Lamya Gargash

The found rooms of Presence, along with their furniture, ornaments and décor, project a sincere, vulnerably human dimension. Each space exudes a feeling of loneliness and sorrow at their owner's abandonment. It is sometimes the state of deterioration that marks their lack of occupation, but in others, which were vacated perhaps just a day or two earlier, Gargash's steady, concentrated perspective captures the heavy atmosphere of desolation. While it is normal for the inhabitants of a home to become affectionately attached to its material elements and to experience sentimental feelings toward bricks and mortar, Gargash's photographs suggest that here in Dubai this condition works in reverse and that it is the apartments and buildings that are left prematurely in distress, while the previous occupants are happy to move on and let them go.

Things become 'old' or at least 'outdated' extremely quickly in a city that lacks an identifiable history of more than 50 years. Alone in its old age the Fahidi Fort is believed to be the earliest standing construction in the city and dates back to around 1799. The courtyard houses of Bastakiya where Gargash ironically exhibited her work earlier this year were built in the 19th Century, but even these buildings have been renovated with a mask of perfectly smooth wall-cladding that confuses their authenticity and brings them in line with the rebounding, replicative tone of the city.

Dubai's sudden and continuing acceleration of development, where new hotels, malls and homes appear every day, has infected its population with the constant desire for renewal. Gargash can remember the first shopping mall opening when she was seven or eight years old. In its wake and that of many other malls to follow, a style of 'conformative consumerism' exploded in the city. Family's began to trade their suddenly unfashionable homes for new modern alternatives. They would not even bother to take many of the house fittings and their possessions with them to their new abode, because these too were also already out-of-date. With no clear sense of an aesthetic, historic lineage of culture and identity to adhere to, the city's inhabitants moved on to adopt an homogenous modernist style of interior décor. In this process, a cultural leap was made that all but deleted the potential design and fashion preferences of the 80s and early 90s. While this seems to go unrecognised, or is of no concern to much of the population of Dubai, there are some who like Gargash, reveal a sense of nostalgia for a lost moment in time that can now never be.

The resulting atmosphere of non-stop change and a lack of material attachment with the past is clearly conveyed in Gargash's photographs. Fairly recent tastes in interior decoration that were formed by the post-oil-culture generation – grandiose chandeliers, co-ordinated wallpaper and upholstery, decorative tiles and early-model air conditioning units - together chart the beginning and end of a very short period in local domestic history. It is these key stylistic themes that provide the composition of many of Gargash's photographs and where her use of natural light eerily taunts the interiors, dulling the soft furnishings and gently tracing the ornamental details, rather than instilling in them a breath of fresh air, or life.

A variety of rooms are included in the Presence series, all found by Gargash in homes abandoned or about to be vacated. Certain of these have already become generic spaces with few references to their former lives, while others cling on a while longer to a scattering, or occasionally all their furnishings. A perfectly symmetrical and very decadent Majili (an Arabic sitting room) prematurely takes on the mood of a constructed museum set as Gargash's photograph predicts its coming demise. A series of lounge rooms, all complete with matching curtains, cushions and carpets, are already a dying breed. In one of these rooms the television set is turned on, the still it hosts stamping the date and location on the photograph, in expectation of a future generation's curiosity.

These 'about to be left' interiors are juxtaposed by images of neighbouring sites that were perhaps photographed only weeks or months later into their abandonment, but are already empty and run down. These scenes seem to condense time, but in fact show how quickly a space can fall into decay. In an image that focuses on what would have been a grand spiralling stairwell and in others of the same apartment building this acceleration of physical change is strikingly clear. On several floors that were functioning as a lobby and living quarters only a month or so earlier, Gargash found stacks of old loaves of bread. In the short time between being abandoned and its inevitable annihilation and redevelopment, this inner-city apartment space was being temporarily used to dry a local baker's unsold and excess bread to later feed his farm animals. In another photograph a chair sits alone, sadly looking out to sea. Its back is torn of fabric and a broken down air conditioning unit shares the same room. The subject of the work is not the unkempt objects or the empty chair, but the broken spirit and soul of a space and most specifically the absence of a person who should still be enjoying this view of the sea, sand and palm trees.

