THE INSPIRATION OF HOMEKöken Ergun interviewed by November Paynter

Those who left Turkey in the 60/70s to follow opportunities in Europe and America rarely returned. But, now the trend has shifted and this generation find it more productive to divide their time between home and away, to communicate the inspiration they get from life in Turkey elsewhere and to share their experience of living elsewhere back home. Köken Ergun’s movements over the last six years, during which time he has lived between Istanbul, London and New York, exemplify this tendency. His inspiration, he says, nearly always comes from home, in particular from Istanbul and yet he finds it beneficial to produce work elsewhere with distance from the original subject and in the context of a different form of cultural perception. This method of practice results in complex questions that relate to locality and geography; how a work about the Islamic headscarf, or military presence in Turkey translate outside the context that Ergun knows so well and uses as inspiration?

Coming from a background of theatre and performance with a dominant interest in bodily stress, Köken Ergun’s videos explore facets of the intersection and anxiety that hover between Turkey’s secular republic state and its Muslim population. In his work Ergun proposes that the choices a community must make in a situation that is plighted with rules and state decisions on the one hand, which often remain unregulated on the other, result in forms of bodily stress. Two recent works in particular reflect these issues. The first is Untitled, 2004 and the second I, Soldier, 2005. In Untitled the artist presents a series of self-portraits of himself applying and donning a variety of headscarves in different styles and with different ties devised by a range of Islamic traditions. Viewing a man undertake this procedure at first gives the work a comic stance, but the austerity and seriousness of his intent and later his tears imply the societal contradictions and trauma that this solitary appendage induces. Whereas Untitled is concerned with a female, religious relationship with the bigger societal picture, I, Soldier presents the opposite extreme of bodily trauma experienced in Turkey, that from a male, secular position. Filmed during a state holiday dedicated to the youth of the republic, this two-channel work shows a soldier voicing with grandiose authority a nationalistic military poem. In Turkey every male youth must complete a period in the military and many view this imposition as a form of mental and bodily trauma. In I, Soldier it is not only those in official uniform that are seen going about their regulated duties, but also boys from the military school who perform rehearsed activities sometimes in synchronisation with the rest of the group or in competition against one another. Ergun’s interest in specific cultural bodily trauma; how he explores and relates to them within his work and how he feels about the different ways his work is understood in Turkey as opposed to elsewhere, form the crux of this interview.



Please tell us a little about your interest in theatre and performance and how you moved away from these fields to begin working as a contemporary artist.

I think I have always been “dramatic” in a sense. When I was a child I always dreamt of “the other”, almost always being better, stronger than “the self”, but not because I was unhappy with my current state or upbringing. I think I just liked fictionalising and dreaming for the sake of creating a different world around me. So I would dramatize other states, other people, like I was creating my own mythology. My roots go back to the lands of the Ancient Greeks of Asia Minor so I was already very familiar with the myths and legends of the Aegean from an early age. One of the reasons I wanted to study theatre was because of this connection with Greek mythology and theatre.

Maybe I also sensed an existential suffocation at that early age towards the greater world (not necessarily to my immediate surroundings) and escaped from that general reality by being dramatic. Istanbul is a very grey city, it can be very depressing in the winter, very misty and dirty, even more so during my youth. Not everybody is lucky enough to have a fantastic view of the city or the Bosphorus, and sometimes all you see is a grey city skyline, a poor skyline. I remember Istanbul being perpetually grey, and even as a child I understood about the political struggles and the hard times that consumed it. I knew that there was a better world out there, one that was not so full of struggle and political contestation. So I pictured our surrounding reality from the position of different characters all the time. I could easily relate to those who didn’t live in Istanbul, those that came from other places, non-places. I still like these non-places and enjoy the ability to locate myself somewhere else that is not necessarily anywhere in particular.

Through this relationship with a drama of sorts, I ended up being accepted to an acting school having attended an audition merely to test my abilities. I entered prematurely which perhaps manifested its problems later on and thus I soon realised that theatre was not for me. Or rather this form of representation was not for me. I didn’t find it sincere. I disliked all those Checkovs and Shakespeares. They didn’t fit my body, my body was too Eastern for them, but the teachers forced us to adjust our bodies to these heavy minded creatures that existed in their plays. For me there was little of interest in theatre produced between the time of the Ancient Greek writers and Beckett. The body in these two examples were closer to mine. All the plays and characters that came after Euripides and before Beckett were a mere nuisance to me. With a few exceptions of course, like Maeterlinck who I still feel comfortable with.

Then, just as I was preparing for auditions for film schools I found myself working with Robert Wilson. He showed me a different aspect of theatre. He made me aware of the importance of timing. Not specifically his own timing, but a sense for timing in/for a work of art. I think this is one of the most important aspects of an art production. It is all about timing, as Bob (Robert Wilson) would say.

Bob wouldn’t teach me things, he wouldn’t teach anyone anything. What he did was much more interesting, he would create a space for you to think that there is an alternative. This is very important and many people who criticize his work today overlook this important motive in his teaching. Once you understand that there is another, you can move on yourself. This is pretty much similar to the teachings of Shamanism, Taoism, or that of Bektashis in Turkey. As soon as I understood this other, I moved towards contemporary art and away from theatre, also away from Bob’s work, which I found a very natural development, and I think he would be comfortable with it too. So, with this new sense of timing that I had acquired, I felt more comfortable working in the field of contemporary art, especially with video and performative video.


Can you explain why you chose not to pursue this new sense of timing within the genre of performance itself and instead chose to work mainly with video, which steps away from the live act of performance into that of documentation?

I am still not content with the representation techniques of either theatre or performance. Many things disappear in repetition or staging. In other words, there are two kinds of performance: the first is performed not for the sake of performance, but for any other reason, either to continue the flow of life (like eating or sex) or to serve a cultural reason (like discipline or punishment). The second is performance made only for the sake of re-performing these first forms of performance. It is pure repetition, but we are somewhat afraid to call it so. We call it art instead. We call it theatre. Brecht said “everything is theatre”. It is true, but then why repeat it on stage and ruin it? I have gradually come to have a problem with this. When I was in the first years of my acting studies I absolutely loved the idea, but now I prefer the first form of performance, the natural one. Actually you don’t even need to describe it as natural because there should not be an unnatural. Just like in Chinese thinking there is no gender, so being male or female doesn’t mean anything and being naked doesn’t mean anything either… I want the Western world to be more like this in terms of performance.

It would be interesting if there were no theatre for a while, no stage, no performances, just a very long hiatus; during which period we can come to accept that everything is an act of performance by itself, without direction by another. The world exists and moves by itself, not by mankind. The whole idea behind Western performing arts is the central figure “I”. And this is why I don’t like the theatre we see everywhere, or the performances we see in the art world. The most selfish “I” is still too central. Both the actor and the director think that by putting themselves in the foreground they will achieve something. What they achieve is a perfect repetition. Or perfect egoism. But, I think to re-present a performance (of the first form) by another un-live medium like video is more interesting. This is why I started to document performances of the first kind and apply my own direction with a very little editing, just to help link the timing of the individual segments into a single work. I don’t want to add more to the original performance I have simply filmed.


How do you differentiate the way you experience and are inspired by your home city of Istanbul and other cities you have lived in such as London and New York?

I have never been as inspired by any city other than Istanbul. This doesn’t mean that most of my works taste of Istanbul, as they say. I think it is the embodiment of the city and its character in my work, and in my character. In a city you grow up and interact with; you copy attributes of its architecture, its people, its public transportation system, its nightlife. I operate pretty much like the architecture of Istanbul for example. And with architecture I am talking about the architecture that you wouldn’t even call architecture. It is an architecture, which develops not according to styles or creators (again the “I”) but according to necessity and rules of daily life. So just like the two forms of performance I described earlier, architecture also comes in two forms. It is the first form that integrated with my body, but the second I was taught to integrate my body with.

Unfortunately, in modern Turkey we are taught to live in the organized and self-centered world of the Western culture. Just imagine: teaching a child of Istanbul to live as a Western urban citizen in an organized system. Imagine what he sees around him and what he is taught. This is why the new expensive schools in Istanbul are built outside the city like gated communities of say 70s/80s London, so that the children of wealthy Western-type families can’t see the real world outside. This points out the most obvious character of Istanbul: it is a city of dichotomies. This city is the epitome of being ‘bi-’. It can embody any given attribute in two or more different states at the same time with an absolute chaotic comfort. For example, if you leave it to its most natural form, many Western attributes will not apply here. But, we don’t leave it to its natural form we force it to change. We raped this city and its people to look like, to feel like, to walk like, to dress like Westerners. The petrified, mutant body that comes out of this rape is what inspires me the most. And ironically I am one of these mutant bodies, so I constantly question my own existence and my own positioning in Istanbul first as a micro-cosmos and also in the world as macro-cosmos.

On the other hand, in Western cities I am more interested in the minorities than the indigenous community. In New York for example, I am inspired by black culture. Although we Turks have no immediate historical or geographical similarities with them, I feel closer to them for some reason. I think it is something to do with trying to distance oneself from colonial attitudes. I first felt this attraction to black culture at a nightclub, in one of the legendary Body&Soul parties. Everyone was dancing with the same enthusiasm and exorcism I saw in the countryside of Turkey. I was not taught to dance like that, I was taught to imitate the Western detached way of dancing. It is very hard to explain. I can’t describe it with words…


Can describe the ideas behind ‘Untitled’, 2004 and ‘I, Soldier’, 2005.

Both are similar in the way they deal with the mutant body I mentioned earlier and its dichotomies (I deliberately use it as plural) in both works I celebrate these dichotomies. The headscarf piece Untitled was inspired by a deliberate and ugly act of the current president of Turkey. The wearing of headscarves is not permitted in state controlled spaces in Turkey, such as its universities, court-houses and even the parliament for that matter. Despite Turkey being one of the strictest secular countries in the world, its public elected a conservative party known with Islamic tendencies, which was actually quite successful for a while. However, as soon as they came to power the lowbrow, high-bureaucrats and the army started to exaggerate the headscarf issue, which is an ongoing argument since the 70s. On the Republic Day the president always hosts a ball at the presidential palace, which is also another state space where headscarves should normally not be allowed. But because almost all wives of the members of the Islamic democrat party wear turbans (headscarves), in order to avoid this clash of the secular and sacred, the president arranged for and distributed one-person invitations to the ball in effect allowing only the husbands to attend. This outraged me and I wanted to apply the stress of living with a headscarf on my own body. So I made Untitled in which I wore different types of headscarves over and over until eventually I burst into tears at the end.

