Numerous projects initiated by the German Federal Cultural Foundation over the past few years have involved research on Caracas, Argentina, Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul. They are now presenting their results in various handbooks from the series »Metrozones«, at congresses and in exhibitions. These projects reflect a curiosity about places whose structures, or the images they produce, are examined with regard to their significance for the situation in Germany. It is, however, precisely this outside view that also constructs them as fringes that are being researched or exhibited, without asking to what extent the position of the researcher or exhibition organiser becomes a gesture of power and assertion emanating from a perhaps slowly dissolving centre: the centre that the Western cultural industry has always seen itself as being. In the past few years, particularly Istanbul and Turkey have been the subject of a number of exhibitions. It seemed as if they were aiming to demonstrate that the works of Turkish artists can indeed be inscribed in the Western way of seeing things. But it also seemed as if the works by artists were to legitimate a political desire for Turkey to be depicted as part of the European cultural sphere.
But, as the Turkish historian Orhan Esen explains, the view of Turkish art is obscured by at least three social questions. Firstly, there is the discussion on Turkey’s accession to the EU, then the problems that the West has with Islam, and the discussion about the Turkish or no longer Turkish population in German and Austrian cities.

Whether at Turkish group exhibitions like the one last year at the ZKM in Karlsruhe or at the Martin Gropius Building in Berlin, or in presentations of individual artists like the recent one in the Museum Quarter in Vienna – these three points are mostly connected with art in a rather deleterious way even in the conceptions, and certainly in the discussions: firstly, by the curators, who, mostly under the title »Istanbul«, which is meant as a symbol of multiculturalism or the possibility of solving problems with the Other, expect the artists to work on the same lines; and then by the audience, which has the same unnecessary expectation that now often predominates with regard to political art: that the works should either provide answers to all unsolved political and social problems, or not even start to try.

Normalisation
At the start of the year, two exhibitions with the title »Normalization« took place at the international showcase venue of the Istanbul art organisation Platform. In English, this title has somewhat negative connotations, but Vasif Kortun, head of Platform and the co-curator of the 10th Istanbul Biennial due to take place in autumn, also chooses this very word when he speaks of the current aim or efforts of the Turkish art scene. So in this case, the word normalisation means the hope that an exceptional situation will end, as it also does in English. However, this exceptional situation consists precisely in all those exhibitions and conferences and the increased attention that, although they slowly make it apparent that there is indeed artistic production in Turkey, also correspond to the typical cycles of the Western cultural industry’s sudden interest in scenes that are consumable because of their small size.

From the point of view of the Turkish, and particularly the Istanbul, art scene, the exhibitions about Turkey, the Turkish art scene and Istanbul give the outsider view of European curators or an assumed audience rather than showing under what conditions art is produced in Turkey, and what kind of art it is. The conjectures of Turkish artists about the interests of exhibition organisers are many, and run from the suspicion of a colonialist – orientalist – point of view to the assumption that there is simply a lot of European money that can currently be shelled out for integrating Turkey into the European cultural sphere. They complain that, for example, the »country presentation« is used to direct at Turkish art a denunciatory gaze that externally imposes the themes – mostly Islam, borders and the social and military conflicts surrounding them –, thus reducing the scope of Turkish artists to these topics. They often quote German or other Western art critics and curators who, when faced with a – Turkish – work on the consequences of the war in Yugoslavia, ask whether it wouldn’t be better to stick to one’s own conflicts, or talk about how themes are dismissed as having been »done« in the West years ago.1 On the other hand, it can clearly be seen how this view also generates a corresponding form of art. And it should not be forgotten that these are, of course, also themes that leave their mark on Turkish art in various ways.2
Country presentations have become common in the poorly financed European art institutions (like the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin), and alternate with presentations of private collections. The conditions of the Turkish exhibitions are different, however, particularly as regards the financial situation of the exhibitions. While other countries make themselves popular by completely financing such exhibitions, presentations on Turkey, mostly collected under the emblematic symbol of Istanbul, receive little or no support from Turkish institutions, even though there is enough money in Turkey. The participating artists are brought together mostly because of invitations from outside, often from nowhere, and constantly re-sorted.

Different scene
The galleries in Istanbul or Ankara show and sell a completely different scene than the one displayed in international exhibitions. This is not all that understandable, as many Turkish artists, such as Ayse Erkmen, for example, are sold abroad. The intersections between international exhibitions and the local scene consist of only a few institutions that are mostly run by banks, or the Istanbul Biennial. For many reasons, but also owing to the possibility of taking part in presentations from outside, which promises easier success, artist-run initiatives and venues, journals and exhibitions – ie. that which in Europe would be called the »art scene« - are very rare.

One exception is the Oda Projesi initiative, run by artists, which was represented in a series of international exhibitions and biennials starting with the Istanbul Biennial two years ago. Oda Projesi translates as »room project«. It refers to the place it started. The three artists Özge Açikkol, Gunes Savas and Seçil Yersel, all with very different backgrounds, rented three ground-floor rooms in one of the central, but run-down districts in the old part of Istanbul. Their intention was really to work there. Moved to an area that did not belong to its normal radius, their idea of artistic work changed pretty fast. Parallel with and to the residents, they opened the room to the outside and began to communicate with the other people living there, or also to work and create art. The next step was to invite other people to encounter this situation. Oda Projesi began organising exhibitions. At the same time, their ideas on their themes and treatment of them changed. Invited to the Venice Biennale, they built a Gecekondu house there with the help of the typical contractors for this kind of building. A Gecekondu house is a residential building like those built by the people coming from Anatolia in the informal housing developments in the outer districts of Istanbul.