Gargash's series of photographs both depict and are conditioned by the perpetual velocity of the surrounding built environment. While she struggles to shoot certain spaces before they become obsolete, in only a year or two there may well be none left for her to discover. In the meantime her photographs are already acting as an archive of this unprecedented speed of change and in time they will be one of the few existing traces of a style and period of living that for now many are more than happy to leave behind.

OÙ ? Scènes du Sud – Volet 2, 2008

The Stamp of a new Rhythm

As this exhibition takes a step east from its predecessor, from surveying artistic production in the European countries of the Mediterranean, it encounters that of a less easily defined geography positioned around the East Mediterranean, which is more often referred to in geopolitical terms as the Balkans and Middle East. This complex collection of countries share a common colonial history, as part of the substantial land area marked by the conquests of the Ottoman Empire, a fact that is the source of many contemporary problems and prejudices. The Balkans and the Middle East are now related by an analogous process of political reconstruction and their continued perception as an 'other' and a peripheral (despite the EU accession of a number of the Balkan countries) entity to the West and Europe Central. This is what continues to unify the region as a whole and what simultaneously makes independence from its past context implausible.

The need to understand how this shared history and mutual heritage has fed into contemporary culture, and through this, the attempt to analyse and at the same time culturally transcend a myriad of interrelated political tensions, led to a series of national and geographically specific survey shows held in Europe in the 2000s.1 Curated and exposed in the west, many of these exhibitions imported art and artists as tools of national and regional representation. Surprisingly, the Balkans and Middle East were rarely brought together as the combined focus of a major exhibition, preference being to look at the situation of one or the other as an opposition to the notion of 'Europe'. In confrontation of this Western interest in Balkan art and the missing link of its consideration alongside the Middle East art situation encouraged Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center to organise in 2003 the conference and conversation series south…east…mediterranean…europe, with writers, critics, curators and artists invited to participate from Sofia, Skopje, Jerusalem, Cairo, Belgrade, Beirut, Zagreb, Istanbul, Tirana, Pristine, and Sarajevo.2 'The meeting focused upon rethinking artistic production, cultural geography and possible future collaborations in South-East Europe and the South-East Mediterranean, otherwise known as the Balkans and the Middle East'.3

Then in 2004 the 5th Cetinje Biennial titled Love it or Leave it curated by Rene Block and Natasa Ilic also considered this notion of 'opposition'. The biennial press released proposed that the exhibition would 'trace affinities and differences within cultural and political conditions and practices, which - according to the general perception - question the Balkans and the Middle East as two regions of different value systems. Applying its political and economical systems, the Balkans positions itself as part of Europe - but represents, at the same time, a transit area to the Middle East. Sources and origins of the current artistic situation of two different regions will step into dialogue'.4
While the trend of national and regional representation persists, curatorial strategy now tends towards presenting a more analytical response of individual artistic practice rather than merely assuming a geographically defined response. In the meanwhile, the initially accepted condition of export from the Balkans and Middle East, that had been the main structure and hope of support for artists from these regions, began to loose its appeal. Instead this repetition of geographical representation fed a desire for new forms of self promotion and installed the realisation that if an artistic environment was valuable enough to be imported by others, then it should be valued, established and acknowledged with as much commitment on home soil.

This shift to a process of glocalisation from a previous acceptance of globalisation has in the last decade, led to the region's artistic centres recognising their potential as future art hubs that can now import an audience rather than repeatedly exporting art. With the gradual support of new money, private investment and public support from elsewhere, the family art tree began to grow, to incorporate a much wider spectrum of artistic activity and to nurture better communication between key individuals and institutions within the combined region. Most recently the growth of a contemporary art market mediated through a plethora of new commercial galleries, as well as major art fairs such as the fairly established Art Athina and the only two year old Art Dubai, has in part precipitated a formative, but self-orchestrated, regional rhythm of production, exhibition and sale.

As the 'art biennial' continues to proliferate ever more rapidly around the globe, its presence and calibre in a country and region can be taken as one indicator of the development of a community based art situation. The instigation of such large-scale exhibitions suggests that there are individuals keen to broaden their local horizon, to both import talent from elsewhere and to promote their own selected talent and ambition more widely. Regardless of the relationship of these events to economy and tourism, their coming, if delivered with focus and expertise, is generally a sign that artistic abundance and its acceptance is a primary trigger.

