Notes on the 9th Istanbul Biennale

9th Istanbul Biennale was generally reviewed as different, as significant as the Venice Biennale. The collaboration between the foreign and local curator was successfull and pleasant. According to the reviews of the invited press people, the integration of the social and cultural distinction and memory of Beyoğlu district was lucratively reflected into the works of the artists who were invited to work in situ. This strategy is supposed to have revealed a more intime and genuine production . Considering that Istanbul has been the victim of orientalising approaches in the past biennale, this inconvenience is considered to be avoided this time.

This optimistic approach is not so astonishing within the context and practice of culture industry of our region where the art is not an authonomous issue but mainly reckoned as a showcase of many other particulars.  Even if there are always dissident art works, questioning and scrutinizing the political and social atrocities and scandals in the showcase, the foreign and local press and media, the institutions and investors of these events love the immaculate and the sheltered image and try to divert the attention of the public to the so called “positive review”.

Yet, we know that the list of misconduct in the art scenes of the world is quite long. The most harmful among them are the new-structuring within the conditions of global capitalism when the art institutions, curators, and the artists become decisively dependent on private sector initiatives. Somehow the control and manipulation of these initiatives on the galleries, curators and cultural events are beyond reason and ethics. No doubt, the other harmful conduct is, whether conscious or unconscious, the amazing insistence of the powerful culture initiatives of AB and USA capitals on colonialist habits. It is currently manifested in AB cultural policies which clearly export their systems, strategies and productions through funds, projects and programming to the still undeveloped culture industry territories and in turn import their sources of inspiration.
Under the spell of this positive thinking, the curators and critics, who generally are frustrated of the market tactics and official policy manipulations, talk at random about the independency and difference of the Istanbul Biennale, and experience some kind of  ease, expansion and hope. They think that there is no market strategies here, the artists and curators can produce in a relatively free and independent atmosphere. They would never admit that the artists and curators have to struggle under the pressure of  weak market and infrasturucture conditions, under restrictions, injustice, monopolies and disinterests of the public.
 
This time, Beyoğlu-Karaköy-Tophane district empty buildings were presented as venues of significant difference or as an escape from orientalisation of the cities charismatic appearance. This is the distric of onetime non-Muslim population and current rural emigrants and reflects some sort of traumatic memory with its empty decading buildings. From soico-political angle, this urban texture also reflects the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, from tradition to modernism and to post-modernism. The struggle to overcome the conflicts of Atatürk’s revolution, of nation-state-ideology, of militarism and the Armenian dilemma could provide a rich conceptual material for the works created for this biennale, if handled with care and respect.  The local and foreign artists tried to show their intellectual command and artistic talent to grasp the dispositions, but the outcome showed a simulation of a simulated reality.

Along these lines, the biennale opened the ever present urbanisation problem of Istanbul over the occupied or ruined minority properties to the observation and criticism of the international art and culture experts who are mainly prejudiced or influenced by the vulnerable socio-political image of Turkey in the EU press and media. The micro urban and human texture within this itinerary of the biennale  is enormously loaded with surrealistic and controversial appearances, such as luxury hotels, palatial embassies, entertainment buildings and the most derelict streets, consequently the  images that were represented in the works of the artists, who painstakingly tried to decipher and show them as attention-grabbing, failed and became pallid and shallow.
The presence of renown artists in this kind of mega shows is not in vain. For example experienced and cool artists such as  Nedko Solakov, Pavel Althamer and IRWIN, played their part with the classical methods and forms of art making since Beuys with success and slipped out of the trap. To be more exact, they even did not cross the threshold of the tension between the visible texture and the hermetic and chaotic sturucture of the city. They did what they had been doing since a decade. In return artists who could not deal with the unbearable buoyancy of participating in the great shows, who overdo the balance of political criticism, who mix up the social research with artistic observation and who like to transmit agitated short messages, lost their blood in the opacity between the  reality, representation and simulation.
A kind of direct visual hint or association language with documentary connotations were prior in the photographies, drawings, videos and texts of the artists such as Phil Collins, Pilvi Takala, Solmaz Shahbazi, Ruangrupa, Daniel Bozkov, Eric Göngrich, Mario Rizzi, who had the opportunity to live and work in Istanbul. These works showed journalistic curiosity and wits rather than artistic intensity.

I really don’t know how to categorize the works of Wael Shawky, Yaron Leshem , Yochai Avrahami, Smadar Dreyfus, Hâlâ Elkoussy, Ahlam Shibli, Yael Bartana, YZ Kami- all documentary videos or performance documentations- which had no direct association to Istanbul but incorporated particular interpretations on the political and social issues of Middle East. These were ready works incorporated into the exhibition with a concern that Istanbul should have a certain responsibility in the political and social landscape of its region. In this respect, the choice of the artists indicated a compulsory balance of İsrael and Palestine.

The familiar group of artists of Turkey, that should be portrayed as “the national team” and  the two side shows titled “Excavation” and  “Free-Cick” that looked like an incoherent mixture could only reflect the vicious circle of the local art scene. In these local shows, the works represented the global and local conflicts such as the post-nation state discourse, ever prevailing class struggle, the effects of the consumption economy and the assimilation of micro identities within the multiculturalism. The treatment of the art work as a tool in the tension between the global capitalism and counter discourses became the main goal of the artists.   Yet, the language the artists can articulate in, is exceedingly determined by the photography and video technology and the active models of electronic images, so that simulation becomes an easy concept rather than a way of expression.