The Road to Tate Modern

The networks mentioned by Vasif Kortun that need to be built up in the course of the normalisation of Istanbul if it is not to become the subject of only ONE gaze are created mainly at the instigation of curators. For example, there is Beral Madra, the commissioner of the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, who has just curated an exhibition with various artists from the Middle East in Diyarbakir, the capital of the Kurdish territory.3 In her words, it was about bringing together the artists in a different place than a that of a »vis-à-vis« with Western artistic production. The most important thing was the personal exchange between the artists from Tehran, Beirut, Cairo, Bosnia, Turkey and Diyarbakir itself, which has a very lively art scene.
According to Vasif Kortun, the desired new orientation of the Istanbul Biennial is for it to be a platform for art from eastern Europe and the Middle and Far East. Look at the list of artists, this is not really noticeable yet, as most of them are well-known names from the Western art industry. However, this show, due to begin in September, also highlights the emblematisation of the city’s name, which is unpopular in other places. Here, Kortun argues that anyone there on the spot will be unlikely to understand a city as a metaphor, but simply as a pre-requisite. This deliberately self-confident manner shows the intellectual divide that has opened up in the Turkish art industry and the work of many artists. If the safest path at present is to depict the exotic and different – and this is the only way Turkish artists can see the success, for example, of Fikret Atay -, how can one elegantly show one’s knowledge about the consumption necessities of the art industry? This has produced a number of works, from Gülsün Karamustafa’s »Le visage turque«, a work that she no longer wants to exhibit but that is constantly requested, to Halil Altindere’s »My Mother Loves Pop Art« or Serkan Özkaya’s »The Turkish Monument That Carries Eleven Watermelons«, which have as their clear addressees an »outside« audience. These works, of which the video »The Road to Tate Modern« by Sener Özmen and Erkan Özgen is perhaps the most significant, are an indication that one cannot be as different as is desired. At the same time – and this is perhaps the specific thing about the Turkish art scene – they are cancelled out by works by artists who live abroad and who were mostly also born there, who reproduce, from the distance of their reality, Turkish emblems that decisively influence the Western notion of Turkish images and themes – from the arabesques of Haluk Akakce to the installations of Ayse Erkmen or Feridun Zaimoglu’s flag installation, to the films by Fatih Akin. In the Turkish scene there is a large number of Shirin Neshats, artists who have not lived in Turkey for a long while but who use their Turkish background as a deliberate means of visual differentiation or as a basic theme. The conscious and sometimes cynical dissociation of many Turkish artists from these positions is however often read from the outside as the same exploitation of Turkish clichés.4

Departure from exceptional status
Recently an exhibition took place in Istanbul that was a novelty in a certain sense: an exhibition about the Turkish art scene in the eighties curated by Beral Madra.5 As Madra says, in Turkey there are at present three or four generations of artists that more or less cancel one another out. According to her, it is a fairly typical characteristic of each respective youngest generation to dismiss all art previously produced in Turkey as the belated adaptation of a Western hegemonic concept of art and to see itself as the first generation to work in a direct exchange with, and within, a contemporary concept of art. This means, Madra says, that there are no references to works of other Turkish artists: to earlier works and approaches, but also to earlier difficulties, including the past political situation of Turkey. Two years ago, Gülsün Karamustafa examined the topic of Turkey’s political past against the background of her own life history. She created a documentary work, a video, in which her acquaintances - women who suffered many years of imprisonment because of their political resistance at the time of the military dictatorship – talk about this period. The very direct form of the interview, which is not really in keeping with Karamustafa’s video aesthetic, seems in this case to have been chosen to speak directly about something that is important and for which one cannot or does not want to find a corresponding visual expression. This work addresses primarily a Turkish audience and her own generation. The work, which was shown at »Normalization«, represents an important step towards the desired departure from an exceptional situation in which contextual art was produced mainly with regard to the view from outside. A work that the Ankara-based artist Can Altay produced for »Normalization« gives another example of how referentiality can be represented within one’s own conditions of production. His contribution consisted in crowding together the respective preceding exhibitions – a group exhibition of Turkish artists, then the first part of »Normalization« - into a corner of the room. The exhibition architectures of the preceding shows thus became a sort of imploded Merzbau, in which the works of the others were deposited as photographic reductions or collections of papers. Works like this one highlight the fact that there are local contexts and that they could not have arisen anywhere else. In this way, they make a context productive for the outside world, without the situation being exhibited solely for the eyes of the Other or materialising only in a sufficiently alien or clueless respondent.
There is, however – in contrast with the a-historicity of the Turkish art scene as asserted by Beral Madra – a common knowledge about the important position that artists like Gülsün Karamustafa or Hale Tanger have in Turkish art. Like Ayse Erkmen, these two artists began at the start of the nineties to build up contacts with artists and networks outside Turkey and its art scene, and to work in a political or conceptual manner. These contacts existed long before the Western art industry directed its attention to Turkey, and the works of these artists are constitutive for today’s art scene as well. In the course of normalisation, however, it is again a number of young men who are finding their place in the art market. But, says Beral Madra, that will also change.

 

 

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