The work I, Soldier is a personal exorcism about my fear of the military discipline and also my secret attraction to its male qualities. There are two national days in Turkey dedicated to certain age-groups: the 23rd of April (denouncing the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul and opening of the new Turkish parliament in Ankara, in 1920) is dedicated to kids of primary school age, and the 19th of May (the start of the war of independence against the Allies in 1919) is dedicated to the youth of high school age. So, during one’s schooling, you experience both of these horrid relics: for the celebrations, children are trained to take part in choreographed performances, which take place in the biggest stadium in the city. And despite the bitter Istanbul weather (it often rains during these two days, even colder in the eastern parts of the country) you are forced to wear tights, march around the running circuit, salute the mayor and an available general, make ridiculous shapes, mimicking both the socialist-realist ceremonies (and some of the Russian Futurists for that matter) and the Olympic games… So one day, I decided to video tape all the state day celebrations of the Turkish republic one by one, thinking that I would put them all together at the end. But, there was one soldier that I came almost face-to-face with in the stadium, screaming nationalism from the top of his lungs, and it was his position that encouraged me to make a single work around the May 19th celebrations. Every male citizen of Turkey has to do his military service for twelve months and I still haven’t done mine because I am studying. When I listened to this one soldier it occurred to me that I would be trained in the same manner whenever I do my military service. Even after six months of completing the work, I am still afraid of him, my hair stands on end when I hear him screaming. The more I show him to other people the better I will exorcise him. So I think it is a very personal work, but it also means a lot in different ways to other people. One curator resembled it to Leni Rifensthal’s Olympia for instance…


“I, Soldier” was shown in the hospitality zone of the 9th Istanbul Biennial in the exhibition “Free Kick” which met with political backlashes. Were you concerned that your piece would also create controversy in this context?

I was a little bit concerned about that specific soldier in the work, who reads the poem. I recorded his entire performance at a very close angle and didn’t ask his official permission. But on the other hand, this entire performance in the stadium is open to public and anybody is allowed to film it. That is the whole idea behind this public performance, promoting pride and honour of your homeland. I had infiltrated into the space where usually only press is allowed, but still, as part of the loose discipline that you see in Turkish police, the guards who are supposed to control that area didn’t even ask me what I was doing. If you look “different” enough, they wont touch you. They think you are the other, eccentric media/artist type. This is part of the chain of dichotomies that I keep talking about. The irregular use of discipline in Turkey is something I absolutely adore. The Western world would describe this as “uncivilized.”


“Untitled”, (2004) was recently shown in New York, how was the response there different to the response in Turkey?

Most viewers there found it beautiful, and intriguing. I can never forget an Upper East side type woman with heavy make up and huge hair exclaiming: “Oh wooow! This is so beautiful, I’d love to have it in my living room!” If you don’t know the wide conflicts around the issue of the headscarf, it is natural that you would find it beautiful, because in a way it is also playing with religious portraits in Western art but this is not the primary concern of the piece. My concern was more about portraying the stress on the female Islamic persona, enforced by the secular state. America is not a secular state first of all, so they are not familiar with the secular sanctions against religious practitioners. It is not part of their life yet, but I am sure it will be. This work can best be understood by viewers who are enlightened about Islamic practices, because it is complex and confusing enough and I like that, I like to point to one direction, but shoot in another. For example, although I have a critical approach to the military pride in I, Soldier, I also like the fact that some elder women in Istanbul cried while watching the work. They thought it promoted the army in a very strong way. You see, nowadays because of the new government the army is criticized a lot in public and the elder generation finds it hard to believe cause they lived with it for so many years. When I showed it to my mother and aunts they also thought I was promoting being a soldier in Turkey.


Do you think that the bodily stress that you perceive in these subjects is just that, a perceived stress from outside, or is it a stress that is also endured by the subject and how do you differentiate between the two?

It is her stress and my stress combined, and both are very internal. In other words, I didn’t make this work as an Orientalist would write about Beirut from his cold home in Weimar… The headscarf issue has been an ongoing issue for the Turkish public as long as I remember. It is all around us, whether you are a believer or not. So there is absolutely no way of staying perpetually isolated from this bleeding wound in our society. Over the years, my observations accumulated to be able to have a general idea of what these women are facing and prior to performing the piece for video, I spent time with friends and distant relatives who wear headscarves. I have listened to their stories about the hardships as well as the comfort of wearing a headscarf. You would always read such stories in newspapers, or see it on television, but this is perceiving the stress from the outside. Because there is the medium of “the media” in between you and the subject. And most of the media in Turkey is either pretentious (mimicking the West), or controlled in one way or another by the state or corporations who suck on the tits of the state. But when you get in a closer human contact with the türbanlılar (Turkish slang for women who wear turban) you can appreciate their dilemma more. On the one hand, you have the Islamic religion, which says you have to obey the book, Kuran-ı Kerim, which in turn says all female believers should cover every part of their body, but the face and hands. If you consider yourself a Muslim woman, you must apply this to yourself. At least this is what they believe. Then on the other hand, you have a republic of only eighty something years on top of an Islamic empire of five hundred years who prohibits women covering their head in state controlled spaces. Is this freedom?

Of course as a third aspect to the story, comes radical Islam, which we Turks knew and experienced centuries before the West woke up to its reality after 9/11. Radical Islam operated solely by male power and intellect, often uses the turban as a symbol for their case against the secular state. They often use the word “chastity” in relationship with the turban, placing the other women who don’t wear it in the category of prostitutes, and this in return forces the turban wearing women, to act like symbols of chastity. Can you imagine a bigger stress than this? At the end, as you can see there are three major kinds of stress imposed on a türbanlı women; one by the religion which orders them to cover up, the other by the state which “encourages” them not to, and third by the radical Islamists who uses them as the symbol of their case/movement. Therefore, the women who wear the türban cannot be free and detached from all these major stressors, but they will also not go out there and scream at the top of their voices that they are stressed. To think like this is very naive. So they often keep the depression inside, which I find very sad, and unfair. It is these feelings, which bring me close to them. I know that having been raised with a secular-Western attitude, I cannot fully appreciate their situation, but I definitely got a hint of it when I was wearing these turbans and constantly watching myself at the mirror. It helps to deconstruct your given identity for a moment.

We all Laughed at Christopher Columbus, part one

Roderick Buchanan, Jeremiah Day, Runo Lagomarsino, Ola Pehrson, Amalia Pica, Florian Wüst

There is a fine, but clear difference between an artistic reconstruction of an historical event made in order to question, or reconsider social attitudes of interpretation; and an artistic interpretation of a past event created to explore newly applied layers of meaning that effect its reading today. The former considers the truthfulness of historical representation, the problematic dialectic between collective memory and factual source, and more often than not it is a personal quest instigated by the artist in order to understand an important moment in their own relative history. It is also a topic that has of late been applied more and more often curatorially to explore a distinct artistic practice that focuses on the reconstruction of historical events to explore their past and current significance - from re-enactments to documentary videos.

The difference in the angle of the latter approach - that of artistic interpretation of an historical event - is that the artists’ relationship with the referenced moment is based on a pure infatuation with a specific happening. This interest is nurtured through research and intrigue and results in a work that is an individual, artistic interpretation developed from a subjective point of view.

Such an approach can be a one off-affair, a fascination with a particular moment in time that the artist cannot let lie. When after having worked through every facet and detail of it for themselves they choose to produce a work of art that is then several layers removed from the original factual source – for example Ola Pehrson’s ongoing production of his personal version of the documentary Hunt for the Unabomber. Alternatively, the approach described becomes a repetitive strategy, whereby the artist selects a series of partially related incidents in history as starting points for artistic examination – as in Florian Wüst’s practice, through which he researches one seminal happening after another that have had some impact on American and German history. The list incorporates, amongst others, the matter of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the so-called Spiegel-Affäre in 1962. In each of his final interpretations he uses a similar system of working that adopts video or audio, wall drawings and installation, so linking his selected subject matters via the aesthetic of his own oeuvre and thus in a new area of classification and at a new moment in time.

We all laughed at Christopher Columbus explores these more buoyant investigations of the past. Composed as an installation that tries to remain as open in plan as possible, the exhibition forms a journey between the works, where each event explored by the artists can be viewed by the audience individually, while at the same time considered as part of a conversation. Although the subjects are not related, or consequentially linked in history in any acknowledged way, they do suggest points of allusion by way of similar artistic approaches and attitudes. Additionally the significance of each of the events is already determined in collective, internationally distributed history, but without disregarding this underlying significance the artists manage to shift their interpretations to a current platform that is about how the work of art is read autonomously in the here and now, more so than how it relates to the past it references. This is most evident in the way the selected artists embrace the fictive within incident, without being compromised by feelings of responsibility to accuracy, thus leaving space for the audience to interpret their own response to each work and construe hypothetical, historical associations.

The statement ‘We all laughed at Christopher Columbus’, adopted and adapted by Runo Lagomarsino became the linchpin for this exhibition. By changing the personal pronoun of the sentence from third to first person Lagomarsino plays with the assumed responsibility of the quote and flirts with the fact that it was always a fictional statement anyway. Like an accidental slip of the tongue the text appears as a projection on a tiny billboard that takes center stage while the other works in the exhibition revolve around it.

A visual stepping stone links Amalia Pica’s film To Everybody That Waves, which shows an event organized in the harbour of Amsterdam of people waving farewell to those boarding an old sailing ship. In a similar way to Lagomarsino, Pica describes a fake collective memory that is generic and stems not from the literal historical event – in this case mass migration from this harbour to the Americas - but from the many fictive responses reproduced by film, media and our imaginations. By taking advantage of the presence of an old ship, asking those in its vicinity to participate on the spot and using an old black and white film format, Pica layers together different fictional associations with no true accuracy to historical fact, to produce a personal interpretation of how we might imagine such a scene now.

