Emre Huner, Panoptikon, 2005
How does Turkey fit into the region?
I have been working within the Turkish art scene for over five years and although this region is often reduced to very specific geographical areas, Turkey continues to hover in and between many of these zones. It is an interesting position for the arts and especially the younger generation of artists, whose practice has been informed by tense regional relationships on the one side and European accession talks on the other.
Which contemporary Middle Eastern artist most interests you at the moment?
An artist who has received much attention this year in Turkey and abroad is Emre Hüner.
How did you come across his work?
Hüner presented two works at last year's 10th Istanbul Biennial. He is also one of the artists participating in the recently initiated Dubai branch of the Artist Pension Trust, a financial services firm for artists. His work Panoptikon is going to be shown in the Bidoun programme of video screenings during this year's Art Dubai Fair.
To create his animations, Hüner collects hundreds of objects in personal encyclopaedias. He then brings these images together to create imaginary worlds, such as that of Panoptikon, which combines an Ottoman-era miniature aesthetic with scientific representations of invention and war. While Panoptikon hints at a dystopian future for society in this region and beyond, a more recent work, Boumont, which was filmed on handheld camera, focuses specifically on Istanbul and the story of a lone man wandering the inner city's already deserted and decaying industrial areas.
Does his work tell us anything about the way that contemporary art is developing in the region?
The art coming out of Turkey is diverse and does not follow such a clear line of thought and key thematics as that of some of the other art scenes in the region. So while the practice of archiving is fairly common, Hüner's approach to cataloguing the world around him is unusual: it is not about noting key happenings, events and images (whether real or factitious), but rather about creating the possibility for these moments to be imagined. While he touches on the problematic political relationships of the region, he does so through references to independent layers of history that he converges to present mythical, yet recognisible events.
A key theme in Hüner's work, which is also being touched upon more frequently in artistic practice across this region - because of the rapid growth and density of some of its larger cities, as well as the tension in reconciling new culture with heritage and tradition - is the effect of excessive consumption, dense population growth and shifting customs and beliefs. To describe a world that is being planned and progressed too rapidly in the wrong directions, Hüner has filmed the forgotten areas of Istanbul, previously unexplored by artists in preference of sites of development. While Istanbul's rash of new high-rise housing and gated communities may speak of a certain prescribed future, one that craves documentation and theory-based response, it is the decaying inner-city industrial zones and the environments of Hüner's animations that open the future and the possibility for change to the imagination.
