KAMUSAL HAYALGÜCÜ 1 Kimliklere ait Kelimeler, Zamana dair Bağlamlar KAOSGL, Eylül 2009 "kelimeler"

KAMUSAL HAYALGÜCÜ 1

Kimliklere ait Kelimeler, Zamana dair Bağlamlar
Adnan Yıldız

Müjdeli Giriş
Bundan kelli, buraya her sayı düzenli yazacağım. Yazılar arasındaki bağlar, bizi birbirimize bağlayan, bizi bir arada tutan, birlikte aynı yaşam alanını paylaş(ama)maktan gelen sorulardan oluşacak. Kamusal hayal gücümüzü kuran cümlelerden, yani eski(meyen)lerin deyimiyle “toplumsal tahayyülden” gelen bahislerden sereceğiz tezgahı. Bu sayının dosyasına eklemlenecek bir bilinç-akışı yazısı yazmak istedim, “sadece kelimeleri kullanarak iletişim mümkün mü, onları bizim-yapmadan(?)” diye sorarak...

Meselemiz: Kelimelerin Gücü
Kreuzberg’in kendine has ortamlarından birinde, Möbel’in bar tezgahının arkasındaki tahtaya –sert bıçak darbeleriyle ve Türkçe kazımış (basso’cu) Yuşi, “ben ibneyim” diye. Beni kelimeler değil bağlamlar ilgilendiriyor, (küçük kasaba okullarında ders çıkışı itilen, dar sokaklarda yolları kesilen, arada sırada sıkıştırılıp dövülen çıt-kırıldım oğlanların çok duyduğu) tıpkı sövmek için kullanılan bir lafın bir bar köşesine kazınmasından ziyade, burada-bu barda-bu lafa sahip çıkılması, artık bu lafın hakaret olarak değil, kimlik olarak algılanmasının ilgilendirdiği gibi. Berlin’de Türkçe. E burada mümkünse neden İstanbul’da mümkün olmasın...Türkçe aynı Türkçe. İki şehir arası uçakla kaç saat ki? Hani küreseldi? Mesafeler daralmıştı? Ya kelimeler?

Kelimeler aynı, bağlamlar değişiyor. Zaten bağlamlar aynı kalsa, kelimeler değişmek zorunda. Yoksa zaman durur; Türkiye, Show TV olur, “her nerede yaşıyor ve yaşatılıyorsa”...

“Dilimin sınırları dünyamın sınırlarıdır" demişti Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dil felsefesine adanan bir acı hayatın özeti gibi. Bir anlamda düşünebilmek için, yaşayabilmek için, nefes alabilmek için önce kelimelerin şifresini bilmek gerekiyor. Bağlamların ve kafaların değişmesi için, belki de bu nedenle, önce ve acilen işe kelimelerden başlamalı.

Ben küçükken, ‘açılım’ bir dershanenin adıydı, sahte deriden çantaların, lastikli klasörlerin üzerinde yazardı kocaman harflerle AÇILIM. Bu açılım nereden başlarsa başlasın ama bir an önce başlasın, yoksa biz bir daha açılmamak üzere kapanacağız –karanlıklara. Tamam önce Kürtler’den başlasın. Ama Ermeniler ve Rum’lar vatanları biliyorlar burayı, istediklerinde imkansız-bürokrasisiz gömülebilsinler; ziyaret için gelenler dini törenlerini yerine getirebilsin. (Aram Tigran’dan... Sümela’ya çıkıp, ayinleri yarıda kesilenlerden... kendi adıma, çaresizliğimden dolayı özür dilerim.) Kadınlar namus cinayetinden ölmesin; geyler, lezbiyenler, travestiler dayak yemesin, ezilmesin, yakılmasın. Avrupa ve Amerika’da eleştiri nasıl “beyaz adamın iktidarını” hedef aldıysa, bizde de “göbekli ve bıyıklı adamın iktidarından” başlasın işe. Boğaz kıyılarında gezen ‘bear’lar alınmasın. Bıyıklı ve göbekli bir takım iktidarların eleştirisi, onların bıyıklarını ve göbeklerini özgürleştirir. Açılım, lafta kalmasın.

Laf! Bazen ne tehlikeli bir sözcük. Her şeyin yalan, her şeyin “ağzımıza çalınan bir parmak bal” olmasını hemen ele veriyor.

Soğuk Stockholm. Açılış öncesi özel bir preview. Bir videosunda, (Kore’de doğan, NY’da yaşayan sanatçı) Kim’i (Sooja) arkadan görmekteyiz, Delhi’de bir bankta oturarak, Yamuna nehrine bakıyor. Nehir akıyor yavaş yavaş, sessizlik ve su. Zaman. Kim, öylece duruyor. Sordum, cevapsız gülümsedi, “neden adı Çamaşırcı Kadın bu videonun?” ve benim sorum sonsuza kadar havada kaldı. Videoya bakmaya devam ettim. Videodaki sessizlik galeriye yayıldıkça, dışarıdan gelen her ses, içeride konuşulan her kelime yok oluveriyor, (gözden değil) ‘kulaktan’ kayboluyordu. Beni kelimelerin (olmayan ama büyük bir ısrarla atfedilen) gücüne ikna eden ne varsa -içimden- çekti gitti. Kim sadece gülümsüyor, kimi andığımı bilmese de, içimden bir şeyin sızlayarak geçtiğini anlayacak kadar hayat bilgisi kuvvetli olduğundan, çevirisiyle ‘süreçlendirmemi’/Türkçe’siyle sindirmemi bekliyordu. Aklıma gelen hemen, Noam Chomsky oldu. Chomsky, bir makalesinde ("What We Know", 2005) “konuşmacıların, içselleştirdikleri dili ya da içsel dili deneyimlerinin akışından seçtiklerini, oluşturduklarını, kurduklarını” söylüyor. Yani, kişisel kurgularla oluşan dil deneyimlerinden bahsediyor ve aslında herkesin kendi iç dili olduğu gibi kendi –iç sözlüğü (de) olduğu noktasına geliveriyoruz birden. Sıkılma hemen bu akademik dalışlardan sevgili okur. Herkesin Türkçe’si, İngilizce’si, Esperanto’su kendine girsin, diyerek başka bir yere zıplamak istiyorum.