Reflecting on the limitations of historical description Jeremiah Day’s work Reconstruction sets an interesting precedent for the reconsideration of what memorials mean in our current society. His installation of photographs, text and sculptural elements take as their reference the renovation of major memorials and monuments in Washington DC during the summer and autumn of 2004. He proposes that this process of reconstruction is no coincidence but a symbolic re-organisation, initiated to parallel the USA’s shift in political discourse. On each of the photographs Day has handwritten notes suggesting his claims of propaganda, that offer a fragmented form of storytelling composed of possible fact and blatant fiction.

Similarly Ola Pehrson’s remake of the documentary Hunt for the Unabomber provokes the limitations of historical description via this particular television and cinema format. The work comprises a series of stills from the original film that Pehrson modelled in clay, junk, thread and polystyrene. These handmade recreations were then put back together and filmed again to form a new documentary, just slightly less connected to reality than the original. Certain references are shown-up as having always been fake – ie a specific airplane in the story, becomes any airplane in the original documentary and again yet another airplane in Pehrson’s personal interpretation. Another abstraction found in the original documentary is the lack of physical participation by character Ted’s brother, where his inclusion is represented by a holiday photo possibly taken on vacation in Mexico. In Pehrson’s reconstruction a remake of this image merely pushes the pretence of the brother’s involvement one step further.

Florian Wüst's installations deal with the ambivalent relationship between subject and state. This relationship is constantly changing under the productive pressures of renegotiation and reassessment. Nonetheless, and as also explored by Day, the defining power of the state tends to treat signs, images and language as malleable material even where they refer to concrete historical events and conditions. Under these conditions discourse is likely to turn into doctrine. The installation Protecting freedom until there is no freedom left (2004) uses J. Robert Oppenheimer as the historical lens through which past and present histories are artistically examined. By concentrating on the form of communication of the actors and the subjective approach of those involved Wüst lifts the discussion out of an abstract political context and presents a series of personal characterisations.

Whereas in Wüst’s work, actors are brought in to render an interpretation of the Oppenheimer story, in Roderick Buchanan’s video History Painting real soldiers present a current interpretation of their predecessors of two hundred years ago. Filmed in Wellington, Tamil Nadu and Catterick, North Yorkshire during the summer of 2004, the film projection features newly passed-out soldiers from the Madras Regiment in Tamil Nadu and their counterparts in the Scottish Infantry Division. In 1803, the predecessors of these young men fought alongside each other at the Battle of Assaye. Both regiments still carry the Assaye colours, featuring an elephant, and the victory at Assaye is central to their respective sense of honour and identity. Although Roderick Buchanan’s new work has its roots in a particular historical moment, its reach is more contemporary and more complex in ambition.

A performance of music, nature and art

The total population of Iceland recently broke the 300,000 mark and a large percentage live in Iceland’s capital Reykjavík, which happens to be the most northern capital in the world. Relatively speaking, the number of art galleries and cultural institutions in the city and elsewhere on the island that cater for those producing work and those interested in viewing it, seems phenomenal. In Reykjavík most of this activity takes place within the postal code 101, hence, the excessive use of this number in place names and titles.

Surprisingly, this generous collection of exhibition spaces is busy and active, all with full programmes and steady audience numbers. This is due to Reykjavík being home to an unusual creative buzz spurred on by the country’s short, but complex history littered by myths and legends; a location which allows for easy access to both the US and the EU; a mind bogglingly, inspiring landscape just down the road and a tight knit community of people that work together and support each other. The artists know those running the art spaces and quite often in addition the best editor, producer and technical support in the country. It is this unique structure that keeps things highly productive. A result and symptom of this prolific output is that local artists have the chance to show their work on a pretty regular basis. These aspects of Reykjavík’s art scene make it fertile, although it has to be accepted that quantity does not always result in quality.

Many artists continue to reference features of the Icelandic environment in their work and this is something that can be hard to relate to as an outsider. Therefore, in order to begin to understand the significance of the many natural influences on local creativity it is vital to also experience the surrounding landscape. Without wallowing in the clichés of Iceland being a land of purity, fire and water, it is nevertheless impossible not to be inspired by the island’s naturally occurring phenomena. Between the still, hardened lava plateaus there are live volcanoes, moving tectonic plates and geysers that erupt at varying intervals. There are shifting glaciers, a raging North Sea and geothermal pools, one of which, the power plant pumped Blue Lagoon at Grindavík is frequented by locals and tourists alike and is a definite must do for the list. Finally, the sky is like an expressionistic canvas where clouds gather, rainbows form and the Aurora Borealis majestically pattern the blackest of nights. After seeing such amazing, natural performances, complementing works such as those by Ólafur Elíasson feel far more minimal than they did before; as does Rúrí’s Endangered Water’s Archive presented at the 50th Venice Biennale, and her public sculptures which include Rainbow at Reykjavík airport.

About three hours drive from Reykjavík is a work that frames the landscape in a way that is really worth traveling to experience. Less than a year old, having opened in July 2005 is Finnbogi Pétursson’s Frequency. Commissioned by the Vatnsfell Power Station this massive fife acts as an acoustic pipe, which is large enough to walk into. When the north wind blows into its entrance, the structure vibrates at 50 Hz producing a tone that mimics the frequency of electricity generated by water passing through the power station.

Experimenting with sound and music is a predominant cultural interest and past time in Iceland, where just about everyone is, or was in a band. The key spots to hang out in, to hear the best of the up and coming local bands and meet the art crowd of Reykjavík are Sirkus, where Spike Jonze shot a music video for Björk and for a slightly more refined scene Kaffibarinn owned by film Reykjavík 101’s writer/director Baltasar and Blur’s Damon Albarn. Just as these scenes converge to listen to music at night, there is also a strong connection back to the music scene from within the visual arts. Well known as a member of the famous electronic/rock and roll group Trabant, Ragnar Kjartansson is simultaneously producing well-received performance and video art works. Another former musician Sigurður Guðjónsson of death-metal band Cranium is now showing his haunting atmospheric videos internationally and in July will have a solo show at the Kunstverein Langenhagen in Germany. Then there are the music performance videos of the more established Icelandic Love Corporation, the members of which Eirún Sigurðardóttir, Jóní Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir are due to celebrate a decade working and performing together this year.

With music, nature and art coming together so emphatically, the result is a performative genre of art production that is both eccentric and yet very settled in its own surroundings. The art space Kling and Bang, run by eight Icelandic artists is set to explore this very grounded eccentricity by collaborating with the art collective Gelitin this coming July. Judging by the results of previous collaborations, the most provocative being the production of a series of Sheep Plugs and their public parade with Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy leading the carnival; and if Gelitin can be kept away from the infamous Runtur bar crawl, this artistic overture is set to be a head on competition with Iceland’s geysers and volcanoes for the biggest summer explosion.
Top 6:

Kling and Bang gallerí
Laugavegur 23
101 Reykjavík
+354 696 2209
kob@this.is
An artist run space that hosts local artists, as well as forming collaborations with key international artists, which so far include the likes of Jason Rhoades, Paul McCarthy and John Bock, to work on large-scale projects made in Iceland. The next such collaboration, with renowned art group Gelitin opens on 8 July.

The Living Art Museum
Laugavegi 26
Reykjavík
+354 551 4350
www.nylo.is
Run by an association of artists, The Living Art Museum was founded in 1978 and its main objective is the care of a collection of post 1960s Icelandic art. The museum also organises around 8 contemporary exhibitions every year, as well as other events including performances, readings, conferences and concerts. Between June and August the museum will host Esperanto Kiosk and work by Olof Olofsson from Denmark.


CIA
Hafnarstræti 16
101 Reykjavík
+354 562 7262
www.cia.is
The Center for Icelandic Art was set up in 2005 to promote Icelandic artists nationally and internationally. It holds files and publications on Icelandic artists and institutions and visitors are welcome to spend time researching the archives in the ground floor lounge area.

101 Hotel and Gallerí
Hverfisgata 10 & 18a
101 Reykjavík
+354 5800 101
www.101hotel.is
Hotel 101 perfectly complements the great outdoors of Iceland and the attitude of Reykjavík with its minimal, but innovative design and additional touches such as products by Aveda, comfy slippers, dressing gown and a choice of DVDs and CDs to fill the evenings. The lobby and public areas of the hotel are littered with art works collected by the owners over the years. In addition the hotel boasts a gallery also called 101, which presents solo exhibitions by Icelandic artists and from June - July will host Steinunn Þórarinsdóttir.



i8 gallerí
Klapparstigur 33
101 Reykjavík
+354 551 3666
www.i8.is
Opened in 1995 by Edda Jónsdóttir, i8 is the main commercial gallery in Iceland. It shows and represents a mix of Icelandic and international contemporary artists. During June and July this year i8 will have an exhibition of work by Finnbogi Pétursson as well as a group show in the basement floor.

Kaffibarinn
Bergstaðastræti 1
101 Reykjavík
+ 354 551 1588
Featured in the film Reykjavík 101, the bar Kaffibarinn is owned by the film’s writer/director Baltasar Kormakur along with his soundtrack composer Blur’s Damon Albarn. These claims to fame and the fact it is frequented by celebrities including Bjork make it Reykjavík’s trendiest starting point for the Runtur (meaning circuit, the Runtur is similar to a serious pub crawl and takes place every Friday and Saturday night until the early hours).

a lack of solemnity is not necessarily a lack of seriousness

In the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (September 16 – October 31st 2005), one of the questions most frequently asked by visitors was, “But is it real?” What is even more intriguing is that this question was asked in relation to two separate installations within the same breath. This is how Khalil Rabah’s The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind and Michael Blum’s A Tribute to Safiye Behar together entered a repetitive yet constructed sphere of comparison.











Although entirely different in terms of approach, rationale and form, Blum and Rabah’s works sparked a dialogue on the deceptive nature of imitation, the role of the museum versus the exhibition of art, the validity of historical interpretation, the responsibility of the artist to adhere to fact and the level of truth afforded by myth.