A survey of these large-scale initiatives is perhaps the most obvious place to start when looking at the current artistic activity in a given region, especially if looking from outside. These events can also be considered as a basic comparative to their coevals in the international scene. The biennial model, while not a constant form of artistic support, is one that instigates a flurry of activity, exchange and to an extent quality control. These attributes are invaluable in fostering the early stages of an art scene and developing it to international level. As almost all the artists invited to present work in this exhibition have participated in one or more of the region's biennials, let us first look at their development here.

Founded in 1987, one of the oldest and most revered biennials in the world, the International Istanbul Biennial, takes place in a pivotal position internationally. Located in Istanbul, a city that for centuries acted as the centre of the Byzantine Empire as Byzantium and then the Ottoman Empire as Constantinople, this metropolis now sits between numerous geographical, geopolitical and cultural zones. While not the capital, it is the largest city and the cultural centre of Turkey, a country that is strategically important in relation to the Middle East and the Balkans as it both divides and joins the two. In this context, Turkey appears to flirt with its own regional classification, sometimes being grouped as a part of the Balkans and in terms of religious politics to an extent with the Middle East, and of course at the same time it sits between the East and the West, Asia and Europe, the Orient and the Occident. This context of being seen as both a part of and a separate entity of so many different types of physically and politically described regions gives the art initiatives in Istanbul the possibility to encourage composite networks of communication. In turn these relationships present the opportunity for Istanbul to play a pivotal cultural role in the creation of a very particular and inclusive art situation.

Having celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2007, the biennial in Istanbul has played an important role in recognising national artistic development over several generations as well as the need to invite international artists and their work. Those working on the biennial realised early on the importance of bringing together the country's neighbouring artists and arts professionals into a shared discourse that focuses more specifically on the surrounding geography and its evolution. As early as the third biennial in 1992, curator Vasif Kortun's exhibition Production of Cultural Difference included a high number of participants from countries east of Europe notably many from Bulgaria, Poland, Russia and Israel. 'The press conference before the biennial's opening revealed how important this event was to the participants. The Israeli spokesperson noted the opportunity for establishing a Mediterranean dialogue; the Bulgarian, the challenge of dealing with new freedoms and of associating on equal terms with artists from countries with contemporary art traditions....the Russians, the importance of seeing what they have produced out in the world. And so on. There was an obvious sense of optimism that goes with new beginnings'5.

In 1995 Rene Block's curatorial directorship of the Fourth International Istanbul Biennial paid particular attention to the invitation of artists from Balkan countries, with artists coming from Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Serbia and also several from the Middle East including those from Iran, Israel and Egypt. It was Block's desire to create an intercultural meeting ground, to have a real engagement with Istanbul and to 'avoid having the exhibition turn into a kind of international road-show temporarily plunked down in an exotic locale'6.

The 9th Istanbul Biennial curated by Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche deepened this resolve with almost fifty per cent of the exhibition's artists living in or coming from the Balkans, Middle East and other closely related countries of Central Asia. The biennial proposed 'an exhibition structure that would fold out of and reveal its context – the city of Istanbul' This was achieved by inviting many of the participating artists to spend up to three months living and working in Istanbul, commissioned to respond to the 'urban location and the imaginative charge that this city represents for the world'.7 Now, with the announcement that the curatorial collective What, How & For Whom (WHW) from Zagreb will curate the 11th Istanbul Biennial, the strongest statement yet of a desire to intensify these neighbouring relationships has been made. The appointment of a voice of collectivity and also one of local specificity is a far cry from the tourist-venue hosted biennials of the city's past and the traditional solo Direction of the biennial model. This bold step entirely shifts the potential of the Istanbul Biennial and could anticipate the next opportunity, following the predominance of 'place' in recent curatorial initiatives and the ultimately unsuccessful re-imagination of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus as an experimental art academy, to spark a new genre of biennial making both for this geography and internationally.8

Another more recently acclaimed exhibition force in the region is the Sharjah Biennial. Although active since 1993 it first gained serious recognition in its 6th rendition when it was announced that the aim was to introduce a new era for contemporary art in the Gulf. Since then, Director Jack Persekian has introduced a key motivator for the art scene in the Gulf by establishing a residency programme that runs in parallel to the biennial. This enables artists to 'spend time in Sharjah and to engage with the Emirate and its context and to conduct an ongoing series of workshops and collaborative projects that will broaden the educational opportunities currently available to local students including the College of Fine Arts at the University of Sharjah, and College of Art and Architecture at the American University'.9 This is yet another example of a new mode of production and support that mainly focuses on its neighbouring art scenes for its own success.

