The critical leaps with the unfolding process of contemporary art in Turkey have been marked by a series of significant events that shaped the recent history of the country. The appeal to appropriate the language of contemporary art and recent reactions that have been directed against this language have been extensively conditioned by the ways in which contributing actors to this discussion have conceived their place in the specific geography they live in and related its position with respect to other geographies.
The first attempts to study and adopt the conceptualist vocabulary from the sixties emerged in the immediate aftermath of the military coup in 1980. The brutal eradication of all political activities, the consequent feeling of defeat within the leftfield intelligentsia and an intensified isolation of the country from the rest of the world created a mental vacuum in all of the niches of cultural practice. As a socialist self-criticism, elaborated by a group of publishing houses (initiated by scholars purged from academies) set out to scan through alternative inspirations such as Structuralism, Althusser, Foucault and so on, a group of artists utilized the dominant atmosphere of exhaustion to open up a space for reflecting upon the impasses of the art establishment of the period (a polarization between abstraction and figuration in painting, along with minor strands of socialist realism and bohemian expressionism). This initial appeal for the newness in artistic terms was comprised of hermetic groups formulating their collective identity through the example of Art&Language, artists who came together around quixotically self-organised exhibitions and individuals experimenting with newly acquired media such as video and polaroid photography (as the economic policies concerning import were gradually relaxing by the implantation of neo-liberal economics). Their motivations were also conditioned by the willingness for breaking up the sense of unconnectedness from rest of the world and be a part of innovative discussions happening in the global art circuits. The scale for operating in these lines was based on the vaguely formulated idea of »universalism«, that was seen as the final destination of integration process, and categorization through »national« identities, which will be relativised by an »internationalist« juxtaposition of contributions from different countries through art events – which shaped the format of the first Istanbul Biennial in 1987, that was defined then as »International Exhibitions of Contemporary Art« rather than biennial.
The beginning of the nineties was shaped by two main dynamics: in internal politics, the armed conflict between the Kurdish guerillas and Turkish army evolved nearly into a civil war situation, which triggered the popularization of nationalism, and intensified the permeation of violence into the daily life; in global politics, the collapse of state socialism had a direct impact on Turkey - perhaps not as the immediate bankruptcy of official politics of the Republic as adjusted to Cold War politics (which is only nowadays being disintegrated) but a released motion on the human level, when thousands of people started to roam around the Black Sea basin, with suitcases filled simple goods to buy and sell. These two social dynamics had visible imprints in the shaping of contemporary art field: first, an unreserved politicisation (anti-statist, anti-nationalist, anti-militarist, anti-partriarchal) and utilization of concrete problems of the local specificity; second, the elaboration of situatedness of local experience within the immediate geography – that is, conceiving Turkey through historical or actual links to the Balkans, the Middle East, South Caucasus and so on.
The edgy character of the practice of the new generation of artists, mediating their narrative style through installation, video and photography, was the outcome of a reaction to the intensifying tension in the country but it failed to deliver its objective of contacting the public imagination and leaving a mark on it – partly due to the scarcity of exhibition spaces that would be willing to promote this kind of work, and partly due to the lack of courage to operate in the public space in a critical way. What reinforced the synergic interaction between the contributors of this newly expanded field was the recognition that came from the West European art institutions through exhibition invitations, residencies and scholarships. The theoretical sources of this expanding field were again the strands of self-critical socialist positions, and also recently arrived contributions of post-structuralism and anarchist thought, which endorsed a critical approach to the notion of identity, as exemplified in art works of that time that set out to interrupt, displace, deconstruct and ironize »national identity«, occasionally offering routes for disidentification, alternative ways to belong to the local, and pointing at increased mobility between geographies and the consequent complications about identity.
In the last five years or so, dramatic changes in economic and political panorama of Turkey brought new entanglements for the art field. The capture of the Kurdish guerilla leader Öcalan in 1998 and the acceptance of Turkey’s candidacy for a full EU membership in 1999 created an euphoric momentum in which some prominent bourgeois families and corporate companies decided to transpose the focus of their cultural patronage onto contemporary art, which was probably meant to reformulate the image of their familial or corporate identity as daring, open-minded and progressive enough to engage with their EU counterparts. A series of art spaces, collections, departments of art management in private universities (ironically not much investment in education on art practice) reshaped the panorama of contemporary art, which was previously operating in a vacuum of infrastructure. Paradoxically, this shift coincided with stagnation in art production: the collective dynamics of the nineties gave way to atomization and professionalism. Some artists conformed to the ongoing process of capital-led institutionalization by accentuating the tones of psychologism and aesthetisation in their work. Some of them allowed their works with transgressive qualities to be exhibited in the sterile spaces of these new institutions. Remaining ones tried to retain their resistant position by initiating artist-run, low- or non-budget spaces. The overall picture of local art field got dispersed into unconnected and sometimes conflicting circles.
