Tag: Biennial

  • Mom, am I barbarian?

    Mom, am I barbarian?

    Curator: Fulya Erdemci

    Organised by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts

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    Design by Ruben Pater, LAVA Amsterdam.

    The notion of the public domain as a political forum will be the focal point of the 13th Istanbul Biennial. This highly contested concept will serve as a matrix to generate ideas and develop practices that question contemporary forms of democracy, challenge current models of spatio-economic politics, problematise the given concepts of civilisation and barbarity as standardised positions and languages, and above all, unfold the role of contemporary art as an agent that both makes and unmakes what is considered public.

    Fragility: Am I not a citizen?

    The title of the Istanbul Biennial “Mom, am I barbarian?” is a quote from the Turkish poet Lale Müldür’s book of the same title.

    As a critique of the highest form of civilisation and rationality, which has produced a world of barbarity in its negative sense, many artists of the Western tradition have advocated historically what was primordial, primitive and irrational (Romanticism, Primitivism, Fauve, Dada and Surrealism, for example). This is also true of today. In the face of excessive production, connectivity and complexity in the world, the simple and direct (and their opposites, the over-complicated and convoluted) are espoused as an expression of the desire to start anew. Against the alarming incompetence of cities, governances and regimes, there is an increase in retreat to start anew, develop new communities (new collective living experiments) and alternative economic systems.

    The term “barbarian” originates from the ancient Greek word “barbaros,” which referred to non-Greek people and meant “foreigner/stranger”; those who cannot speak the language properly. In the Middle Ages, it also denoted non-Christians, and later on, non-Westerners. Certainly, the etymological origin and historical and contemporary meanings of the word are loaded with strong connotations of exclusion. Strikingly in this context, in ancient Greek, barbarian was the antonym of “politis,” the “citizen,” coming from the polis, the Greek city-state. It is a term that relates inversely to the city and the rights of those within it. What does it mean to be a good citizen today, in Istanbul, for example? In the midst of ongoing urban transformations—the “battleground”—does it mean to conform to the existing status quo or take part in the acts of civil disobedience? Neo-liberal urban policies advocate the implementation of free market parameters that lead to socio-economic Darwinism, which in turn creates a wilderness, where the powerful beat the weak. Can’t we imagine another social contract in which citizens assume responsibility for each other, even for the weakest ones, those most excluded?

    In the current context, what does it mean to be a barbarian? After all, galvanising the limits of the civilised, the “barbarian” reflects the “absolute other” in society, circumnavigating the frames of identity politics and multicultural discourses. But, what does the reintroduction of barbarity as a concept reveal today? Is it a response to an urge to go beyond already existing formulas, towards the unknown? It may refer to a state of fragility, with potential for radical change (and/or destruction), thus, to the responsibility to take new positions. Through the unique interventions of artists, the biennial exhibition aims to explore further such pressing questions and will ask if art can foster the construction of new subjectivities to rethink the possibility of “publicness” today.

    Public Alchemy: Public programme

    An integral part of the exhibition, the public programme will bring artistic production and knowledge production together in the months prior to and throughout the exhibition. Artists, architects, planners, theoreticians, activists, poets and musicians will come together to examine the ways in which publicness can be reclaimed as an artistic and political tool in the context of global financial imperialism and local social fracture.

    The Public Programme is co-curated by Dr Andrea Phillips, who is currently a Reader in Fine Art in the Department of Art and Director of the Doctoral Research Programmes in Fine Art and Curating, Goldsmiths, University of London.

    NB: 12th Biennale de Lyon from 12 September to 29 December, 2013

    Preview: 10–11 September, 2013 / www.biennaledelyon.com

    Istanbul Biennial

    Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts

    Nejat Eczacıbaşı Binası

    Sadi Konuralp Caddesi No:5

    Şişhane 34433 İstanbul Turkey

    T +90 212 334 07 64

    F +90 212 334 07 05

    ist.biennial@iksv.org

    13b.iksv.org

    Media Relations

    Elif Obdan

    T + 90 212 334 07 13

    elif.obdan@iksv.org

    Accreditations

    13b.iksv.org/tr/akreditasyon

    13b.iksv.org/en/accreditation

    accreditations@iksv.org

    via Mom, am I barbarian? | e-flux.

  • Shooting blanks in Istanbul

    Shooting blanks in Istanbul

    By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

    The Daily Star

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    ISTANBUL: Whoever took the job of curating the 12th Istanbul Biennial was guaranteed to have a hard time pulling off an exhibition as powerful or memorable as the 11th.

    Two years ago, the Croatian collective WHW used the biennial as an occasion to propose – and then try to prove – that art could redress the gross inequities of late capitalism, retrieve the lost promises of communism, expose exploitation, resist occupation and find some measure of personal and collective fulfillment in 21st-century life.

    WHW’s exhibition, named “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” after a lyric from Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera,” was conceived as a full-fledged, left-leaning political program. It was brash, stubborn and heavy-handed. It was as if the curators thought they could change the world.

    Much of the work was didactic, but WHW’s biennial was a complicated beast. It crashed around the stuff of propaganda, but it also took delicate and nimble turns. One of the most enduring facets of the exhibition was its attention to the labor of art – for those who make it and those who engage it – as both a solitary struggle and a potentially regenerative act.

    Now the curators Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann have stepped into WHW’s formidable shoes. Their exhibition, titled “Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial),” opened to the public Saturday as a literal and willful return to form.

