Art Without Borders

A Few Retrospectives; Cevdet Erek

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

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

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

Global Cities, Tate Modern

We all Laughed at Christopher Columbus, part three

Today in History

Book Launch

Lala Rascic - Pilot 03

Wael Shawky

Ola Pehrson: Hunt for the Unabomber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Christodoulos Panayiotou

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












_{Slow Dance Marathon, installation view}

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











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

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

Contemporary (Performance Issue) January 2007

We all Laughed at Christopher Columbus, part two

Roderick Buchanan
Jeremiah Day
Omer Fast,
Runo Lagomarsino
Deimantas Narkevicius
Amalia Pica
Florian Wüst

_{Amalia Pica, To Everyone that Waves}

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. 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 Jeremiah Day and Florian Wüst’s practice. Wüst for example has researched one seminal happening after another that made an 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 of 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.

Two exhibitions, the first at Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam, the second at Platform Garanti in Istanbul and a future publication aim to explore these inspired investigations of the past. The exhibition at Platform is composed as open in plan as possible, to allow the works to form a journey and the events explored by the artists to be viewed individually, while at the same time as part of an ongoing conversation. Although the subject matter of the works is not related, or consequentially linked in history in any acknowledged way, there are points of allusion through the artists’ similar approaches and attitudes. The significance the events considered is already determined in collective, internationally distributed history. Without disregarding this underlying historical significance, the artists form new interpretations of the subject matter that can be read autonomously, as well as in relation to the past they reference. This is most evident in the way the selected artists embrace the fictive within incident, without being compromised by feelings of responsibility to accuracy.

The statement ‘We all laughed at Christopher Columbus’, adopted and adapted by Runo Lagomarsino became the linchpin in the first exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam and remains in place as the title of the exhibition in Istanbul. As this statement continues to maintain a strong presence, a new work by Lagomarsino inhabits the exhibition. Casi Quasi Cinema presents in a model cinema the flyer text handed out by the US Directorate for Special Operations for a screening of the film The Battle of Algiers (Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo 1966) when it was shown at The Pentagon in August, 2003. The Pentagon considered the film a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq and the flyer read, as does the text in the work:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Two other works in the exhibition reference specific films. Omer Fast’s two channel video Spielberg’s List is constructed from the experiences of persons who participated as extras in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Spielberg shot his film on location in Krakow and employed thousands of local residents for the dramatic recreation of the historical events on which the movie is based. Some of the extras are old enough to have also experienced these events as they occurred in reality earlier in their own lives. Their recollections as witnesses and as viewers – indeed their duplicate first-hand experiences – bracket a fifty-year span during which events turn into movies, memory into filmed narrative. Fast mixes and juxtaposes footage of the constructed Plaszow film set with the neighbouring landscape. Interviews with extras who recall scenes from the film, are re-edited in the subtitles to offer more literal references to their fictive origins. In addition the videos include clips shot on the ‘Schindler’s List Tours’, thereby showing how notions of memory and place are both expanded and put under duress when history turns into film and when these layers are combined in a new multi-dimensional artistic interpretation.

The Role of a Lifetime by Deimantas Narkevicius features interview material with controversial British film director Peter Watkins, best known for his genre-breaking fictional documentary The War Game, 1965. Narkevicius' film combines three distinct elements. The first is his interview with Peter Watkins, recorded in Lithuania where Watkins lived for many years in the course of his self-imposed exile from Britain. The second is a sequence of drawings of the Lithuanian landscape, some depicting an unusual theme park, Gruto Park, a repository of Social Realist sculpture from the post-war era. The third comprises scenes of Brighton shot over an extended period by an amateur film enthusiast and never intended for public consumption. The Role of a Lifetime creates a space for Watkins to discuss his ongoing wish to liberate the film going audience and allow them the opportunity to be involved in a film’s research. And, by presenting his thoughts in a work by an artist interested in exploring the history he has created, his desire to encourage people to think about time, space, structure and process is intensified twofold.

Formed in a similar vein to consider memory, history and its interpretation through film is Amalia Pica’s work To Everyone That Waves. The 16mm footage shows an event organised in the harbour of Amsterdam of people waving farewell to those boarding an old sailing ship. 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 project on the reconstruction of monuments in Washington DC 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 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.

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. "Oppenheimer, who has often been called the father of the atom bomb, later refused to support the hydrogen bomb program of the U.S. government. Following this refusal he was accused of being a communist and subsequently lost his security clearance and his official advisory positions in 1954. 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.

Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and November Paynter

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.