Although the Istanbul Biennale seems part of the biennials boom that hit the post-1990 art scene all around the world, it is grounded in a somewhat different tradition. It is part of an endeavour led by a well-known industrialist, Nejat Eczac?bas?, who dreamt of organising an urban festival of arts similar to those held annually in several European cities. To accomplish this objective, Eczac?bas? applied to the Federation of Music Festivals in 1968. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art (hereafter also referred to as the IFCA, or simply the Foundation) was established only five years later, in 1973, and the first International Istanbul Festival took place from 15 June to 15 July 1973, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey.

In the post-1980 period of socio-spatial transformation of Istanbul, this first festival developed into various different events – many relatively small-scale or once-off activities, four main international festivals (film, theatre, music and jazz), and a Biennale to draw attention to contemporary art. This latter event also aimed at creating an international cultural network for Turkish and international artists, curators and art critics. The first Biennale, organised under the name »International Contemporary Arts Exhibitions« in 1987, included group exhibitions from various countries. This first Biennale’s main exhibition was curated (by Beral Madra) under the theme »Contemporary Arts in Traditional Spaces«. (These »traditional spaces« were the jewels of the historical peninsula: namely, the Aya Irini Church, the Aya Sophia Museum and the Süleymaniye Centre for Culture). In the following Biennale, the theme changed slightly to become »Contemporary Arts in a Historical Milieu«, and the venues remained the same. The Biennale has gradually taken on greater conceptual focus in subsequent years, through the use of themes and the decision to appoint a curator who not only determined the theme, but also chose the venues, invited the artists of his/her choice and placed the artworks. The themes of the following biennales were thus »Production of Cultural Difference«(1992) , »Orient/ation, The Vision of Art in a Paradoxical World« (1995), »On life, beauty, translations and other difficulties« (1997), »The Passion and the Wave« (1999), »Egofugal«(2001), »Poetic Justice«(2003) and »Istanbul«(2005).

From the very beginning, the Istanbul Festival and its offspring had an educational objective articulated as part of the modernisation project of the nation-state, which conceived of cultural transformation in terms of the appropriation and deployment of Western cultural forms to create a national culture. As the limitations of the nationalist project were realised, and cultural integration started to be seen as a prerequisite of full economic globalisation, the progressive motive behind festivals has gradually been replaced by an instrumental one, or rather by a combination of both: the organisation of festivals turned from a national project of modernisation into a strategy of globalisation, but these two did not conflict to the extent that both were taking the »West« as a reference point for further development, and excluded the Islamic ethos. Without losing sight of Atatürk’s legacy, festivals thus developed an international-multicultural orientation, and went partly beyond the unitary identity that the nationalist project imposed – this was, however, a rather depoliticised celebration of multiple cultural forms »accessories of the global city«) that was not necessarily translated into praxis.

Istanbul festivals soon turned into a prominent cultural »institution« of the city, and the Foundation into a cultural authority. This was partly related to the fact that the festival organisation has been »professionalised« amidst a web of international art agencies, festival networks and curatorial structures, marked not only by the domination of capital, but also an abundance of promotional exercises. Accordingly, festivals were also »standardised« inasmuch as they based themselves on the aesthetic taste and the criteria of legitimate art that these institutions defined in the cultural capitals of Europe or the United States in order to influence art markets globally. Most of the time, Istanbul festivals, in using these canons, failed to develop their own language and overlooked their own specificity, instead relying on international curators in the hope that their names or practices would bring recognition and acclaim.

Well aware of these criticisms raised in the past, the co-curators of this year’s Biennale, Charles Esche and Vas?f Kortun (this was the first Biennale co-curated by a foreign curator and a Turkish one), made several moves to change the way the event was organised. The historical venues of the old centre were abandoned in favour of various sites in Beyoglu, »sites that have a more common reference to everyday life«. With its coffee shops, bars, bookshops, galleries, museums and churches, Beyoglu is nowadays the heart of the culture industry and nightlife in Istanbul and hosts a large number and a great variety of people every day. (Though posited in contradistinction to the historical peninsula by the Biennale administration, it is very touristy as well). This change of the main Biennale sites aimed to remove any connection to the city’s cultural heritage (as Esche and Kortun claimed) and was a response to the criticisms that past Biennales (and curators) had frequently fallen back on the old Orientalist imagery. Many, indeed, resorted in the past to a conceptualisation of Istanbul as a crossroads, an Eastern city which successfully combined its historical and cultural heritage with a certain level of econo-technical development .

Another change that Esche and Kortun introduced was related to the way the artists were selected. Of the fifty-three artists/groups invited, half were invited to live and work in Istanbul for more than a month. Pilvi Takala’s work on the local coffeehouses and her reflection on the masculine character of these public places; Mario Rizzi’s film on »Murat and Ismail«, a father and son who run a family shoemaker’s shop; Eric Göngrich’s prismatic wooden structure, evocative of Istanbul’s topography; and Phil Collins’ recording of The Smiths fans while they took part in a karaoke night were projects that grew out of these residencies in Istanbul. The other half of the artists, based in cities with historical connections to Istanbul (as is explained on the official website of the Biennale), produced different works, which, when compared with and contrasted to Istanbul, allowed the visitors to see this city more clearly. Solmaz Shahbazi’s decontextualised, memoriless light box images with almost no cultural, spatial or temporal clue pointed to the similarity of metropolises across the world – none of the images was taken in Istanbul, but all might have been.