Also political landscape got exposed to drastic changes. The collapse of political centre in 2002 elections brought AKP (the reformed, liberal version of the previously Islamic movement) to power. Their pro-active and pro-EU program attracted a considerable vote share, but their roots in religious conservatism alarmed the secular segments of the society (mostly the army), which saw AKP as a threat to the Kemalist foundations of the Republic. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 touched a second nerve of the official ideology: the political empowerment of Kurdish ethnicity in Northern Iraq refreshed the paranoia about the dispersal of territorial unity of the country, and triggered another wave of nationalism. This new wave did not only address the traditionally ultra-nationalist support in rural areas but also attracted considerable amount of people from the secular, urban, educated segments of middle and upper-middle classes, who had been previously voting for central-left. The political tension gradually deepened when a group of nationalist lawyers brought several intellectuals to court with the accusation of »defaming Turkishness«, like in the case of Orhan Pamuk’s trial after his remarks on Armenian genocide in 1915. A series of dubious bombings and provocative assassinations at this period created an explosive atmosphere, which culminated with the killing of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. The popular condemning of the murder eased the way for interrogating the motivations behind the recent provocations and the resulting legal case started to expose minute details about »deep-state« activities, ranging from massive killings of Kurdish civilians by counter-terror organizations to plots for bombings, from plans of military coups to manipulations on mass media. The foundations of Kemalist ideology was this time really shaking and the whole society got extremely polarized: on one hand, the nationalist bloc comprised of the army machinery, CHP – the foundation party of the republic which was once considered to be social democrat, traditional nationalists, Kemalist recruits from the ex-Maoist movement, TKP-Turkish Communist Party; on the other hand, pro-government sections, liberal and some socialist intellectuals, Kurds and other minorities – crudely speaking, republicans against democrats. This dividing line cut every ideological position vertically into two halves. Recently, a further split emerged with the remaining leftfield, and the two opposing camps called each other pejoratively as »liberal leftists« and »orthodox socialists«; the discussion was about which objective should be prioritized: whether to support the ongoing interrogation process in hope of democratization of the country; or conceiving the ongoing conflict as a war between two capitalist camps (one national, the other Islamic/global) and insisting on a class-based political program.
Within this all commotion, contemporary art also came under the spots. In 2005, when the organised nationalist hype was at its peak, a documentary exhibition on the pogrom against non-muslim communities in Istanbul in 1955 was raided by a joint group of right- and left-wing nationalists –photographs were torn down. In the same year, Halil Altındere was brought to court for the images he put into the catalogue of the exhibition he curated – the accusation was again, defaming Turkishness. In 2007, Hou Hanrou, the curator of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, was publicly condemned by the dean of a prominent art academy for his critical remarks on Kemalist ideology in the exhibition catalogue. A similar reaction was given to the group WHW, the Zagreb-based group curating the 11th Biennial –they were accused of importing Croatian secessionism to Turkey and promoting Kurdish separatism since they used the word »Kurdistan« in one of their previous texts.
The total abjection of contemporary art (without taking the heterogeneity of the field into account) as the ultimate example of cosmopolitan decadence, comprador-type surrender to the cultural imperialism of the West by the nationalist discourse found echoes in leftist positions. The swift change in contemporary art’s status among the elite, its reliance on corporate sponsorship and support received from Western institutions, its omission of economy politics in elaborating its political criticism, and its failure in discussing the problematics relating to its own institutionality exasperated the sense of repulsion. The themes that were brought up by the politically engaged works of contemporary art so far are judged to be diluting class-analysis and contributing to the culturalisation process of politics. Its political paralysis in the eighties, and its contacts to post-structuralism and anarchism in the nineties were seen as symptoms of collaboration with, or at least surrender to the neo-liberal ideology. In the extreme versions of this perspective, contemporary art is being nearly conceived as a rival body offering a political program aiming at contesting Marxism, and as a second step, it is being condemned as failing in delivering any impact on the social life.
This confrontation deepened during the 11th Istanbul Biennial. The conceptual framework presented by WHW claimed to be aware of the dialectical tension between the explicitly radical tone in the composition of the exhibition and confining framework of the biennial by relying on support from local and global capital and its spectacular consequences, and moreover it aimed at producing a critical awareness among the audience on this paradox by pushing it to its extremes, just as Bertolt Brecht, the inspiration of the exhibition title, staged contradictions of the system in their most blatant forms. Whereas WHW stated that their objective was to leak into mainstream exhibition making and create a short-circuit within it by staging a radicalized politicality, the massive reaction coming from socialist positions (even the ones who never touched the field of contemporary art before) saw this staged paradox (apposing Brecht and the logo of Koç family, the main sponsor of the biennial) as a full co-option into the system, and refused to engage with the show. The reactions were nearly unanimous and largely shaped the public opinion about the exhibition. A temporary activist collective with the project name Resistanbul joined the chorus of railing the biennial. The project was originally conceived for organizing demonstrations against the coming IMF meeting, and a subsection within the project, issuing a open letter addressing the curators and the artists of the biennial made direct associations between the IMF meeting and the biennial, which were held around the same dates; a protest took place in front of the biennial venue at the opening, as a rehearsal against IMF. Consequently, the contact that had been gradually established between politically engaged contemporary artists and activist groups in previous years collapsed with mutual alienation.
The discussion around the 11th Istanbul Biennial could actually evolve into a constructive discussion. The strong criticism against the exhibition had completely justifiable arguments, yet the general tone remained quite reactive, contented itself with demonizing contemporary art as a whole, and claiming the everlasting validity of Marxist analysis. A contra-exhibition entitled as My Name is Casper (referring ironically to the ghost of communism roaming over the continent of Europe through the famous Disney character) did not propose a cohesive alternative to the existing practice in contemporary art in aesthetic or thematic terms, but congratulated itself for opening up a space for the young people of »this« country (which meant that the biennial failed to do so). Just as some of the socialist argumentations in the political sphere easily slip into the lexicon of nationalism, confusing the boundaries between anti-imperialism with alter-imperialism, reactions raised against the biennial or contemporary art in general appealed to the simplicistic mechanism of othering: the biennial as a presentational format is judged to be »foreign« to »this« culture; the WHW was defined as »extra-terrestorial« for failing to contact Brechtian theater people working in Istanbul (actually they did meet those people); the contemporary art scene was said to be operating under »authorization« of »external« forces. Yet, it should be also noted that the weakness of reactions should not overshadow the frail state of contemporary art practice in Turkey at present: synergy is lost, productiveness is slumped, and criticality is largely replaced by conformism.