    “Istanbul has become important as a critical, experimental, research-based biennial,” says Pedrosa, an independent curator based in Sao Paulo. “From looking at the last few editions, there seemed to be an emphasis on art and politics, but there also seemed to be a certain disregard for aesthetic form,” not only in Istanbul, he explained, but in a rash of other politically minded exhibitions taking place over the last twenty years.

    “The way curatorial practice has developed, curators are bringing in other things to look at political issues through art,” says Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. While others have turned to literature, philosophy, critical theory or an activist agenda, Pedrosa and Hoffmann have hinged their biennial on the sensibility of a single artist.

    Felix Gonzales-Torres, who died in1996, was known (and almost unconditionally adored) for his eloquent and ephemeral gestures. He made piles of candy and stacks of paper for people to take and keep. He put a photograph of an empty, unmade bed on a public billboard, strung up light bulbs, hung diaphanous curtains and placed two synchronized clocks side by side.

    Gonzalez-Torres left almost all of his works untitled, followed by parenthetical words or phrases that conveyed undercurrents of violence and sorrow. Some of the pieces were inconsolable, dealing with the illness, death and absence of his lover. Others pointedly critiqued guns in America, the Reagan Administration’s criminal neglect of the AIDS crisis and the ravaging physical effects of the disease.

    None of Gonzalez-Torres’ works are in the biennial itself – Pedrosa and Hoffmann argue that he constitutes “a disembodied presence” – but the show is named for him and structured around five actual or approximate examples of his work: “Untitled (Abstraction),” “Untitled (Ross),” “Untitled (Passport),” “Untitled (History)” and “Untitled (Death by Gun).” He has become, here, something of a fixed curatorial framework.

    “His works have a certain sensibility and elegance,” says Hoffmann. “They don’t punch you in the face and they aren’t spoon-feeding you messages.”

    The Istanbul Biennial has long been the most serious and professional event of its kind in the region. With the Sharjah Biennial looking a little unsteady, the Marrakech Biennale still untested and the Cairo and Alexandria Biennials in terminal decline (with or without a revolution), Istanbul may soon become the only one that counts.

    Fitfully, since 2005, it has also become a solid platform for artists from the Middle East. For this edition, the Ford Foundation gave the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, which organizes the biennial, a grant of $50,000 to support the participation of Arab artists – the argument being that no one else will.

    The greatest strength of “Untitled” is that it does not corral the usual suspects, and that applies equally to artists from the region. Mona Hatoum, Akram Zaatari, Wael Shawky, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are there, but so too are Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Marwa Arsanios, Ala Younis, Charbel-Joseph H. Boutros, George Awde, Rula Halawani and Shuruq Harb.

    Palestine is as ubiquitous a disembodied presence as Gonzalez-Torres.

    With five group shows and more than fifty solo presentations spread across three floors in two old customs warehouses, the biennial is remarkably self-contained. It feels institutional, refined, museum-like and controlled.

    Each of the solo artists is installed in his or her own room. Jonathas de Andrade’s “Tropical Hangover,” 101 photographs of Recife in Brazil coupled with 140 pages from a manic found diary that swings from sexual adventure to God and despair, fills a long and spacious hallway, giving the works room to breathe. Thirteen gorgeous photographs by Tina Modotti are pulled together in an intimate chamber. But overall, the layout feels uniform and systematic.

    The group shows are also incredibly literal with their themes. Walk into “Untitled (History)” and you find books and timelines and documents redacted to a decorative extreme. Walk into “Untitled (Passport)” and you find luggage, maps, visa application forms and, of course, passports.

    “Untitled (Abstraction)” is lined with modernist grids, whether made out of Mona Hatoum’s hair or cut up stills from the film “Lasting Images” by Hadjithomas and Joreige. The latter is problematic in that “Lasting Images,” as a film, is haunting and visceral. “180 Seconds from Lasting Images” reworks the piece into wall décor.

     

    Not every selection in the exhibition feels equally astute.

     

    Pedrosa and Hoffmann’s structure is certainly crisp and clever but it does not necessarily justify its own existence. It may be a beautifully made exhibition, but does it need to be a biennial? You could move it anywhere in the world, tour it like an enormous museum show, or break it down into a year’s worth of programming.

     

    WHW may have been strident, but they took risks and staked out positions and courted the dangers of being naïve, hopeful, furious, of claiming an urgency for art and failing to meet its challenges, of reviving a tired ideology instead of coming up with something new or unknown.

     

    “Untitled” is, by contrast, smooth, steady and heavily scripted. The show ends with bang in “Untitled (Death by Gun),” but it feels like a one liner.

     

    You’re in a room with Mathew Brady’s photographs of dead bodies in the American Civil War, Weegee’s photographs of dead bodies in New York, Eddie Adams’ sequence of a street assassination in Vietnam.

     

    There are guns and bullets everywhere, along with Mat Collishaw’s knife-wound as vagina-like bullet hole.

     

    Goya’s “The Third of May” is replicated in clay figurines on the floor, a chalked-in toy train track looping figure eights around them.

     

    On a screen in the corner, a little girl walks down a wooded path, playing hide and seek with two little twerps. One of them shoots her in the shoulder and she slumps to the ground. The video loops and you hear the shot over and over. Maybe the first time you wince. After that, nothing. It’s just a cheeky, anodyne detail.

     

    “Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)” runs through November 13. For more information, please see www.iksv.org

     

    A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 21, 2011, on page 16.

     

    Read more:

    (The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

     

  • Istanbul Rising

    Istanbul Rising

    A Lively Art Scene Aids Istanbul’s Biennial

    Courtesy of the artist  Biennial rediscovery: an untitled 1979 self-portrait by Peru's Teresa Burga.
    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.