Many of these works were presented to the public through a series of talks (entitled the »9B Talks«) which started almost a year before the event itself. Again, the Biennale gazette, published for two months (before and during the Biennale), aimed at informing the visitors about the exhibitions and the debates surrounding the Biennale.

All these modifications, as Vas?f Kortun once explained, were intended to save the Biennale from being part of the event culture. Curators tried to expand the temporal and spatial reach of the Biennale to make the organisation process more transparent, and to share technical and organisational complications with the public: in short, to establish a new genre of interaction between the Biennale and its city/citizens. And this was the issue my title addresses: Was this a real leap forward? Did the move from the historical peninsula to Beyoglu mean a genuine step towards »the other side« - as »Pera« would suggest, the name being that previously given to Beyoglu, after the Greek word »pera«, literally »the other side« (probably to denote »the other side« of the Golden Horn in relation to the historical centre). Did the Biennale really take a step towards the »other« side of the »dominant« - be this the city centre, the state ideology, or the valid cultural canon?

In order to think through these questions, let’s elaborate more on the changes that were said to characterise this year’s Biennale.

[b]Contemporary Sites, Memory Sites[/b]

No matter whether they are historical or contemporary sites, Biennale venues mark a discontinuity with everyday life to the extent that their space is delineated by clues that define the threshold for the potential intruder: these clues can be as real as a ticket, or symbolic like cultural capital. By moving to sites »with a reference to everyday«, this year’s Biennale attempted to lower this threshold so that the border between the exhibition and the city faded away – the official website clearly stated that »the walk between these venues should also be seen as a part of the biennale experience with a few public works but mostly with the fabric of this area of Istanbul« . The Biennale venues were three apartment blocks, an old customs storehouse, a former tobacco depository, a gallery and an office building; »residual sites« (except the gallery) in a precarious state. Though not historical in the literal sense, none of them was a present-day construction. Some were quite hidden, off the normal paths of an ordinary visitor to Beyoglu. Even the ones that had a more modern outlook were decaying, and this Biennale, I think, pointed up this state more than any other before.

It was perhaps this elusive character as reminders of a tormented but glorious past that made these buildings attractive: the memory they reawakened was not that of a powerful empire (like the traditional sites on the historical peninsula), but of an empire which was struggling to protect its internal stability, its borders and its respectability at the turn of the 19th century. The memory that this Biennale recalled was also of wealthy, non-Muslim minorities of this time (with Greek, Armenian and Jewish origins), who lived, worked and socialised in Beyoglu, a district which emerged as the cultural centre of the 19th century Istanbul, and which was the site where the winds of modernisation (and modernism) were felt most powerfully. This latter memory was gradually erased by the official politics of the new Republic (founded in 1923), which aimed at the unification of the nation-state; and was then completely obliterated when thousands of people, provoked by the bombing of Atatürk’s birthplace (in Thessaloniki, Greece), attacked sites that were known to be inhabited by these minorities (6-7 September 1955).

Whether these venues were made attractive as art sites by their decaying character that reminded us of the passage of time or by the uncanny memory of the 19th fin de siecle, it was certainly the erasure (if only partial) of the original function that allowed artistic montage. In keeping with Deleuze’s declaration that »the canvas is never empty«, these sites were never blank spaces like gallery walls. The hygienic, almost timeless space of the »white cube« is recreated anew after almost each exhibition to remove prior traces, whereas this year’s Biennale is deliberately superimposed on several, intermingled layers of urban living. Dan Perjovschi’s »The Istanbul Drawing«, for instance, literally takes the walls as a canvas on which his humorous and sharp drawings and texts address a wide range of political, economic and artistic issues. In »Art&Life (in my part of the world)«, Nedko Solakov makes the walls and the doors of an old apartment speak on life and art, evoking memories of prior inhabitants.

This superimposition/juxtaposition of artworks on a background loaded with memory-images interrupts the chronological sequence, reawakens dormant memories that acquire new connotations shaped by contemporary circumstances. As Huyssen shows, recollection is a fluid process and memory remains embedded in current networks of relations. What/how a spectator recalls depends mostly on how s/he would make meaning with the artefacts that are presented to her/him. This meaning-making process is a continuous negotiation between the historical heritage, the aesthetic context, the meanings that the artist/artwork wants to communicate, and the personal baggage that each spectator brings. Every act of recall therefore carries new openings. By pointing out the fact that the canvas is never empty, Deleuze also wants to show that it is covered over with unseen possibilities – the canvas is not a blank, flat surface but an assemblage which can be transformable and deformable.