Rising up through the floors of the Deniz Palas apartments was Rabah’s The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. To all extents and purposes, Rabah’s museum, which is installed on each occasion of exhibition according to site and context, presents a selection of artefacts in vitrines and display cabinets. The layout mimics that of a traditional museum; in this particular installation, a ticket desk led to a main entrance followed by a run of topological installations that terminated in a research area and a café. Belief in the authenticity of the works on display, as an officially endorsed collection, falters when it is understood that the museum’s entire contents were crafted by Rabah from olive trees, the universal symbol of peace and a clear reference to the effects of war on Palestinian agriculture, economy, and identity. Each object in the displays was fashioned from the olive’s bark and ash and secondary products such as soap and oil.











Does an archive that, for example, presents a lump of olive coal as a meteorite or cross-sections of tree trunks as delicate countdowns to the extinction of geographical borders, make Rabah’s museum less “real” than any other art museum? Is it, perhaps, that a work of art cannot pronounce itself as two entities presented in tension— art as a form of personal, conscious production and the museum, a supposedly objective place devoted to the acquisition, conservation, study and exhibition of objects that have some scientific, historic or artistic value—at the same time?

For Rabah, his museum’s research and reading room provided a threshold to a dual reality. He described it as a space “not yet resolved, and where function becomes obscure”— a space for people to do their own thing and reflect on the museum’s leftovers and the factual remains of its very existence. While the rest of his museum can be confronted as art, in the research and reading room, Rabah renders both terms—“art” and “museum”— ambiguous.












On the next floor of the Deniz Palas building was Michael Blum’s recreation of an apartment lived in by Ataturk’s lover Safiye Behar. Presented as a preserved house/museum, wall panels hung at its entrance describing the history of the couple’s relationship and personal facts and anecdotes about the Jewish feminist Behar, like her fascination with Marxism..(it seemed important to the work that he made her a Jewess in Turkey) Within the reception room were vitrines containing letters, photographs, personal possessions; in the parlour, a videotaped interview with Behar’s grandson seemingly validated the tale of Ataturk and Behar’s tryst. The rest of the apartment appeared as if left by the owner—furniture and personal trinkets intact—but separated from the audience by a glass barrier..

A Tribute to Safiye Behar again exploited a form of display that mimicked that of a museum, but this time, the collection of artefacts were not presented as representing facts of history or science as in Rabah’s installation; they instead collectively proposed the possibility of an imagined history—a history that might have been. The tale of Behar is, of course, a construction albeit one that Blum never admits and the use of the museum format a device. Yet, ultimately, the work was the presentation of an original idea and hence, as with Rabah’s The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, it is the sincerity of the artists’ perspective that registers the work as “real.”

So, why is it that disillusionment arises over whether the subject of a work of art is based on a “true story,” or, similarly, over the factual description of one’s own work? Is this a symptom of a growing paranoia in the art world about quality control or false advertising, a sign that we, as an audience, are becoming apprehensive of the ambiguousness of the ingredients that make up a work of art? The sincerity of artistic statements should be more than enough to validate a work of art. There is no need for a film-like credit, tag or an authoritative endorsement to label artistic intent as ”sincere.” An artist cannot be labelled dishonest for avoiding categorisation or for leaving their work, as in Blum’s case, as open to interpretation as written history.

It is interesting to note that visitors who responded to both works in a negative way—those that queried their status as “real”— appeared to feel cheated somehow, as if they were told a secret that was later negated, stolen or shared too easily with everyone else. Perhaps the need to ask whether art is “real” is simply a reflection of the childish desire to cling to the belief that a museum should hold authority over its audience. In their particular form of intimacy, museums supposedly insure that some kind of new “truth” will be discovered. In both Blum and Rabah’s works, it is the personal process of discovery that forms/structures the work's literal existence. The question, therefore, of whether “it is real” is also a symptom of the confusion and apprehension that results when confronted by a museum that lacks an institutional stamp of responsibility. Who can the audience turn to, in this case, to get the ultimate, factual and uncontested answer that they normally do not feel the urge to question? They can only turn to themselves.

Posit9B - Ikon, Birmingham

Encore

All that Glitters

Serkan Özkaya can remember copying important works of contemporary art from an early age. With no international art collection in Istanbul and no option to travel to see the originals, he relied on photocopies from books, from which he would make a copy of his own. Reproductions were for Özkaya and other artists of his generation more important than the original could ever be. The prospect of seeing an original became a form of back-up and often a let-down – potentially it was smaller, less colorful, and in worse repair than ever imagined.

Özkaya, born in 1973, made a “few” works when he was still a “young artist,” a term he questions with bemusement. How can a young artist be identified, and when does the designation expire? During this ‘young’ phase and in an endeavour to create an original from a reproduction, he proposed to wrap the Reichstag about two years after the fabric used in Christo and Jeanne-Claudes’s Wrapped Reichstag (1971 – 1995) had been removed. Özkaya’s proposal to the German Parliament included copied images of Christo and Jeanne-Claudes’s work and his motivation was simple - to make a work that he had never seen, a work that he had only seen in pictures or heard about. He realized a similar work in Istanbul in 1997; at the BM Contemporary Art Center where he wrote ‘Keith Arnatt is an Artist’ on the gallery wall. Arnatt himself performed the same gesture in a gallery in London in 1972, before Özkaya’s birth. Özkaya indicated his admiration by copying the text verbatim, making him, in his words, an art lover rather than an artist.

As these devoted acts of imitation become the focus of Özkaya’s practice, he began to consider whether the situation of “living within a zone of reproduction is a representation of feeling to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Özkaya first attributed this feeling to ‘geographical dislocation’, growing up and living in a country and city that many consider to be periphery. He subsequently concluded that “you always presume there is something more important happening elsewhere, you never believe that you are in the right place at the right time, and therefore there is in fact no center.”

Triggering this moment-of ecstasy followed by clarity-- for himself and others is where Michelangelo’s statue of David comes in. Özkaya has never seen the original statue, he has not even seen one of the many one-to-one casts that exist in the world, he has only encountered small replicas of the sort tourists buy and various different two-dimensional reproductions. “Such iconic works no longer exist in reality as originals,” says Özkaya, “they have become verbal legends, all about the replicas, the copies, the reconstructions, and the fakes.”

Özkaya wanted to experience David first hand, and started production of the ultimate copy, a larger than life replica of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, commissioned for the 9th Istanbul Biennial and to be exhibited in the area of Beyoglu. He aims to replicate that precious moment when time stands still for those who see David, many of whom like Özkaya only know the statue through reproductions of the work. Özkaya explains, “even if you don’t know it is in the image of Michelangelo’s statue of David, your body and eye will know that it is something beautiful. For a moment time will stand still and only in the aftermath will the obvious questions arise – is this Michelangelo’s statue of David? Is it the original, an exact copy or a new work? How was it copied, was there permission?”

In order to realize a new David, Özkaya contacted Professor Marc Levoy, known for pioneering work in three-dimensional facsimiles. Levoy developed a technology that would allow users of everyday household appliances, for example, to fax one another computer-generated data that could be used to produce a precise model of the original object selected.

Such production proved too expensive for domestic use, but, Levoy was enthusiastic to advance the potential of this technology to achieve the ability to copy in 3D a wider variety of artefacts from museum collections and sites of cultural heritage. At that time nobody had yet digitized a large scultpure with enough precision to serve as a primary resource for scientific work, and nobody had tried to digitize a large and coherent collection of statuary. Hence the impetus for the Digital Michelangelo Project.

In 1998 Levoy and his team relocated to Florance and scanned ten sculptures in the Galleria dell’Accademia, the largest work accomplished being the statue of David. Without moving or touching the sculpture a laser rangefinder and mechanical gantry were used to capture the surface structure of David within less than a millimeter of Michelangelo’s chisel marks.

The result of this process is a dataset of 2 billion polygons and 7000 color images – a 250 gigabytes 3D computer model of David copyrighted to Marc Levoy, Stanford University and Galleria dell’Accademia. As long as credit is given, anyone can use the 3D computer file found at (http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/ ) to produce a David statue in any ratio and almost any material. The process is similar to that of the SETI project in Cairo, which intends to recreate ancient objects so that they are available for future generations to view, the data then lasts as the key to re-form what was once considered unique and impossible to replicate.

Özkaya, having contacted both Levoy and the Galleria dell’Accademia out of courtesy rather than for official permission, is now making his own David based on the data of the 3D computer model. Özkaya proposes that his David will emphasize the idea that icons are considered public property, and as such, can be reproduced by anyone at will. He points out that galleries and museums provide a community model of proposed sharing; and patrons form personal relationships with works of art, often returning time and again to view a specific painting or sculpture.

Another of Özkaya’s ongoing works, Mona Lisa Upside Down, also reconsiders the audience perception of an icon. In 1996 Özkaya wrote to the Director of the Louvre and proposed that Leonardo da Vinci’s best-known work be hung ‘‘upside down for one, two, no best for three days’’ in order to reconsider the painting’s historical record as a thing of great beauty. Citing Roland Barthes work Mythologies, Özkaya believes that our understanding of icons is beyond judgement: we accept them as such because of their long histories, and to judge for ourselves we must reposition our perspective with respect to the work in question.

This presumed judgement also applies to defined objects of society such as the newspaper. On the 21st of September 2003, to coincide with the opening of the last Istanbul Biennial, he produced a work in collaboration with the daily national newspaper Radikal. On the evening before this particular issue of Radikal was due to go to press, when all the copy and images had already been laid out and the newspaper was finished and ready to print, Özkaya and his team entered Radikal’s office. Using tracing paper, they drew over every word, image and headline that appeared on the front and back page of the paper in its original form. The newspaper then went to print that night in the usual way, except for its cover, which was replaced with a printed version of the hand-drawn copy made by Özkaya and his team. Although the work was not commissioned by the Biennial, Radikal’s media sponsorship of the event meant that Özkaya’s initiative was available and free to all the exhibition’s visitors. The paper was also distributed nationally as normal and available to buy at the usual price. As an after-thought Özkaya titled the work Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance, as the newspaper had shifted from its every day standardisation to an object to be kept rather than disposed of, a copy suddenly more of a genuine article than the original.

Completed to ‘nipple-stage’ at the time of our meeting, Özkaya’s David when finished will be twice the size of the original. Özkaya will paint the finished sculpture gold, adding another layer of simulated worth and excess “I am not interested in absolute beauty, but in the beautiful as an ugly memento”, says the artist. Considering all the steps taken for this project--from the brainpower and equipment of Levoy and his team, to Özkaya’s research and construction, the doubling of height and gilding, the relative value of the copy creates the potential to momentarily capture the qualities of an original, or at least a unique copy.

