Lokma, börek and doner kebab — they’re all on the menu when members of Southern California’s Turkish-Armenian community gather. Paloma Esquivel writes of one such party in Winnetka:
The occasion for this feast is Doner Night, an event sponsored by the Organization of Istanbul Armenians, a group of more than 1,000 Turkish Armenians in Southern California. Of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians in California, Turkish Armenians make up a small fraction. In addition to Armenian, they also speak Turkish, listen to Turkish music and have adopted many of the traditions of that country.
There are times, some said, when this closeness with Turkey — those who remained in that country were sometimes discouraged from following their own traditions and culture — has made it difficult to gain acceptance from other Armenians. But that is changing. Organizations like the one hosting this event have found ways to embrace both elements of the culture.
via Celebrating their Turkish-Armenian heritage – latimes.com.
Courtesy of the artist Biennial rediscovery: an untitled 1979 self-portrait by Peru's Teresa Burga.
Istanbul’s art scene is mushrooming, aided by the recent openings of nonprofit art spaces like Garanti Bank’s Salt, Vehbi Koç Foundation’s Arter-Space for Art and Borusan Holding’s ArtCenter Istanbul. Their arrival may give a boost to a longtime also-ran in the art-biennial pack—the Istanbul Biennial, an exhibition of contemporary art that opens Saturday and runs through Nov. 13 at the Antrepo warehouses.
Biennials typically serve as breakout moments for hot young artists, but biennial co-curator Adriano Pedrosa and collaborator Jens Hoffman said they scoured for older, overlooked artists whose works may still feel revelatory. Case in point: Teresa Burga, a Peruvian artist who compiled a self-portrait from drawings and a sheaf of medical records.
Much of the art is bundled into five group shows; each takes its theme from a work of art created by Félix González-Torres, a Cuban sculptor known for using everyday items like candies and light bulbs to confront personal and societal woes like AIDS.
One of the group shows explores themes of sexuality and includes portraits by photographer Catherine Opie. Another centers on migration, identity and border controls, includes Claudia Andujar’s photographs of obscure, indigenous Brazilians who don’t, by custom, adopt individual names. (Ms. Andujar identifies their portraits by number.)
Other rediscoveries include Geta Brătescu, an 85-year-old Romanian artist who makes geometric collages from rags, and Turkish photographer Yçldçz Moran Arun, deemed a maverick in the 1960s because she crisscrossed the country documenting the lives of women at a time when few local women traveled solo. Mr. Pedrosa said he was impressed when he uncovered her images in the archives of a local university. “It feels like new material,” he said.
Collectors on the hunt for young Turks will do better to canvass the galleries popping up in industrial spaces along the banks of the Bosphorus in the Beyoğlu district. One of the biggest, Galeri Manâ, is showing Nasan Tur, a Berlin-based artist of Turkish descent. Tur’s works include “Kapital,” a trio of papier-mâché sheets he made by shredding leather-bound copies of Karl Marx’s manifesto, “Das Kapital,” into a pulpy stew. Hanging nearby is “Once Upon a Time,” his collection of eight huge flags representing countries that don’t exist anymore, like Yugoslavia.
Other Biennial-related highlights include Bertrand Ivanoff’s neon installations on the old Orthodox Palestinian Christian Church and Johan Tahon’s milky ceramic figures set in a 15th-century tiled kiosk in walls of the Topkapi Palace.
—Kelly Crow
via A Lively Art Scene Aids Istanbul’s Biennial – WSJ.com.
A detail of the Sidamara Sarcophagus, on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Turkey is asking for the return of a sculpture of a head that was detached from the tomb.
A detail of the Sidamara Sarcophagus, on display at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Turkey is asking for the return of a sculpture of a head that was detached from the tomb.
London (CNN) — Turkey’s government is calling on the United Kingdom to return the head of an ancient marble statue taken more than a century ago.
The object, currently in the stores of London’s Victoria & Albert museum, is, says a museum spokesperson, a “life-size marble head of a child, with curling hair, broken off at the neck.”
The head was snapped off a sarcophagus excavated in Anatolia (present-day Turkey) in 1882 by a British archaeologist named Sir Charles Wilson, who then covered the tomb over again. He took the head to England and his family gave it to the museum in 1933.