Nevertheless, we need a caveat here. It is known that recall no longer refers exclusively to an individual recollection of forgotten experiences - and thus it is not only based on psychological traits. Memory has also a collective dimension in the sense that it is linked to people’s physical and social space, including the transmission of values, educational systems, public memorials commemorating events and heroes and so on. Therefore, every time we refer to the possibilities present in intermingled layers of meaning and the awakening of the memories lying amidst them, we should also think about how these possibilities are reframed according to current socio-economic, political and cultural conditions. What are these conditions in the case of the Biennale?

[b]Memory Sites, Counter Sites[/b]

The cultural transformation of Turkey from the unity of a modern national order into a global one started in a moment of tension - between the severe physical and intellectual oppression of military rule (following the coup in 1980), and the new discourse of freedom and choice promised by the IMF-led economic liberalisation, consumerism and global integration. As the latter has gradually replaced the former, many social and cultural forms that were suppressed in the making of the modern Turkish nationality returned – but in a new mode: as »cultural« of a city which, after almost a century of decay, was now longing for its historical international prominence. Istanbul discovered not only various cultural artefacts and practices appropriated from other geographies, but also those that it retrieved from its own past (like Sephardic music). To this fusion were added all the forms that Anatolian migrants brought to Istanbul, adapted to urban conditions and deployed, at times, to communicate political causes (mostly to do with the Kurdish people). As the discourse of the Welfare Party (and its successors, all putting forward a pro-religious political position) went through a process of normalisation, Istanbul finally uncovered the public face of political Islam. Nevertheless, the re-circulation of these forms happened most of the time as »commodities«. As the market logic extended to other spheres, Greek music or Kurdish rugs appeared in the shop windows but it was the same logic which robbed all these artefacts of their social-political connotations.

As art has been instrumentalised in corporate promotional programs and in city promotion, the political content of artworks also faded in the international network of culture industries. Maria Eichhorn’s contribution to this year’s Biennale was a clear example of this. Eichhorn’s audiovisual installation was a reworking of one of her previous works – the billboard that she erected in Taksim Square for the opening of the 1995 Biennale. At that time, Eichhorn had invited left-wing organisations and sub-culture groups to design posters that she planned to place on this billboard. Though permission was gained from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, other civic authorities, unaware of this, tried several times to prevent the placement of the billboard. The problem was solved when Esra Nilgün Mirze, Director of Corporate Communications at the Foundation (IFCA), convinced these other authorities that such an artistic event was very important for the recognition of Istanbul on the international arena. So Eichhorn’s current video consisted of footage of Esra Nilgün Mirze re-telling this story while she was also elaborating on the socio-political conditions of Turkey at the time. Through Mirze’s discourse Eichhorn’s work not only develops into a eulogy on the IFCA’s own contribution to arts: another modification takes place at a deeper level. At the moment Mirze convinced the state authorities that the »political« posters should be »exhibited« on the billboard because this was important for the promotion of the city, these posters became devoid of all their subversive meanings – or rather their silenced voices were reappropriated (and tamed) by the marketing logic. And the memory of this incident simply turned into a promotional film for the Foundation.

In other cases where the silenced voices attempted to come back, they returned in a rather oblique manner. Although several works addressed the issue of Palestine, for example, none (in the main exhibition) made explicit any concern about the recently intensified conflict between the Turkish state and its »citizens with Kurdish origins«. Neither was the dormant memory of the 6-7 September riots reawakened. Such overtly political issues were relegated to the Hospitality Zone (on the second floor of the storehouse), which was said to be part of the Biennale but not of the main exhibition. Part of a parallel exhibition curated by Halil Alt?ndere (entitled »Free Kick«), they were thus positioned on a threshold, in an in-between space that was not completely within, nor exactly outside. The space was rather chaotic, and the free-floating memories of the 1980 military coup, of hunger strikers, of torture, various icons of nationalism and militarism; and images of war created a fragmentary narrative, a feeling similar to the one of walking in a very crowded city. The rupture of the narrative, effectively created a »heterotopia«, a »counter-site«, as defined by Foucault, where »all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted«. Interestingly, the site neither exactly typified the »heterotopias of accumulating time« (such as the museum and the library), nor those of the »mode of the festival«, relating to the most fleeting and transitory aspects of time. Rather, it represented an intermediate state of »transient permanency« - a memory of past use which re-appears in a commodified form during ephemeral moments of spectacle. The »fleeting quality« of events, spectacles, happenings and media images, then, cut across the intransience of the vast building.

On the right hand side of the entrance, if one bent slightly forward towards the lift shaft, one could see scattered photographs (faces) of women and men, killed slightly before or after the coup in 1980 – their dates of birth and death were also given. Some photographs were hung up, others lay at the sides of the dark empty space – »they stare[d] at you with the aura of black and white images, with the power to reawaken a/the memory«. For Benjamin, it was this memory that resisted the dissolution of the subject in exile and its desubjectification by cultural industries; it was the decaying buildings and disappearing artefacts that revealed the truth of the capitalist society/cycle; and this last illumination that paved the way for a new future.

 

 

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