Can repetition in any way spoil the beauty of such an iconic work of art? Does it merely suggest that the original has lost the very essence that set it apart? With the increasing ease of precise mechanical reproduction, it is in fact the copies, replicas and fakes that authenticate the status of icons. One last question: does Özkaya have no qualms about copying, personally adapting and re-contextualising such an icon? He is quick to answer “I feel closer to Michelangelo in person, than to the values of the museum”. And with this salvo, another iconic David enters the world.

Hussein Chalayan

Combining what many categorise as different creative disciplines, the recent films of Hussein Chalayan embrace a spectrum of interests, from fashion to architecture, choreography to anthropology. Having received critical acclaim as a fashion designer over the past decade, Chalayan has of late been discussed and exhibited more and more frequently within a contemporary art context. In acknowledgement of his evident artistic creativity, Chalayan – born in the divided city of Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1970, but resident in London since the age of 15 – has been invited to represent Turkey at this year’s Venice Biennale, an honour that he admits represents ‘a new arena’ both for his work and for its usual audience.

Hussein Chalayan’s studio lies at the hub of London’s East End contemporary art spaces. This location, combined with Chalayan’s inter-disciplinary approach, suggests that his working space will be a similarly multi-dimensional environment of stored props, rails of past and present collections, AV equipment and more. In fact, the studio still appears very much dedicated to fashion, with clothes neatly hanging on either side of the room, while in the centre his assistants measure and cut lengths of cloth for his 10-year retrospective exhibition at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. But although the atmosphere feels highly focused, it is no longer clear where a piece of material will end up: on the catwalk, in an exhibition display, or even in a costume for one of his films. ‘There has not been so much room for cross-disciplinary creativity in the art world,’ Chalayan says. ‘I am interested in turning one idea into something more, in stepping away from such restrictive categorisation.’ It is his confidence in the belief that ‘all disciplines are woven’ that propels him, allowing him to make work that disintegrates the boundaries we still perceive to exist between fashion and visual arts.

Less than two years ago Chalayan finished his first film, Temporal Meditations (DATE), which was conceived as a one-off production for a fashion collection of the same name. Filmed in Cyprus, and often actually referred to as ‘Cyprus’ by the artist, a territorial dialogue unfolds on an open runway with an abandoned aircraft as the backdrop. Chalayan is interested in using film to contain the variety of his interests and to extend his work further into what he calls the ‘realms of movement, space, sound and object. Each element appearing in my films is executed in a different way, but the whole allows them to merge, bringing everything together within one shared language.’ As in his other films, it is difficult to put a finger on the central idea behind Temporal Mediations because it consists of so many layers of narrative. But Chalayan suggests that his work is ‘generally about identity and displacement’, and broad references to travel, cultural rituals, codes of behaviour, imposed territorial conditions and border controls certainly recur throughout the films.

Chalayan insists that he is not yet well known as an artist, although his second film, the Tribe Art Commission Place to Passage (DATE), has already been exhibited in five international art venues. Projected on five screens, the film presents a woman going about day-to-day essential activities such as eating, sleeping and dressing, all within the confines of an enclosed, spatially restricted travelling pod. Although the pod itself travels – from a London car park to the glittering shores of the Bosphorus in Istanbul via a barren lunar landscape – the woman’s enforced environment precisely circumscribes her actions. Again, a set of pre-determined conditions of movement is the key theme, Chalayan taking issue with the effects of ‘temperature change, pressure change and in-flight entertainment’ that characterise an era shaped by what he calls the ‘violence of travel’.

Another film, Anaesthetics (DATE), was recently shown at the Moderna Museet in the exhibition ‘Fashionation’, which brought together a selection of creative individuals working between fashion and visual arts including Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft and Martin Margiela. Split into chapters, the film first investigates the strict aesthetics of Japanese food; as Chalayan points out, ‘the customer is never involved in the production of the food, in the violence of its production; we just eat its aesthetic result’. The Christian Holy Communion, the taking of bread and wine, forms a later chapter exploring the rituals and codes of conduct inherent in organised religion, while other sections of the film return to the idea of travel as a disembodied experience. ‘Each scene is like a kit, a stage set for a different zone,’ explains Chalayan. ‘But it’s more related to performance than theatre, because the work presents a series of formulated actions that can only be made timeless on film and not when presented live.’

The different chapters that make up Anaesthetics could easily be presented as separate works, but the idea of complex layering is actually a key structural motif. Just as we peel off the different strata of meaning with each successive chapter, the white-suited assistants in the film peel clothes from the walls of each scene to be worn by the main characters in the next setting. In fact, in both Chalayan’s film and fashion work, the act of gradually stripping away or unfolding layers is used as a device to symbolise adaptation and change: the woman peels off the blanket that covers her in Place to Passage; a letter opens out into a full-length paper dress in his ‘Airmail’ designs; furniture upholstery, and finally furniture itself, turns into dresses in the 2000/2001 ‘Afterwords’ collection.

For the Turkish Pavilion in Venice, Chalayan is working on a specially commissioned five-screen projected installation, a ‘scientific and aesthetic experiment as narrative’ titled The Abscent Presence. At the last Biennale, Turkish commissioner Beral Madra presented a group exhibition in a building shared by several other countries’ representatives, but Chalayan’s solo presentation merits a dedicated space (Fondazione Levi, the site of the Scottish Pavilion in 2003).

During the research phase of the new project, seven people unknown to Chalayan and foreign to the city of London donated an item of clothing to the artist. DNA was extracted from the clothes and analysed to form a series of facts on which to base imaginary – but entirely possible – characteristics for each individual. DNA, as Chalayan points out, ‘can only offer a few clues, such as someone’s race and gender, state of health and certain allergies; the rest has to be imagined from the clothing itself’. Three of the seven samples will be used to create graphic, animated representations of each individual, based on the form of the original garment and its status as a foreign element in London’s alien cityscape. The five-screen projection will be accompanied by items of clothing exhibited as static objects, so that the entire installation incorporates both the real and imagined presence of the three strangers. Chalayan is excited at the possibility of crossovers between the reality and the fantasy.

The Abscent Presence is not a documentary, but rather an abstract and creative reading of information that highlights the way we form cultural stereotypes and claim knowledge based on approximation. According to Chalayan, it will act as ‘a form of interrogation, a confrontation of assumed readings of immigration’ – a confrontation, in fact, that reflects on his own presence at the Biennale. His first concern on receiving the invitation to exhibit in Venice was that having a London-based fashion designer representing Turkey might ‘annoy people’. But his resistance to prejudice and categorisation – his subject matter in The Abscent Presence, as in so much of his previous work – should deter audiences from making hasty judgements.

ArtReview June 2005

Normalization

In 2003 Platform was invited by Rooseum, Malmo and WHW, Zagreb as a third collaborator in a series of discussions, exhibitions and publication, which would take as their point of departure the term Normalization. The mere mention of normalization, carries with it a multitude of connotations: the EU process of transition, one of adoption and transformation; its contrary and the desire to achieve normality, ‘hope in liberation and independence. Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims’.* The ambiguity of such a term, its perception from different geographies, cultures and individuals, plus our personal approach to curatorial practice, resulted in less of a collaborative outcome and rather presented an opportunity to emanate three different approaches while continuing to embrace clear cross-references.

Throughout the development of Normalization, Platform was wary of proposing a single response as an analysis of the term. Again it was the ambiguity of the word that revoked a single curatorial approach. And, although by means of different perspectives, a collection of art works in one exhibition could balance such a predicament, this alone would not absolve the curator’s responsibility to also confront the proposition. Hence, Platform’s personal response in its pursuit to communicate a notion of normalization has been one of trepidation and enquiry, resulting in a progressive art program that focused on the multiple meanings of the term, its usage, manifestation, its political and social implications via the involvement of different modes, media and protagonists.

In October 2004 Platform launched its Normalization process by inviting three artists: Can Altay, Solmaz Shahbazi and Phil Collins, to independently present their work and consider the relationships between each other’s practices with reference to the concept. During this phase an impending probability that Platform would have to relocate and the prospect of losing our exhibition space, put many ideas on hold. Confronting this situation and its own conditions of normalization became the main topics of discussion. The move did not come about, but its potential led to concerns about the transfer of a scene, the import and export of art, site specificity and audience.

These ideas were developed in two exhibitions entitled Art For…, which strove to discuss the conditions of ‘art for export’, in particular the exchange between Turkey and Europe. A selection of work by artists from Turkey that had previously only been shown abroad was installed within Platform’s exhibition space. The entrance became a reference point, the walls clad with posters and a table laid with catalogues from various Europe and Asia based exhibitions that have imported work, sometimes almost the entire scene. Art For…1 and 2 questioned whether this situation of export arose from a lack of audience, or clientel in Turkey? Whether artists from a certain culture change their practice on realizing that they cannot capture the attention of the local audience, or that their work cannot be exhibited because of political reasons or misunderstandings? Whether there are specific types of requests from the international scene that are placed upon them? Or just the opposite; whether they are creating works that they would want to see in another context?

Following Art For… and a program of talks and discussions, Normalization introduces the term via a diverse group of works that pronounce a range of commissioned responses, or presupposed tendencies towards the theme.

Can Altay, invited at the very start of the discussion, created a series of site-specific installations, each one re-presenting the previous exhibition hosted at Platform, but in a condensed form. In Normalization he provides a frame and historical review of the Art For… exhibitions, including his own work as previously viewed within their contexts. In so doing, he references the personal as a product and producer of normalization and raises questions relating to scale, packaging and consumption as an aspect of contemporary life, which Altay proposes ‘is, itself structured around a series of installments.’

