously over-blown and under-whelming. WHW's Biennial is diametrically opposed: evidence that simple premises, realized well, can be revelatory. Artworks are shown in the massive waterfront customs depot Antrepo no. 3, a former tobacco warehouse in the historically European quarter of Galata, and an old Greek school which shut down in the 1980s for lack of students. A series of superlative “historical” works – spanning the late 60s through the early 80s – risk stealing the show. Made by artists like KP Brehmer, Cengiz Cekil, Nam June Paik, Michel Journiac, and Hans-Peter Feldmann, the older artworks, many on paper, are as concise, clear-eyed, and open to humor as the Biennial's proliferation of recent videos are lengthy and prone to taking themselves too seriously. But, by distributing multiple artworks by single artists across the exhibition sites, WHW avoid locking individual works into strict relational categories – “historical,” “contemporary,” or otherwise.

Five very short black and white films made by the Armenian artist Hamlet Hovsepian in the 1970s are spare, unexpectedly affective studies of quotidian gestures – yawning, scratching one's back, washing one's hair. Head (1975) frames the top of Hovsepian's head closely, anonymizing him as his hands work the lather around and around in a dark, viscerally evocative mass of hair. Close-up, body and action near abstraction: in its unceasing repetition, this quotidian act begins to feel decidedly bleak. Yawning (1975) is more lighthearted. Hovsepian – long-haired, in a suit cut for that era alone – sits in a chair facing the camera, docilely waiting for a yawn to come on. It does: contagion involves the viewer in the loop.

The contemporary works coalesce – or, equally tellingly, dissolve – around recurring figures like German artist KP Brehmer (1938 – 1997), who appears in all three venues. You'd assume Brehmer's graph- and map-based illustrations on the movement of armed forces in the Vietnam war, the price of zinc and potatoes in Germany, or the year-long changes in the “soul and feelings of the worker,” would be flatly boring in the face of flashier contemporary offerings. But Brehmer's hand-drawn works, made between 1968 and 1980, act as a critical yardstick for later ones of a similar conceptual persuasion, but more contemporary style of execution. In three pieces from 2009, Marko Peljhan reconstructs armed forces' movements on the day of a Bosnian massacre (Territory 1995); the artist pair Bureau d'études provides a global overview of the Administration of Terror, where a web of arrows track international intelligence operations from the 1950s onwards; and the duo Société Réaliste creates an impenetrable alphabet of international borders turned into ideograms (Ministry of Architecture: Culture States). Like Brehmer, these contemporary artists aim to visually convey the trajectory of vast amounts of goods, money, people, and power. Yet the contemporary, computer-generated “mappings” lack the simple legibility of Brehmer's hand-drawn work. If this is because the internet era has provided us so many ways to “plug” concepts in to image-makers and data-crunchers, one can't help but mourn the thinking- and design-time abandoned in the process. [Image: KP BREHMER]


In a video-heavy Biennial program, stand-out works are often videos. At Antrepo, Rabih Mroué's I, the Undersigned takes on the genre of the public apology. On one screen, Mroué, stoically facing the camera, enumerates a long list of things for which he is sorry, while a second screen features his statements in scrolling text. Mroué's apologies are couched in a sort of legalese and addressed to those whom he may have harmed (knowingly or unknowingly, in circumstances of any sort). Beneath his remorse lie the implied confessions to deeds whose dimensions we can only imagine. The precision of Mroué's statements slowly dissolves, eventually collapsing into one ongoing sentence which rings with futility: “words, words, words, words, words...” At the tobacco warehouse site, the Russian collective Chto Delat? also look askance at the empty symbolism of political rhetoric in a short, satirical operetta titled Perestroika Songspiel – The Victory Over the Coup (2008). Scenes of typical citizens gearing up to change the world by protesting in the local square alternate with musical interludes featuring a six-person choir. The choir's ironic choruses are at odds with the music to which they are set: “Pinochet! Pinochet!” is sung as a blissful soprano, “Chechnya! Chechnya! Chechnya!” appears as a resounding finale, and “Hatred for authority, that's the ticket!” sets the driving rhythm of a militaristic tune. At the Greek school venue, Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir's Beyond Guilt #2 (2004) encapsulates a disturbing conflation of masculinity and militarism in a documentary filmed in a Tel Aviv hotel room. Having invited a series of young Israelis to the hotel through an online sex chatroom, the two women proceed to interview them about their obligatory military service. The male posturing, displays of “weaponry,” and tangled attitudes towards sex and violence which emerge simultaneously make for riveting and uneasy viewing.