In 2007, two major new biennials in Greece were added to the regional map, the first taking place in Thessaloniki and the second in Athens. The physical proximity of Istanbul to Thessaloniki and in turn to Athens marks one of many potential independent art circuits, much like the Asian Biennial calendar, that can now be negotiated outside the established US and European art systems. Such networks are sparking a new era of exchange. They also create opportunities for artists to travel to neighbouring countries, which ironically was previously much more difficult and unlikely in terms of visas and funding than travelling to the more normalised zones of Central and Northern Europe.

Other big periodic exhibitions that have come, gone or remain in the region include the currently suspended Tirana Biennial in Albania; two editions, with the third planned in 2009 of the Riwaq Biennial, Palestine; the less revered state-sponsored Cairo Biennial, which is likely to be superseded in terms of credibility by the proposed Photo Cairo exhibition planned for December 2008; the previously mentioned Cetinje Biennial in Montenegro; and the Periferic Biennial in Iasi, Romania, founded in 1997.

Two other successful initiatives that are working to rethink the traditional biennial model and at the same time involve themselves more intimately with the locally existing institutional base via working with independent organisations are Meeting Points and Home Works. The Meeting Points festival organised by the Young Arab Theatre Fund has gradually expanded its reach to create a circuit of sites of intervention in the Arab World and beyond. In its 5th edition in 2007 events and exhibitions took place in Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Ramallah, Cairo, Alexandria, El Minia, Tunis, Rabat, Brussels and Berlin. Over a seven-week period, theatre and contemporary dance performances, visual art exhibitions and nights of film screenings, established zones of creativity and bridges of exchange, the aim being to support talented young individuals as well as emergent cultural spaces.10

As the title suggests Home Works invites others to enter a site of exchange for contemporary art in the Arab World, in Beirut, Lebanon. Initiated by Ashkal Alwan (Of Colors and Forms) The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, the week long forum takes place every 18 months and is composed of lectures, performance and film screenings. Like many of the festivals in the region Home Works holds the character of a pilgrimage for the many artists and cultural workers that have moved away to live abroad. Their return and also the coming together of natives, immigrants and visitors creates an assembly that is personal and specific. This is due to its location in Beirut, a city, which despite its venerated art scene does not have a permanent museum or art institution to speak of. As its main art centre, Ashkal Alwan has for many years considered itself as functioning 'with no permanent address', but continues to offer art projects and local artists a form of institutional framework.11

While large periodic activities introduce a wave of accelerated cultural interest, due to their local specificity 'they are neither truly indexical, nor, as in the marketplace, formed in reference to each other and they come together only by virtue of being planned to happen at such and such dates every two years.12 In addition, each one in turn, heavily relies on its local, continuous support structure and network, a crutch that is not always so easily relatable or perhaps self-explanatory within the global art labyrinth. Due largely to a lack of public funding, in many of the countries of these regions there is a clear divide between the professionalism of the biennial model, down to the next contour of well considered arts initiatives - the region's main independent arts institutions. There are few fully and well functioning museums and this 'museum void' is only just beginning to be targeted. One reason for this is the repeated mistake of assuming that the replication of western museum examples, such as Istanbul Modern's take on Tate Modern, will work without specific contextualisation elsewhere. Perhaps more controversial is the importation of existing brands as in Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island project, a completely constructed cultural district, which is set to include a version of the Louvre and Guggenheim Foundation. The concern for many of the already existing institutions is their lack of direction and mediocre policies for collecting contemporary art.