Phil Collins and Solmaz Shahbazi, also involved from the outset of Normalization will as well present work in the 9th Istanbul Biennial. The introduction of artists participating in the Biennial and the support of specific artists over longer periods of time, were additional positions we were interested to take within the normalization process. Collins will spend three months in Istanbul from June on residency with IRP to produce work for the Biennial, in advance he has presented a selection of photographs within Normalization. Taken in places of intense socio-political conflict, these images collectively constitute the very fabric of everyday life more or less anywhere. Shahbazi, who will spend time in Istanbul this summer in order to make a new video work, was commissioned to make a third part to her Tehran series, the first being Tehran 1380 and Good Times/Bad Times. Her new work, Persepolis (2005), does not focus on the city itself, but on details within apartments, sweet memories and the construction of personal and collective narratives.

Two other artists with previous and ongoing connections with Platform are Wael Shawky, who has completed a six-month residency here, and Yael Bartana who will spend three months with IRP again in preparation for the Biennial. In the exhibition Shawky presents Cave (2004), which features himself in a local Istanbul supermarket reciting sections from the Koran. At first glance, the video appears much like a news-broadcast, effectively blurring the lines between consumerism, dissemination of information and exotica. Bartana exhibits Trembling Time (2001) in which she captures an aspect of collective memory related to the ‘Soldiers Memorial Day’. Her camera is directed at cars slowing out of respect on a major motorway, supplemented by the pause exaggerated in editing, the work offers a perspective of a ghostly world where movement and immobility merge into one.

An ongoing interest in the work of Mark Leckey, who previously exhibited at Platform in Coming Up, led to the inclusion of Made In Heaven (2004). An inquisitive form of allure haunts this computer-generated vision of Jeff Koons’ iconic bunny. Observed in Leckey’s own London flat, the implied camera circles the sculpture, an appropriation that positions the infamous work literally within Leckey’s grasp.

Also included is Hip Activities (2004) by Aydan Murtezaoglu, which offers a reduction to a kind of indifference via image, a treatise on the quest to transcend the bounds of the possible, a self-proclaimed ‘melodramatic parade of displacement.’ The multi-media installation: I Am the Martyr Comrade Jamâl Sâtî (2003) by Jalal Toufic, which attends to the “martyrdom” of Jamal Sati and his pre-recorded statement exposed in the work’s title. And, finally, Roman Ondak’s performance Good Feelings In Good Times (2003), periodically resulting in an artificial queue of people standing in line at Platform’s door. The fake queue is a reference to everyday-life and symbolises stagnation as well as order and shared mindset. If the visitor asks ‘what are you queuing for?’ the exhibition itself becomes a point of reference, as the response will most likely be a shrug and the reply ‘we don’t know’ as the queue disperses.

*Mahmoud Darwish

Normalization is supported by European Cultural Foundation and was conceived as part of a series of exhibitions, lectures and discussions initiated under the umbrella concept normalization. Parallel programs have been developed by Rooseum in Malmo, Sweden and WHW in Zagreb, Croatia. A joint publication will emerge from the three interpretations.

Memorials, monuments and memory in Amsterdam

The political climate in the Netherlands regarding immigration and integration has strongly affected general discussion. Added to the debate surrounding future cuts in cultural funding, current artistic production appears to be reflecting these issues by reconsidering the true signification of memorials, monuments, memory and National identity.

At the Rijksakademie (not) open ateliers, open to the general public on 27 and 28 November, it was stated that the academy’s main topic of consideration were the consequences of severe funding cutbacks in the cultural sector. The open studios brochure also explained that the ‘(not)’ preceding the usual ‘open ateliers’, was inserted to illustrate ‘that it no longer goes without saying that a multitude of worlds of experience, ideas, cultures, work and work in progress can be shown.’ Perhaps more simply described as the local increase in concern over repercussions brought about by freedom of speech.

The Rijksakademie attempted to exhibit each of its 58 participating artists both in their studio environment and in additional spaces throughout the academy. The building is a maze of staircases, corridors and bridging devices and the numbers, names and levels applied ‘on various big maps throughout the building’ didn’t ease navigation.

Amongst the many presentations, only a few stood out. These included a number of installations by Claire Harvey scattered throughout the building. The most effective being in her studio, where an overhead projection of pencil drawn figures clambered and balanced amidst the gradients of a wall applied collage. A video projection by Sara Rajai, presented a family sat perfectly still, while a roving camera, intimately circled their composition. Here the image proved more seductive than the narrative - a story about the selection, delivery and installation of what one was led to presume to be a traditional Turkish or Persian carpet. Next door, Igor Sevcuk’s two-room exhibit of cross-referencing installations definitely intrigued the audience who appeared transfixed by an emotive video of a dog aggressively chasing its own tail.

Moving on to the topical theme of memorials and national identity: Marjolein Rothman’s paintings of ruins and historical monuments, proposed a confrontation between power, decay and the desperation to make memory permanent. Oranje, Amalia Pica’s studio work, where she had painted every object and every part of the room as seen from its open door in vivid orange, was unfortunately eclipsed by a new work of the same name by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij. Selected to represent the Netherlands in the 51st Venice Biennial, de Rijke and de Rooij’s slide installation Orange presents a series of 80 orange monochrome slides originally intended to capture the colour of the prisoners’ overalls at Guantanamo Bay, while simultaneously confronting National sympathies and referencing The House of Orange. Orange was on exhibit in ‘Cordially Invited’ at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, along with another of Pica’s more successful new works Toc toc, a clog wearing performance and video documentation involving Netherlands based foreigners.

Finally at the Rijksacademie, Jeremiah Day’s work Reconstruction set an interesting precedent for the reconsideration of what memorials mean in real time. His installation of photographs, text and sculptural elements used as a reference the events of the summer and autumn of 2004, when most of the major memorials and monuments in Washington DC went under construction. He proposes that this simultaneous reconstruction is no coincidence and that it is a symbolic re-organisation, initiated to parallel the USA’s shift in its political discourse. Upon the photographs Day had handwritten short notes, which crossed over images and factual information, offering a fragmented form of storytelling and a reflection of the limitations of historical description.

In the realm of new media and design a contemporary answer to the convention of graveyards and memorials was proposed by the winning entry for the Internet competition Fusedspace. Initiated by SKOR, Foundation for Art and Public Space, Fusedspace 2004 called for innovative applications of new technology in the public domain, leading to its virtual extension. The competition received 307 international entries and was won by Ulrika Wachtmeister from Sweden.

Wachtmeister’s proposal was to install on the island of Pepperholm, (which is located between the two cities Copenhagen and Malmö), a field of 1.5m high light-poles connected to the Internet via mobile technology. This field would be fully visible to passengers in the cars and trains passing via the island to each city, but would remain, as it is now, physically inaccessible. Each time a pole was lit as a gesture of remembrance it would then gradually fade, to allow access for a new interactive user, leaving a glimmering field of lights, which you pass by on your way to elsewhere.

Ironically continuing this theme of remembrance and mourning is SMART Project Space’s move into a building of monumental proportions that was once Amsterdam’s Pathological Anatomical Laboratory. SMART was founded in 1994 and since inception has developed as a site for cultural production through its strong artist studio program. Now SMART is developing its activities and enlarging its premises by ten, to 5000 square metres.

The new building’s features retain a cold edge but offer an incredible range of spaces, which once redeveloped will include 700 square metres of exhibition space fuelled by work produced on site in the 12 studio spaces; 6 cinemas, each seating between 20 and 60 guests who can select their film of choice in advance via the internet; a production support and new media lab; reference library; media café, club and restaurant accessible by boat, Smarties, an onsite kindergarten run by studio artists; and in the hollow clock tower, accommodation for visiting critics and lecturers. The new SMART spaces open on 21st May 2005 with ADAM (short for Amsterdam), an exhibition of works by 30 artists including Dave Allen, Otto Berchem, Johanna Billing, Phil Collins, Dirk van Lieshout and Susan Philipsz.

While the Rijksakademie and the De Ateliers studio progamme are both concerned about future funding, the Stedelijk’s exhibition program has also deteriorated during its temporary transitional phase at its waterfront location. Amidst this general feeling of unease and stagnation, SMART has moved forward regardless and its directors’ Thomas Peutz and Una Henry’s positive perspective could provide the potential to reposition SMART as Amsterdam’s main centre for contemporary culture.

dig my wig

Over and Above/How Can You Resist, LA Freewaves 2004

For a number of years, Can Altay has been documenting ways in which his urban environment of Ankara is ‘mis-used’, or alternatively ‘made the most of’ by its inhabitants. MiniBar, an ongoing project, surveys a group of people who accommodate the gaps between residential or commercial apartment buildings to form social drinking spaces. They return to these places time and again to meet up in the evenings, until the residents, police, or local authorities move them on. The ‘Minibar’ then shifts and is reformed elsewhere, again creating and shaping a new space for the continuation of the protagonists’ activities. Altay, who studied and now teaches architecture, describes this phenomena as: “a doing of architecture, by undoing the very architecture that provides the grounds for the act. It is not about undoing the architecture physically, because just by being there the people who initiate the ‘Minibars’ shape the space that they use. In contrast, it is the residents’ interventions, generated in order to eliminate the ‘Minibar’ activities, that imprint lasting changes on the physical, urban texture.” Minibar has itself been exhibited in different formats, including installations with text interventions, theoretical documents and slide shows. For Over and Above Altay has created a new compilation of slides that are here projected as stills within the moving images of the rest of the programme. These paused images show the ‘Minibar’ act, details such as the use of plastic drinking bottles, the evenings’ ephemeral remains and then finally the permanent interventions that intercept the ‘Minibar’ and cause it to move on.

“I mean, people created this place’’.
Excerpt from the minibar interviews by Can and Deniz Altay

In Paperman, another new edit from a larger installation, Altay forms a diary about the garbage collection of non-official rubbish collectors in Ankara. These men collect specific ‘types’ of garbage in order to sell it on for recycling. The camera follows these ‘Papermen’, who during the day and throughout the night, spend hours going through the city’s bins and refuse, searching out countless samples of a specific material in order to make a living. The authorities turn a blind eye to this practice, which in fact appears to benefit everyone, from the official garbage collectors, to those that recycle the materials and finally those that are making the best out of what is available, the ‘Papermen’.