What would happen, the 11th Istanbul Biennial curators have asked, if one were to draw upon an unprecedentedly non-Western demographic to produce one of today's major international biennials? Actually, nothing wildly different. Nothing happens that wouldn't also happen at a well-installed, discerningly selected and historically grounded exhibition of contemporary artists from anywhere else in the world. As historian Omnia El Shakry points out in her catalog essay, contemporary non-Western artists are almost always presented as “localized,” “particular,” or driven by region-based problems which are specifically “Uzbek,” “Lebanese,” “Russian,” or “Turkish.” By integrating a significant body of non-Western artists into the 11th Istanbul Biennial, curatorial team WHW have shaken this standard. Some might argue that this is just another example of a Western contemporary art world's relentless hunt for fresh fodder to satisfy its appetite for the new. For better of for worse, the new “truth” WHW have begun to construct is one where not just a select few, but non-Western artists in general are capable of executing today's biennial requirements with aplomb: to embody “universal” themes which are of interest to a global audience.

Originally appeared in Bidoun magazine, NOISE issue, #19.

Los Angeles Highlights August 2009

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Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film - David Horvitz - 2nd Cannons - Chinatown

Artist David Horvitz's "Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film," on show in Second Cannons Publications' micro-gallery/public vitrine, includes a film clip, a newsprint photograph of the sea from the location of Ader's projected landing spot, and its own small myth. Uploaded onto Youtube in 2007, the film was deleted by the site at the request of the gallery calling the Ader film a hoax, ostensibly for copyright infringement. The scratchy, black and white clip – only a few seconds long – shows a young man bicycling directly into the sea. It cuts off just at the instant before we see him actually fall, reverting to a flash of blank film frames. Uncannily, the clip seems to provide the perfect missing link between the concept-images that are now emblematic of Ader's own life and death (a young man disappears into the sea); and several of his actual (all silent) films.



Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea

Go to the LACMA website and a wheezing chord welcomes you to a blank white screen. A large black text appears, read out with unexpected vehemence by a synthesized voice: Hey, where'd all the smart guys go? The self-doubting conspiracy theory which follows – the work of artist duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, commissioned by LACMA for "Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea" – is propelled along by sporadic drums and accelerating chords, in a series of short texts which gain in size and urgency.

You know the smart guys, the ones who are in charge?
Who are taking us places, who are telling us to sit back, to enjoy the ride?
Well, I've got news for you.
The smart guys have left us by the side of the road.


I feel that way too. The catalog to "Your Bright Future" self-consciously cites a number of the conceptual hurdles which an exhibition of this type must contend with. Curators are keen to avoid art as metaphor for national progression, the idea of nationality as a unified ethnic identity, or to promote an exhibition as 'exemplary' of the whole of Korean art. Then, the smart guys leave us by the side of the road, with few proposed alternatives. "Your Bright Future" proposes to let the artworks do the talking. Why them? Who knows. But the lucky twelve are here now, and the loose grouping of heavily video- and installation-based works speak in outsized voices.



New Histories for an Untutored Audience: Art on the Middle East in Los Angeles

Since April, L.A. has seen an unbroken stream of small shows on the modern and contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran, narratives positioned to resonate with those of other Middle Eastern countries or countries, like Venezuela, which have historically occupied similar geo-political positions on a world stage.

In three recent exhibits, the impulse to turn geographic units into analytical categories overlapped with a significant use of the heavily "factual:" architectural models, didactic texts, and documentary videos proliferated. What little manipulation there was was mainly a question of presentation. Sleekly documenting the material manifestations of individual and political power in locations where oil money, and center-periphery relations are particularly salient, all three share a common philosophy to "let the facts speak for themselves."

Why this particular congruence? Maybe it's as simple as the fact that all have taken it upon themselves to write essentially new histories for a relatively untutored general audience. They share a common impulse to simultaneously establish a record, and set it straight. Yet this redundancy is a little disappointing. The appearance of three exhibitions like this in the same city, at the same time, seems to point to a broader trend. And the trend itself engenders its own set of nagging questions – not only whether there might be other ways to write new histories, but why exactly this is an increasingly common goal in the contemporary moment: does it help?