While contemporary 'museum' practice seems to allude governmental cultural departments, perhaps it is the resolve of the independent art centres that will gradually redefine this role and eventually take their place. While it is impossible to mention all of the many arts spaces that have had an impact in these regions, be it temporary or more permanent, there are some that have grown in tandem with their local art situation and are now major players in terms of artistic support, intellectual critique, production and curatorial practice. To name but a few, and to focus on those that grew up together we can include the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia and WHW in Zagreb. These institutions, variously funded by both private and public money albeit from elsewhere, formed a critical approach and adapted their development according to changes in their site specificity. They have all nurtured a generation of artists, working with them and supporting their practice as well as promoting it internationally. Each one is far more than an exhibition platform, in fact the focus is more often on production, archiving, research and debate. A more recent effort of some of these institutions is to introduce a residency programme, a triangular relationship between themselves that takes place without European involvement. This exchange, in person, of ideas and cultural beliefs, presents the most meaningful circle of art collaboration yet to be formed in the larger region. The effects of this simple act will be long felt, enlightening the younger generation of artists to related histories and current social and urban conditions, as well as providing access to an intimately shared structure of support and knowledge, one that can subsume larger projects, museums and biennials to result in a correlation of artistic evolution.


1. For example Balkania curated by Roder Conover, Eda Cufer and Peter Weibel in 2002 at the Nueue Galerie Graz, Austria; Blood and Honey: Future's in the Balkans curated by Harold Szeemann in 2003 for Essl Collection in Klostrneuburg, Austria; Call Me ISTANBUL ist mein Name in 2004 at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany; Contemporary Arab Representations curated by Catherine David, various venues, 2001 – 2003; In the Gorges of the Balkans curated by René Block in 2003, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany.
2.The project was sited within the context of In The Cities of the Balkans, the second part of The Balkans Trilogy, a project initiated by Kunsthalle Fridericianum.
3.south...east...mediterranean...europe conference press release, December 14 – 16, 2003 http://platformgaranti.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_archive.html
4.Love it or Leave it, 5th Cetinje Biennial press release, by curators René Block and Natasa Ilic.
5. Sarah McFadden, “Report from Istanbul: Bosphorus Dialogues. 3rd International Istanbul Biennial Exhibition Turkey”, Art in America, June 1993
6.Gergory Volk, “Between East and West: The 4th International Istanbul Biennial, Antrepo, Hagia Irene and Yerebatan, Istanbul, Turkey”, Art in America, May 1996.
7.Istanbul Biennial Press Release, (2005): www.iksv.org/bienal/bienal9
8.Manifesta 6 was due to take place in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2005 under the collective curatorial approach of Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel. Manifesta 6 was cancelled three months before the opening.
9.artist-in-residence. www.sharjahbiennial.org
10.www.meetingpoints.org
11.www.ashkalalwan.org
12. Vasif Kortun, Unpublished text, 2007.

New Ends Old Beginnings

Financial Times Arts Survey

Emily Stokes in conversation with November Paynter, Director, Artist Pension Trust Dubai and freelance curator based in Istanbul. March 17, 2008












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.

Bashir Borlakov

The scenery is magnificent. The scale and drama that make up the vista of crags, crevices and clouds, breathtaking. Yet the panorama in this photograph is a stage for one moment, or as Borlakov describes it 'one sentence' in any number of stories. While nature continues timelessly all around, seven men, mere dots in this vast landscape, pull determinedly on a rope. Whether they are rescuing someone, lowering one of their number, or pulling a hidden load is unclear. If this were a film the result of their endeavours might appear in the next frame, but instead the sentence they write remains open.

There are six other images in this series, all shot in the Caucasus Mountain Range in Russia near the Georgian border. The composition of the land is strikingly different in each one, as are the acts these backdrops both conceal and reveal. In the corner of one image, two men batter something with a rock; in another, a bundle is thrown from the trunk of a car; in the next, a man is elevated by two white geese; eight women walk in line across a plateau; uniformed men undress; a group of boys stand tentatively looking over a cliff edge. The imagination runs riot. Amidst this awesome sweep of nature, even the most microscopic human presence demands explanation, a before and after. Is the body from the car the same one that was beaten and is here being pulled back to be identified?