With a similar attitude ‘of making the most of the situation’, Osman Bozkurt’s DVD Auto Park depicts families picnicking and playing on the verges of some of Istanbul’s major roads and motorways. Not to be inconvenienced by a lack of green space near their homes, these families plan entire day trips to be spent within metres of speeding traffic. As one would expect, these areas are not officially open to the public, but no one seems to notice or care. As Bozkurt interviews different people who sit out on the minimal grassy banks, it is clear that they more than enjoy these small islands of green land for the space and freedom that they provide. One interviewee suggests that the spaces are ‘well designed and if it wasn’t for the fact that there was a road to be crossed – convenient’. Another picnicker, when asked about the disturbing noise coming from the traffic optimistically philosophizes that: “There is no noise. Of course if you give yourself to the noise, there is noise.”

Specifically produced for the programme is Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr extracted excerpts from their documentary work Tehran 1380. The new edited version includes footage of contemporary Tehran and interviews that describe how quickly the city is changing and expanding. The Alborz mountains provide a natural background and limit for the city and so it is within the existing urban configuration that a chaotic and tangled growth of newly built living spaces can be witnessed. Air space is where the planned developments are to formally occur, but there are also makeshift sites such as the interior of billboard signs that are accommodating the excess population. Since the revolution of 1979 the population has dramatically exploded and now a third of the city is less than 14 years of age. It is in this work and other documentaries both made and in progress that Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr are proposing that it is no longer the Capitols of the West, but the highly populated and organically growing conurbations such as Tehran that are now setting the standards for today’s cities.

The Atlas Group is a fictional art collective formed by Walid Raad. In the work I think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep another fictive construction is taking place. The work is filmed on the Corniche, Beirut’s seaside walkway, a place that is renowned these days as a pleasant place to walk, talk and jog. It is also known as the favourite meeting place of political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune-tellers and phrenologues. To keep an eye on all these activities, Lebanese security agents set up cameras in 1992 along the strip. The cameras were manned and were placed inside the mini-van cafes that lined the strip at 18 metre intervals.

Instead of concentrating on capturing on camera these deviant activities, the operator of camera #17 would divert his camera’s focus away from its designated target and instead aim its view to the setting sun. For shifting his attention to something far more personally appealing, the operator was dismissed in 1996,

According to the Atlas Group, although they never had contact with the camera operator, he sent them the sunset video footage he had been permitted to keep. The cameraman also stated that he had focused his camera on the sun when he thought it was about to set and that he returned to his duties once he thought the sun had set. Moreover, he stated that having grown up in East Beirut during the war years, he always yearned to watch the sunset from Corniche located in West Beirut.

Finally, to offer another perspective on the social production of space and the utilization of a physical environment pushed to its limits, architects Neutral were approached to produce an urban impression of their recent visit to Cairo. Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman have been working together since 1998, when they collaborated in Tokyo to produce the film seek.01. In a similar way to seek.01 their new work Clustered In performs as a fast-moving diary and personal reading of the city. Clustered In was filmed in May 2004, using a digital still camera with a highly compressed Mpeg movie option. The film ‘refers to the gregarious atmosphere of people huddling densely within their groups and families under the threat of the ever intruding sand from the surrounding desert’. Interpreting the speed of the city is foremost and although its inhabitants remain as Neutral suggests: ‘clustered in’, the film continuously proposes the desire for escape. Each section of the video concentrates on a mode of transportation, or another implied shift from a to b, such as the speed of change that results from increased allusion to commodity value. Together these different forms of exchange span years of history, while also proposing a desire for the new and the possibility to move further and more quickly in time and space. The closing scene of Clustered In is filmed from a car, at night, – suggesting that ultimately this city, much like the others refered to in this programme, will continue such rapid acceleration even when left alone.

Works and order


The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Lebanon
I think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep, 2000, DVD, 6:30

Can Altay, Turkey
Minibar, 2004, DVD, 3:30

Osman Bozkurt, Turkey
Auto-Park The Highway Parks of Istanbul, 2003 DVD 15:00

Solmaz Shahbazi and Tirdad Zolghadr, Iran
Excerpts from Tehran 1380, mini DV, 18:30

Can Altay, Turkey
Papermen, DVD, 9:56

Neutral - Christian Grou and Tapio Snellman, UK
Clustered In, 2004, DVD NTSC, 9:00

Two steps forward and one back?

It is difficult not to only refer to Istanbul when asked about the contemporary art situation in Turkey, because this is where the crux of it happens. There are a small number of artists emerging from Izmir and Ankara, and a strong, but again small scene has over the last few years appeared in Diyarbakir and the surrounding region. But, Istanbul remains where the majority of the artists live and work, it is where the exhibitions take place and where the international art crowd flock every two years for the International Istanbul Biennial. So, to mainly discuss the situation in this particular city is crucial and even more so when it stands at a point that appears to exist inbetween the historical and the contemporary.

There is so much potential for the situation in Istanbul to suddenly launch itself away from the conservative and undemanding modernist ideals many consider contemporary. But, until this happens with more conviction, for every two steps taken forward into the experimental and enlightening arena of contemporary culture by the city’s institutions and their audience, there still seems to be one taken back.

Istanbul is full of energy and things have been happening quickly over the last few years. It almost feels as if there is a deadline approaching, that the previous lack of institutions has created speed, in advance of the forthcoming EU decision, the ratification of new cultural sponsorship laws that offer tax breaks for private businesses, a more positive outlook for the country’s economy and the desire to be the ‘one’ to open ‘Istanbul’s first modern museum’. In light of these changes the city has recently seen contemporary art spaces open, change and close, more often than not without due consideration or public discussion. Their aims, long-term plans and intellectual position are either not discussed, or remain behind closed doors. On the other side of the coin, one can find the remains of philanthropic funding, where the donation of a space and small budgetry assistance allows the marketplace to be dominated by the most mediocre of collectors and local media. Again, this support, (Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center and Borusan Art Gallery aside) which mainly dominates the busy pedestrianised zone of Istiklal Caddesi, is about having a cultural center or gallery to one’s name without a care to what it houses.

There is a constant that runs underneath all these projects, the city’s historical foundation, where things remain static and immersed in tradition. It is the pride in this permanently effective base that remains in tension with the desire to produce a contemporary situation and this is where the fine line of success lies – in managing to completely escape old habits in order to concentrate on the new.

In spring of this year Proje4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul’s first major contemporary art space closed. Since its founding in 2001, a number of the most important contemporary art exhibitions to happen in Turkey in the last five years, took place at Proje4L. Both Under The Beach the Pavement curated by Vasif Kortun and I’m Too Sad to Kill You curated by Halil Altindere provided a much-needed platform for Turkey’s new generation of artists and without bias to Istanbul’s local artist base. These felt like positive times. The work was not always fantastic, but the attitude and potential were there. As Vasif Kortun stepped down as director and the museum’s funding became more of an issue, the program seemed to loose direction and the institutions lack of a collection meant that it had no true stability or focus. Still, its closure should have caused a reaction and a discussion about how it could have continued, moved or shifted, but instead the event was all but glossed over by the Turkish media and even those working in the contemporary art sphere with shared interests.

By no means substitutes, but at least new beginnings for Istanbul's museum culture, are plans for two new spaces; the first, a museum of modern and contemporary art at the Silahtaraga Power Station campus anticipated to open late next year, and the other, due to open as early as November is Istanbul Modern. The latter will house a collection of modern Turkish art, temporary exhibition spaces, as well as a public library and archive - entry will be free. This museum initiative has been backed by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art and will be located in the old customs warehouse on the Bosphorus that was used as the main site for the 4th and 8th International Istanbul Biennials. With the appointment of Rosa Martinez as head of exhibitions, there is growing expectation as to whether this will make the difference between the museum existing as a static display of Turkish work, or becoming a lively, internationally reputed museum. It is though, the decision of starting a contemporary collection of Turkish work, that will make or break its success.

While the institutions here continue a fragile existence, it is the individuals - the artists, curators and critics from Turkey who are gaining more and more exposure on an international level. There remain strong connections with Berlin, Amsterdam and Rotterdam and these cities as well as others, have seen freelance curators such as Erden Kosova, Esra Sarigedik, Pelin Tan and Basak Senova all continuing to expand their activities abroad. In the last year the established artist base have reached new heights; to name but a few achievements among so many others: Kutlug Ataman nominated for the Turner Prize, Haluk Akakce and Ergin Cavosoglu for Becks Futures, Huseyin Alptekin and Cengiz Cekil showing at the recent Manifesta, Fikret Atay to show at Tate Modern and Oda Projesi travelling and exhibiting extensively. While Turkey still struggles to provide collectors for the many excellent artists producing solid work, there is interest abroad both in the private and public collections. This interest also extends to the documentation of such activity and several publications, notably ArtIst magazine and a recently commissioned book on Turkey’s contemporary art scene written by Vasif Kortun and Erden Kosova, provide an intellectual structure of support for their contemporaries.

This international interest is yet again reflected by the many art professionals and artists passing through Turkey for research, projects and sabbaticals. Turkey is currently viewed as one of the hot spots for new talent and anticipated change. This proves a difficult, alternating position, that is positive in terms of increasing exchange and production, but problematic when the artists and scene are extracted, popularised and replanted as a national collective in another context. On the other hand the exchange to here, mainly implemented by Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center’s international conference program, this year saw The Last Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist book launch and discussion with guests including Martha Rosler, Tino Sehgal and Daniel Buren hosted in Istanbul. Also at Platform is the Istanbul Residency Program, which is providing a completely new situation, one where invited artists, their friends, relatives and collaborators all turn up expectantly enthusiastic and in consequence enliven the scene. Combined, these guests, who may stay for a few days or for up to six months, have introduced something fresh and alternative, while also revealing the sharp edge of competition, something that did not exist as predominantly before. As a result of such a dominant presence another negotiation is presented, a trait of Istanbul is its imbalance between excess and normality, and currently foreign participation resulting from the rise in visitors and guests is more apparent than the local.

Finally, there is the Biennial and its international emphasis, the one institution that has maintained its support of contemporary art over the last eight exhibitions. Poetic Justice, last years’ offer by Dan Cameron, did little to enliven the local art scene, concentrating more on the import of work, a list of safe names and an installation that at best was dull. Preparations are already underway for the next installment and for the first time the Biennial will be co-curated, the appointed directors being Charles Esche, who recently took up the Directorial post at the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven and Vasif Kortun, Director of Platform Garanti in Istanbul. Their concerns focus on the project's structure and local context, Vasif coming from Turkey and Charles having strong connections with the scene here for a number of years. The title will initially be Istanbul, referring to both the real urban location and the imaginative charge that the city represents for the rest of Turkey and the world. Working with a newsite and escaping the old historic monuments of the city, Istanbul will be considered as a metaphor, as a prediction, as a lived reality and an inspiration.