For the public who would like to view the art as simple and easy as this, the biennale offered a lot of material. For the ones with more complicated expectations, the carelessness in the overall production, the lack of aesthetic concern and the estrangement between the works and the reality of the city was tiresome and disappointing.
Beral Madra*

*This review is a modified English version of the review published in Radikal newspaper, 25 November 2005
 
 
 

Aluminium in Baku
Invited by Jahangir Selimkhanov, I visited Baku in January 2002 for the first time.  The city with its diverse architectural strata and its detonated motivation had impressed me deeply. The emotive art scene with its strong modernist painting tradition, with its dissident land art production and with its young generation artists and art experts indicated that Baku contemporary art scene had ambitions to register itself into the contemporary art scene. The art circles had great hope to re-build the infrastructure according to the requirements of international contemporary art scene.   No doubt, now, Baku with determined individual and institutional initiatives, promoting critical art production and dissident artists, is in the new network that links South Cacasus and Middle East to European Union countries.
Yet, after three years, when I arrived to Baku for the fourth Aliminium Festival, I was stunned to see that the city became the space of global power projects- whether political, religious, or economic. Now, one can find all the structures and infrastructures of past colonial empires and of current global firms and markets, high-income residential and commercial buildings to accommodate the expanding elite professional classes, and the inevitable displacement of traditional texture and the lower-income population. One can also see the random destruction of historical buildings to erect particular forms of post-modern buildings to promote real-estate development interests. This might be advocated as a particular dynamics that signals the possibility of transformation. Yet, global economy--globalization, consumption economy, and other related issues all suggest that memory and tradition no longer matters, when it comes to rapid material tarnsformations. The new transnational corporate culture can quickly cover the multiplicity of cultural environments, which is the charismatic subtance of this city.
 

Aluminium Festival promoters and organizers are working within this transformation context, which does not seem to have an investment program in contemporary art, as there are still no venues and institutions specifically connected to contemporary art productions. As the departure to the cultural industry which is definitely in tune with the global economy, calls for determination and resistance, the art scene people are conscious of the potential power of contemporary art production that can slowly but surely implant the necessary critical thinking to the public, to make political and economic analysis.  With their persistent undertakings - international art events or art making- they will instigate to construct a new narrative about economic globalization, one that includes rather than evicts all the traditional, architectural and cultural elements that are essential part of the city. Artists and curators of this yet non-structured culture industry are intimately collaborating in this departure. This can be viewed firstly in the idea and concept of the art works, secondly in the structure and mediation of the exhibitions realized for Aluminium in the former Lenin Museum.
This majestic museum with its vast halls reflects the cultural ambition of the Soviet era. The post-Soviet function is still to be defined; it is dedicated to arts and crafts rather than to modern and contemporary art. One of the top floor wings was reserved for the main show of Aliminium which presented artists from Georgia, France, Poland, Greece, Uzbekistan,Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz, Israel, Italy, UK, Russia , New Zealand as well as from Azerbaijan. The highlights of the show were the works of Zuzanna Janin, Babi Badalov, Yeşim Agaoglu and the group show curated by Shalva Khakhanashvili. Zuzanna Janin’s installation which she created in situ refered to current  conundrum of urban development. On a transparent (ephemeral) wall made of a gauzy textile she projected to juxtaposed video-loops. Full of black humor, one video showed the construction of a building, the other showed of a tomb.  Yeşim Agaoglu, who was also invited last year and befriended with an emigrant woman showed a series of interior photography from her colorful one room house, a kitschy paradise conceiling the estrangement and lonesomeness. Khakhanashvili’s travelling show with mostly self-portrait or portrait photography of artists from France, Georgia and Bulgaria  focuses on the identity issues in dfferent contexts. A series of Bulgarian TV pop-singers, who display a streotype appearance with blond hair, heavy make-up and false-sexy pose and the accompanying music reflected the common taste of the mass-viewer.   Among the selected group of Azerbaijan artist’s works, the most striking were Babi Badalovs performance piece titled “it is better to go to the top of a mountain and stand as a mountain goat then it is to go to a gallery and look at paintings”  and Orkhan Huseinov’s “Life Under Ground" (2003) , a print on plastic tracing the pattern of birth to death as an underground map. Inna Kostina and Fakhriyye Mammedova are the two dissident women artists of Baku, however in this show their work was understated and decorative. The students works, which were displayed with the works of these professional artists, were extremely amateurish and confused, they should have been exhibited in another space. Nigora Axmedova, the chief curator of Uzbekhistan Biennale showed some video and photography works, which we have seen in the 51st Venice Biennale.

As a low budget and middle-of-the-road event, Aluminium is still one of the few successful contemporary art manifestations of South Caucasus and should be promoted to be a more ambitious and motivated event; the urban development boom in the city requires an equivalent cultural expansion.
Beral Madra, January 2006-01-29