In a place of Greek legend, the mountains where Prometheus was chained to a rock, myths are easily born and tales of the immortal, heroes and tortured soles can be infinitely cited. So while Biblical imagery (a pilgrimage, a crucifixion and resurrection) appear obvious in their implication, references to political turmoil, corruption and racial hatred can just as easily be applied. In the end, Borlakov's works reference all and none of these sources and he simply lets the blind lead the blind and the sighted close their eyes.

Art Without Borders

A Few Retrospectives; Cevdet Erek

In advance of Cevdet Erek’s forthcoming exhibition we can rehearse its form as if a musical composition. In such a study the introduction would be Ruler. While this work implies a fixed linear measurement that denotes a complete period or retrospective, it does not set a single tempo, but many, each corresponding to a myriad of personal interpretations. It is perhaps pertinent that this is one of Erek’s most recent works, a project that stems from a residency period spent in Cairo, where civilization first mastered the rule of the ‘golden section’. This system of divine proportion is studied and applied in art, architecture, mathematics and music, disciplines that are all fundamental aspects of Erek’s work. His art is to combine their influence, to propose the essence of an original site-specific situation and subject, resulting in a form of ‘golden section’, or a series of innately human reflections on time and space.

The simple applications of rhythm and compression of time in Ruler are more visually tactile and active in Studio. In this video, which can be described as the refrain of the exhibition, his hands release an embedded rhythm. Like an off-duty percussionist or wind player seen impulsively tapping their thigh, while the memory of the source still lingers, for the viewer the effect is an anonymous pulse. Studio is presented in a scaled-down, sculpted version of the studio where the original act took place. Held captive in their own enclosure, the now involuntary tapping fingers are bolstered by a swinging metronome that perhaps keeps true time, or else attempts to offer a more basic translation of the digits’ infinite performance.

A Few Retrospectives is not an exhibition that proposes any kind of conclusion, because for Erek there are always new renditions to consider as his works’ evolve. But for now the last movement is SSS (Shore, Scene, Soundtrack), a proposal for a performance that imitates nature in order to capture the essence of the sound of the sea as it laps the shore. It is said that the proportions of nature and art follow the same ratio and SSS is in a way a formula that attempts to prove this hypothesis. Its translation of nature takes place via the act of stroking a carpet, a process of recording, interpreting and playing back, through the medium of humanity. The acts and thoughts that make up the essence of SSS have since been published and like a musical score this manuscript is available for anyone to take up and in turn perform their own expression of the composition.

Global Cities, Tate Modern

We all Laughed at Christopher Columbus, part three

Today in History

Book Launch

Lala Rascic - Pilot 03

Wael Shawky

Ola Pehrson: Hunt for the Unabomber

From 1978 until his arrest in 1996 Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber (university and airline bomber), targeted individuals with a campaign of mail bombings. In all he sent sixteen carefully crafted bombs to academics and scientists, members of the air force, airline officials, and individuals working in public relations and in computer stores, killing three and injuring a further twenty-nine people. The mistake that led to Kaczynski’s capture was his demand that his antitechnology manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” be published for full public scrutiny in a major national newspaper. In the end the US Department of Justice agreed to the publication in the hope that it would help with the capture of the Unabomber, and the text was excerpted in the New York Times and published in full in the Washington Post on September 19, 1995. It was Kaczynski’s younger brother David who recognized the arguments against an industrialized society and the style of writing as those of his brother. Based on this evidence, the suspect’s identity was finally reported to the FBI.

In 1998 Kurtis Productions Ltd. and Towers Productions Ltd. produced a half-hour documentary based on Kaczynski’s notorious bombing campaign and life story entitled The Hunt for the Unabomber. Ola Pehrson spent several years re-creating this documentary in his own unique way. Pehrson’s process was theoretically very simple. He selected a series of stills and animations from the original documentary and then modeled them in a variety of everyday materials such as clay, junk, thread, and polystyrene. Nearly all his creations were formed as three-dimensional objects, and they included everything from newspaper clippings, which he made and then drew and wrote on by hand, to environments, locations, and photographs that all became intricate three-dimensional models. Even the documentary’s on-screen quotes took the form of handcrafted speech bubbles, rather than being applied via computer during the editing process. Although the number of objects kept rising—because, as Pehrson stated, “the reality of the quantity and form of models required for this remake remains elusive and utopian”—he eventually assembled enough handmade re-creations to shape almost every detail and scene to be found in the original documentary, and he personally acted out all the included interviews. Once these elements had been filmed in the correct order, and the original soundtrack had been added, a new documentary that is just one step further away from reality and yet no less authentic than the original was created.