The Moderna Museet has Re-opened.

Following two years of repair work and architectural refurbishment, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet re-opened in February this year. Considered by many as the largest and most comprehensive museum of contemporary art north of Düsseldorf, the current director Lars Nittve is finally in a position to resurrect its reputation and the building’s image.

Just one month into the program a candlelit procession of twinkling lights lined the path from the new waterside entrance (a path that the original architect Rafael Moneo had always intended for) to the first in the Moderna by Night series of art and music events. The evening concluded with a performance by Swedish artist Tobias Bernstrup and attracted a full auditorium of local artists, curators and musicians. People were drinking in a bar set up in the adopted education room, a DJ played continuously next-door and even though the performances were seated, the atmosphere was relaxed and casual. One of Bernstrup’s computer-animated creations - a man repeatedly running around a corridor, to become more and more consumed by grey fog with each circuit - provided an hypnotic backdrop for his entrance. As the artist took his position, clad in a robotic suit, a monocle over one eye and a large barrelled gun by his side, it felt like the Moderna Museet had reopened as a young and hip venue. Even Bernstrup’s finale lyrics: ‘You, You’re only beautiful at night, here in the fluorescent flickering lights’ seemed to say it all.

A second visit the following morning suggested that the new Moderna Museet is still a rather conservative but popular institution, that is attracting a diverse crowd of Tate-like proportions. Admission is now free to all and this, along with the new emphasis on open-plan public meeting space, which incorporates bookshops, cafes and a large day-lit lobby, courtesy Marge Arkitektur practice, has tempted a continuous stream of visitors. An installation of fabric wall panels by Yinka Shonibare counterbalances the minimal quality of the surrounding architecture and is most successful as an introductory work at the waterside entrance. Also located at this entrance is a new interactive Studio Video lounge. Here one can select art videos at choice from the Moderna Museet’s collection and view them via a computer screen or projected on the side wall. It is a great research point, which also enables more discerning visitors the opportunity to view work that is of personal interest, a positive shift to what could be a new era of interactive curating.

There is a strong respect for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and yet even those working in its shadow are aware that there is a need for more alternative, independent art spaces in the city to balance its strong institutional message. In response to this situation, Jelena Runqvist who had previously initiated the project After Shopping and Ylva Ogland and Rodrigo Mallea Lira who founded the project Modern Talking recently came together to form Konst2. Launched in the suburb district of Skarholmen in an ex-immigration office, activities at Konst2 intend to question and avoid the conservatism associated with the more traditional art institution. The ‘2’ in the title refers to the other facets of art production such as design, fashion and architecture, which Konst2 believe the art world too often perceive as the ‘other’, a situation they are interested to dissolve by integrating all these cultural disciplines within one situation. The space acts as a public working platform, with spaces and offices for artists, designers, curators etc., to work and collaborate on joint projects.

The interior of Konst2 can also be read as one large collaborative project with the most ingenious intervention created by architects and designers Ugly Cute. To soften the previous and current distinction between public and private space, the floor carpet has been extended up to cover the dividing walls. Cuts in the carpet provide visual access between each space and this flexible design allows more material to be cut away at the users’ discretion.

Konst2 have attempted to create a situation where all their activities start from scratch, from the interior by Uglycute, to their graphics – a blank pad of coloured lined papers. It’s a nice utopian concept, but surely it is naive to suggest you can create anything from a starting point of nothing. Another concern is how Konst2 relates to its public. It is essentially a public space, but its activities are diverse and appear quite insular confined to those that they collaborate with and their friends from the local art and design scene. The shop signals at these contradictions. It sells design objects and art concepts– for example you can purchase the instructions to a conceptual art work or a designed object such as shelf or wallpaper. This suggests a registered difference between ideas and objects, the facets of art production that Konst2 endeavour to bring together.

The strong sense of collaboration seen at Konst2 is extremely prevalent in Stockholm. Last November this network was used to its full potential when many of the artist run and independent spaces together organised a public open day. Under the title Southern Comfort and with Index as the main facilitator the following spaces and initatives: Make It Happen, CFF, Sauna, Idi, Konst2, Candyland, Soc, Bondegatan, United networks, Site, Uglycute, Crac, Fylkingen, Studio and The Union along with others, will list their activities and open their doors to the public in a concerted effort again in May. This collaborative condition however active and positive is in danger of internalising Stockholm’s art scene with the same people coming together and relying on one another’s creative support time and again. As the three protagonists of Konst2 also take up artistic directorial posts at Testa Konsthall, their initial aim to create a complex production site as an ambitious response to the form of the institution already seems to have been integrated into the system. With similar local support existing in terms of funding, together these structures hinder the possibility for an alternative underground, mediating even the most experimental new projects into the mainstream.

Ahmet Ogut

Ahmet Ogut

There is a subtle shroud of ambiguity dangling over the work, resolve and character of Ahmet Ogut, one that tempts enquiry, rather than providing answers. With it comes a self-assurance that is not arrogant, or overly ambitious as seen in some of the work produced by artists from Turkey that came to local and international attention during the nineties, but from a personal and although often humorous, a more earnest perspective. The one-liner works, in your face statements and use of political irony are dwindling, to be replaced by a subtler, more inquisitive and muliti-dimensional approach. And, the younger generation of artists, of which Ogut is one, are choosing not to be restricted and hence labelled by working with a solitary form of medium; are open to collaborations in order to encourage diverse practice and thought; have gained confidence to experiment freely without assuming an end-product; and ultimately they are producing work that is not obvious, not as expected and therefore far more interesting to discuss.

Until the age of 17, Ogut had not ventured beyond the region surrounding Diyarbakir in the East of Turkey, the city of his birth. It was only then that he travelled to Ankara to study painting and illustration for four years at Hacettepe University. One of his first works Halisaha sets a poignant scene for his interest in performance and role-play, the ability to shift tradition and location and the sense of community formed by games.
A candid irony combined with Ogut’s gentle touch as its referee grants a dexterity that clearly references specific issues important to him as a Kurd living and working in Turkey, while at the same time picking up on similar ambiguities present at any threshold which exists between two cultures.

In Halisaha (which literally translates as carpet field, but means astro-turf) Ogut transferred a Turkish carpet, a symbol and literal element of his home in Diyarbakir, into the centre of a football stadium. A photograph of the carpet’s temporary placement exists as the art work, but it was the actual performance of taking the carpet from its private setting to lay it out for display in a space created for an audience (although at that moment significantly absent and therefore merely implied), which produced a temporary interface loaded with enquiry.

Another local game Okey has been the subject of several of Ogut’s works. Played with numbered chips and as popular as Backgammon in the more rural areas of Turkey, Okey is a man’s game and in places like Diyarbakir consumes time in tea shops for the unemployed. In his youth, Ogut and a friend set up a small business, which boasted the return of Okey chips ‘as good as new’ by repainting their embossed numbers for pocket money. When invited to participate in the exhibition Under the Beach the Pavement curated by Vasif Kortun at Proje4L in 2003, Ogut recognised a familiar division between his activity and that of the Okey players in Diyarbakir and the location in Istanbul of the museum, then positioned on a fine-line separating the financial area of Levent and the residential, poverty stricken district of Gultepe. In order to locate an element of one site subtly into the other, Ogut went about collecting chips form the community in Gultepe (this time without charge) to renew within the museum. On the opening night of the exhibition Ogut sat focused, painting these chips, doing a job he knew well and that performed multiple references for himself, having been a lived reality of his youth and a symbol of multiple cultures living side-by-side albeit in ignorance of one another.

Ogut used Okey again as a different means for communication in the exhibition Darkroom in Hannover. One day before the opening, Ogut taught four German males how to play the game, which they then realised as a form of living sculpture within the setting of the gallery. The men had never played Okey previously and yet lived very close to the Turkish neighbourhood from where the chips for the game had been easily borrowed. Without imposing a shared dialogue between the local German and the Turkish community, Ogut hinted at the possibility for cultural exchange by introducing this game on the boarder of two contexts.

Two recent video works What a Lovely Day and Cut it Out propose imaginary scenarios for real situations of cause and effect. What a Lovely Day depicts the playing out of a situation where the police stop and search a young man. Secret police, such as the ones portrayed in the video, exist in Ogut’s memory as a catalyst for assumed guilt and the fear of potential violence. His video is as much a re-enactment of scenes he has heard about, as it is a performance of his mind racing forward to conjure a future situation on seeing the tell-tale white car known to contain such police.

In Cut it Out a young man, who for Ogut represents the average American guy, sits on the floor in a pair of pants printed with an American flag motif. Posing as an Iraq posted soldier he curses the war, the people involved, the pointlessness of it all and numerously repeats the phrase ‘it’s a lost cause, I want to go home’ seemingly confused and referring both to America’s war efforts and the situation in Iraq simultaneously. Throughout his rendition he continuously breaks down in laughter, as if high and excessively nervous of a reality and seriousness he cannot express. On two occasions flash frames appear momentarily exposing two men dressed in the representation of terrorists fed to us by the media. The first time they stand behind the boy, posing as if guarding him, in the second all three appear dead. These split-second insertions jerk the viewer to look beyond the boy’s bewildered contempt to the more sinister reality it refers to.

Another component of Ogut’s practice consists of collaborations with other artists. The most successful of these has been Colouring Book, produced with Sener Ozmen in 2004. The book contains a series of line drawn scenes adapted from childhood memory. Each one references complex topics mainly related to the Kurdish, Turkish relationship such as religion, small town mentality, immigration and the image of Ataturk as a national symbol. These pages perhaps best represent Ogut’s practice literally –because although images, scenes and thoughts are out-lined in the work, Drawing Book is essentially a blank canvas, gamely waiting to be coloured in, added to, modified, or scribbled out.

Ahmet Ogut currently lives and works in Istanbul. He was recently selected as the first artist from Turkey to receive a three-month residency in Basel, Switzerland with the support of Pro Helvetia.