The tomb to which the head belongs, the 3rd century A.D. Sidamara Sarcophagus, was re-discovered in 1898 and currently resides in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.
Now, the Turkish culture ministry wants to reunify the marble head, which bears a resemblance to Eros, the Greek god of love, with the sarcophagus. They are currently in negotiations with the museum to repatriate the object.
Dr. Tolga Tuyluoglu, the director of Turkey’s culture and tourism office in London, said in an email: “This unique piece is not only one of the largest examples of its kind in the world, but it is truly a work of art, featuring magnificent detailed reliefs.”
“It is important that the Eros head is reunited with the rest of the Sarcophagus,” he continued.
It’s a situation with echoes of the famous case of the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” friezes which were removed from the Parthenon in Athens by the 7th Earl of Elgin in the 19th century and taken to England.
It is important that the Eros head is reunited with the rest of the Sarcophagus
–Dr. Tolga Tuyluoglu, director of Turkey’s culture and tourism office in London
Now displayed at the British Museum in London, the friezes are a matter of dispute between the governments of the UK and Greece, with the latter calling for their return.
Though this long-running debate has failed to produce favorable results for the Greek government, the Turkish culture ministry is hopeful that the V&A will heed its request.
Tuyluoglu said: “The Ministry has a good relationship with the V&A Museum and we are hopeful that an agreement between the two parties can soon be reached.”
Olivia Colling of the Victoria & Albert museum, said that “amicable” negotiations with the Turkish government were taking place and stressed that the return of the sculpture was “not a closed door.”
If the museum does decide to repatriate the object, it will be as a sign of good will, according to Tim Schadla-Hall, a Reader in Public Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.
That’s because the object was removed from Anatolia long before UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, he said.
The convention requires signatories to prevent the theft of cultural objects, but also to recover and return stolen cultural property. The Turkish government has made no allegation of theft.
“Legally, there is no basis for return, they wouldn’t be able to get it back under any convention,” he said.
And Sir Charles Wilson, who was Britain’s consul-general in Anatolia at the time, may well have had a license for his excavation, said Hall.
The marble head has not been on display at the V&A for some time. If it were to be sent back to Turkey, it would be reunited with the sarcophagus and put on display in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, said Tuyluoglu.
via Echoes of Elgin Marbles: Turkey asks UK to return ancient sculpture – CNN.com.
Diners in the busy Istanbul district of Beyoglu are being forced to take their meals inside, as government regulations have banned outdoor dining.
Photo of outdoor diners (Image by Mehmet Ergun/Wikipedia)
The district of Beyoğlu in the city of Istanbul is a busy tourist and night-time area with bars and restaurants, most of which had, until recently, outdoor seating sections. Those outdoor eating areas have now gone quiet, after government regulations cracked down on restaurant owners who want to serve meals outside.
“Certain rumor are running around, of course,” Constanze Letsch of The Guardian told PRI’s The World. “Some people say it’s because Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan… got stuck between chairs and tables and couldn’t pass.” Officials are saying they received 1,000 complaints during the first 7 months of the year from residents who say they couldn’t pass through all the tables and chairs.
Restaurant owners are clearly upset about the new regulations, saying they’re losing money and being forced to lay people off. “There’s one solution being offered now by the municipality,” Letsch reports, “which is a 70 centimeter balcony that can be added.” Though that’s hardly enough room to make up for lost revenue.
Some owners have taken the situation into their own hands. Letsch talked to one owner who has “one, sometimes two tables outside, which is not allowed at the moment.” To protect himself, “he pays a guy a monthly fee to look out for the police so he can warn him when the police are near and he can take the tables inside.”
“There is no solution that’s right in front of people,” Letsch reports. “Lots of bar and restaurant goers are unhappy because they can’t go there anymore and sit outside, and residents or people who work in Beyoglu say well, this is actually good because now we can pass through the streets without being obstructed by chairs and tables like we used to be.”
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PRI’s “The World” is a one-hour, weekday radio news magazine offering a mix of news, features, interviews, and music from around the globe. “The World” is a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. More about The World.
via Why sidewalk dining is banned in Istanbul | PRI.ORG.
Posted by Katy Cowan in Events on Wednesday 7th September 2011. Tagged with Manchester, Art.
Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present Life in the UK, a debut UK commission by Istanbul based artists Osman Bozkurt and Didem Özbek of PiST/// for the Asia Triennial Manchester 2011. As the only artists to participate in the Triennial from Turkey, this project focuses on the issue of freedom of travel exploring one of the most salient issues of our time; the migration of people from one place to other parts of the world.
For this ambitious multi artform project, Bozkurt and Özbek will transform the gallery into a temporary VISA application centre using the exterior and interior of the gallery as a mechanism to explore real stories fused with history and fiction. Examining the growth of the VISA ‘industry’ in Istanbul as its starting point, the project that combines the theatrical and participatory with installation and film, and will explore the radical impact that migration has had on demography, identity, politics, global economic changes, community and belonging.
This exhibition is co-curated by Lora Sariaslan, curator at Istanbul Modern and Castlefield Gallery.
Osman Bozkurt b. Istanbul 1970 is a photographer and video artist. He was recently featured in the Independent newspaper as one of the world’s ‘up and coming international artists’, nominated by Alistair Hicks, art advisor for the Deutsche Bank Collection. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul; Villa Manin Centro d’Arte Contemporanea, Udine; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille; Frieze Art Fair, 2008 among many others.
Didem Özbek b. 1970 lives and works in Istanbul. Her work has been exhibited at Akbank Sanat, Istanbul; Umetnostna Galerija Maribor, Slovenia; International Design Centre Nagoya, Japan among others. She also developed and created other conceptual projects for PiST/// such as Artist Information, Tea Stand and White Sugar Cube Book.
PiST/// is an interdisciplinary project space that creates new platforms for discourse and presentation from young and emerging artists, writers, critics, architects or musicians to generate an international dynamic in the art scene of Istanbul and Turkey. Located on 3 neighbouring shop fronts in Pangalti, Istanbul, PiST/// is an independent project run by artists Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt founded in May 2006.
Asia Triennial Manchester 2011 (ATM11) The UK’s only Asian Art Triennial opens 1 October – 27 November 2011 in Manchester. Initiated and led by Shisha, ATM11 will showcase current contemporary visual art and craft from Asia. ATM11 is a festival of visual culture that features a series of exhibitions, commissions and interventions by international and UK artists exploring the theme of Time and Generation, presenting new site-specific work alongside work not seen before in the UK, and challenging stereotypical viewpoints of contemporary Asian artistic practice.
via Life in the UK: Osman Bozkurt & Didem Özbek of PiST/// at Castlefield Gallery | North West | Creative Boom Magazine.
CATALHOYUK, TURKEY — A pair of space-age shelters rising from the beet and barley fields of the flat Konya Plain are the first clue to the Catalhoyuk Research Project, where archaeologists are excavating a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village.
Dig Site in Turkey Reveals an Ancient People’s Handiwork
The experts, armed with scalpels, gingerly scraped away micro-layers of white plaster from a wall deep in the dig last month to reveal what the project director, the British archaeologist Ian Hodder, called a “very exciting” and “particularly intriguing” painting with deep reds and reddish oranges thought to be made with red ochre and cinnabar.
“We were taking off many, many layers of plaster and we have a program where a joint team of Turkish and British conservators try to take them off one by one, so it’s extremely slow-going,” Dr. Hodder said this week by telephone.
“I got called over to where they were working because they saw some paint. The pattern initially didn’t look like very much: We often find just specks of paint or a wall of all-red paint. But this time it gradually emerged that this was a complete painting, and the best preserved painting that I’ve ever seen at Catalhoyuk, with wonderfully fresh, bright colors and very neat lines.”
Word of the discovery spread quickly through the international team on site as more of the painting was exposed.
“It is by far the most intricate and elaborate painting we have found during our excavations here since the mid-90s,” Dr. Hodder said. “We’ve been waiting quite a long time for something so elaborate.”
But Stone Age paintings don’t come with labels explaining what they are.
“An interesting aspect of some of the paintings at Catal,” Dr. Hodder said, “is that they are very enigmatic and full of ambiguity and difficult to read.
via Into the Stone Age With a Scalpel – A Dig With Clues on Early Urban Life – NYTimes.com.