When exhibited, Hunt for the Unabomber is shown as an installation, which includes Pehrson’s version of the documentary, as well as around 120 models used in the video. By including these delicate but often scrappy sculptures, Pehrson raises a number of allusions to the practice and philosophy of the Unabomber. Even before the publication of “Industrial Society and Its Future,” it was known that Kaczynski was obsessively concerned with the advancement of technology and its application in society. He feared that while humanity gained power through technological tools, the individual was losing the ability to freely make personal decisions. To somehow reiterate these concerns, he began to construct personalized bombs from extremely basic, found materials, which led to his secondary FBI code name: “Junkyard Bomber.”

This interest in playing with or subtracting the technological devices used in certain modern-day processes is apparent in a number of Pehrson’s earlier works. In two installations from 1999, Desktop and Yucca Invest Trading Plant, Pehrson presents a new way to imagine the relationship between a virtual world of computer programming and a possible physical embodiment of its existence. In Desktop, a 10:1 scale re-creation of a standard Windows 95 interface is painted on one wall, in front of which hang plastic models of the desktop’s icons. This arrangement is filmed and shown in real time as a 1:1 image on a computer screen on the opposite side of the exhibition space. In a similar way to the installation Hunt for the Unabomber, the process of intricately creating a step away from reality results in a more physically present and personally heartfelt interpretation of the original subject. In Yucca Invest Trading Plant, Pehrson’s subjective approach to dealing with technology is materialized via a yucca plant wired up to the stock market. As all living organisms, including plants, emit electric impulses, here the yucca’s amplitude readings are translated into currency via a computer. Based on the plant’s success, it receives in different doses its own essential currencies: water, air, and light. While the yucca plant replaces a young urban businessman, in a later work, NASDAQ Vocal Index 2003–04, graphs tracking share prices of companies listed on the NASDAQ exchange are translated into sheet music, and members of local choirs are invited to vocally interpret the current situation in each market.

It is a clear development in his practice that Pehrson selected the subject of Kaczynski’s life as presented in a “produced”’ documentary format. For Pehrson a documentary such as this, based on historical events, is no more than a re-creation of reality anyway. He sees it as a combination of memories, ideas, and representations of the world that can be embodied via found photographs and mimicked events, or just as honestly described by reproductions of these occurrences modeled in clay. Talking about the overlaps in reality and fiction, as well as the combination of the objective and subjective in documentary making, particularly in Hunt for the Unabomber, Pehrson said: “Some of the representations, in both the original version of the documentary and in my remake, are highly subjective visual statements, which carry little visible resemblance to the original subjects. In contrast other moments present minutely precise copies of say a house, or a photograph of a relevant person. Many scenes, in both versions of the film, are highly neutral in relation to their connection with the actual events told. A specific airplane for instance, which in the original film has to become any airplane, since it is impossible to show the actual plane from the earlier event, is in my version represented by a winged detergent bottle.”

Ola Pehrson tragically and prematurely died in a car accident near Ljusdal, Sweden, in 2006.

Theodore Kaczynski is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole at the federal prison in Florence, Colorado.

Note: All quotations from the artist are from e-mails sent to the author in the spring of 2005.

November Paynter is curator of Platform Garanti CAC in Istanbul and is currently on leave to work as a consultant curator at the Tate Modern in London. In 2005–6 she was assistant curator of the Ninth International Istanbul Biennial.


Biography
Ola Pehrson (1964–2006) was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He studied art at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, and received a master of arts degree in 1997 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm. Pehrson's solo exhibitions include those at Galleri Lars Bohman, Stockholm; Galeria Noua, Bucharest; and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. His work has been included in group exhibitions in Sweden at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Malmö Konsthall and in Japan at the Yamaguchi Museum of Art. Hunt for the Unabomber was included in the Ninth Istanbul Biennial in 2005 and the Twenty-seventh São Paulo Biennial in 2006. This is the first solo exhibition of Pehrson's work in the United States.

Christodoulos Panayiotou

Christodoulos Panayiotou’s works are all performance-based and collectively they span every level of what one could describe as a spectrum of the performative in art– from creating a space for activity such as dancing, to the directing of actors and events, to the recording and tracing of both the artist’s and society’s ‘performances’. His practice is therefore difficult to sum up. To explore his works via a method of chronology or cross-referencing feels redundant, in favour of looking at it as a series of branches that stem out from a performative centre. Panayiotou adopts a similar process in his analysis of his own work, most specifically, at this moment in time, in relation to one of his more literal performance works Slow Dance Marathon (2005 - ).
Slow Dance Marathon was first realised in Thessoloniki in 2005 on a stage set up in a wooded enclave, at an outdoor mini-concert venue, in which a chain of people danced to well-known love songs. Each person would dance for one full hour, with alternate partners changing every 30 minutes and so on, and so forth, until a whole day and night had passed. The second rendition with the same title was organised for Tel Aviv. Here an additional 24 hours were added, making the marathon a two-day affair. As anticipated, the third in the series planned for Istanbul, will take place over three days. Unlike similar artist-initiated events, Panayiotou is more interested in the sociological interactions created by the situation than the psychological reasons why people agree to participate. He admits that his intention is open to interpretation, but for him it is about creating a relational space, and the way people act within that space produces an opportunity to decode and analyse a spectrum of ‘amorous dialectics’.












_{Slow Dance Marathon, installation view}

The act of ‘slow dancing’ resurfaces in a number of Panayiotou’s other works. He finds this form of dance radical in comparison to other social dances, in the sense that it boasts emotional familiarity and the generation of a radically intimate space while being totally accessible through its lack of codified moves. In Forever is gonna start tonight (2004), which like all of Panayiotou’s works is part performance and part real life, the audience in the role of participants are invited to enter into a series of actions and dialogues with the three performers, one choice being to enter into a slow dance. As one-to-one relationships are formed the work unfolds like a soap opera, but one that is part script, part improvisation and part reality – the performers maintained their own identities and personalities while on stage. Within this work, the degree of literal performance rises and falls throughout its duration, as do the levels of intimacy between the audience and the performers. In a way this work simply restages aspects of life itself, which Panayiotou describes as a form of theatre, in order to interrogate certain forms of representation.











_{Christodoulos Panayiotou, Truly, 2005, Video installation
Photo: © Panos Kokkinias}

Another branch of his practice includes works like Sunday (2005) and Alkadashlar (2006) part of the work Truly (2005) for which Panayiotou won the Deste Prize in 2005, and most recently Prologue: Quoting Absence (2006). For these Panayiotou takes on a more directorial role, as the emotional impact of the works is less to do with the experiences of the protagonists, and has more to do with the appreciation of its audience who are confronted with it in the end result. For Sunday, 80 street cleaners were contracted to collect over two tonnes of confetti from the streets of Limassol following the city’s grand carnival parade. The confetti was then taken to the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre and piled to one side of the space, a sculptural remnant of a collective experience. To create the video Alkadashlar Panayiotou’s orchestration stretched even further to commission fighter planes from the British base in Cyprus to draw the shape of a heart in the sky. The work was shown in Istanbul on a Lumacom screen atop the towering Marmara Hotel in Taksim Square to coincide with the visit of the Greek Foreign Minister following the mid-air collision between jousting Greek and Turkish fighter planes over the Aegean Sea. The symbolic timing of this screening, its location and monumental proportions emphasise clearly the way Panayiotou plays with the various roles of artist-director, performer and audience within his constructions. This is also clearly evident in Prologue: Quoting Absence, a work commissioned by Modern Art Oxford that is a conversation on the theme of absence between four Oxford University scholars from the academic schools of Philosophy, Theology, Astrophysics and Arts. Played in an empty gallery as a form of ‘reversed landscape’, the desired intellectual conversation that comes about as the result of experiencing a work of art, is in this case, already there. As with Slow Dance Marathon, Panayiotou plans to develop this work in two further parts with a video and a performance epilogue, perhaps making this the new pivot for his practice.

Contemporary (Performance Issue) January 2007