Karşınızda, 2009 işiyle Sacha Baron Cohen. Tam da dilden bahsetmişken, Brüno’nun ikna kabiliyetine, performatif zekasına ve küresel etki alanına girmek istiyorum. Hamas ile humusu birbirine -kör bir cesaretle- (kültürel elçiye zeval olmaz) bağlayan, Asyalı fantezilerini adeta ‘içimizde’ patlatan Brüno, aslında bize en çok DA (dadaistçe ve egoistçe) günlük hayata dair basit-leştirici gözlemleriyle ve geri-yansıtmalarıyla vurmakta. Eleştiriler malum, şimdi bu da film mi diye sorarsanız bilmiyorum, o tarafıyla da hiç ilgili değilim ama bence iyi performans. Film de olur, helva da. İpod ile değiştirdiği Afrikalı bebeği, Milano moda haftasında podyuma fırlayan kara mizahıyla ve hazır cevaplarıyla yeni olan mizah dili. Moda şovu sunan ve ünlü olmak için yırtınan -Avusturyalı- Brüno karakteri kurbanlarına sadece “Evet” ya da “Hayır” soruları sorar ama sunduğu opsiyonlar Erdoğrul Özkök Türkçesi’nden daha zengin; Naber? "Vassup" (what’s up) ya da bilmem "Ich don't think so"... Peki bu kısmı biraz filmi izleyenler için olacak, pardon ama İngiliz bir arkadaşım filmin sonundaki sahneyi kastederek, “o canavarları hangi casting bulur, oynatır... O kısım olsa olsa gerçektir...” demişti. Gelse görse, biz Ahmet Yıldız’ı, Ebru’yu, Münevver’i... katledenler ülkesinde ne kadar mutlu, ne kadar mesut bir casting ile yaşamaktayız...

Bunlar, Perez Hilton’un tavan yaptığı günler sevgili okur. Bizim İstanbul-alemimiz kendi Çerez Hilton’unu yaratmış bile, cümle Madipolitan okumakta. Kelimeler de, pozisyonlar da ona göre değişiyor. Koyunun olmadığı yerde keçi olmakla açıklanamayacak bir durum bu, hepimizi ilgilendiren. Adı anılmaz bir arkadaşın referansıyla, “Desperate times make desperate people” demek ya da Bisiklet Hırsızları’nı yeniden izlemek. Ama kelimeler de, seks de, dedikodu da hayatın bir parçası. Her birinin özeli var, geneli var; çürüğü var, hamı var. Zeka, his ve estetik –hep ama hep- şart. Kendi iç-dilini, iç-deneyimini nasıl oluşturuyorsan artık.

Yani, işin özü kelimeler de mideden geliyor. Mesele, mide meselesi.

ENG / Good Gangsters in Danish / WE BOTH CAN QUIT TODAY! for Lotte Juul Petersen's anthology on curating (published in Danish)

GOOD GANGSTERS INTERVIEW EACH OTHER (Summer '08)

WE BOTH CAN QUIT TODAY!

Good Gangsters: Esther Lu & Adnan Yıldız

When we received this invitation from Lotte to partake in her co-edited anthology on curating, we were just recovering from our last show “Good Gangsters in Town”¹. It was a sort of peak of our collaboration that had been transformed a lot during the last two years’ experience within the institutional framework of Curatorlab². For this book, we decided to produce five questions each, and both answer to the total ten, which were produced with personal desire to answer and ask to each other. We also asked Lotte to guess which question was produced by which one of us, and gave a score to her regarding how much she knew us. (She scored six out of ten!) The game of which is who, however, does not remark on anything but Good Gangsters' united humour—how we have come through the process of becoming a bonded collective.

Good Gangsters like to ask questions more than giving answers; they like to reflect themselves more than repeating or reproducing. Good Gangsters means working equally under the same title, sharing the costs and benefits for believing in a better world and creating a critically interesting discussion. This is the first time they interviewed each other.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

*You are welcome to guess which question is produced by which one of us. And later you can score yourself by checking out. Answers could be found in the end of the text.

1) What's the most interesting and inspiring part of curating to you?

It inspires me. It inspires me to be curious and keen to the subtlety of how human mind functions in relation to what we make the world today, especially extracted by artistic transformation. The interior and the exterior of curating for me somehow work the same as well as in a micro level to perceive the commonly shared humanity, and I think it is a language I’d like to employ to question and position myself in this exchange process and relation. I also believe that curating is a very interesting means to project visions and generate communication in society, and in turn, ideals are transmitted and shared with open critique and tolerance. Of course, this is the more romantic side of it. I could also answer that it often upsets me, since a great part of such endeavour comes along with a big challenge vis-à-vis the general struggles in the infrustrature to negotiate with commercial influence and the often nationalist biased funding systems, and these are fundementally remapping our boundaries.

It possibly opens channels for new forms of human relations. Or let me say it more clearly, maybe like this, it forms new relations between people. You spend time and energy in front of something, which is produced by another human mind, and in order to be engaged into something else you move through your experience. As audience, we all share the same ground and this is the most important moment of our practice.

What I feel myself best quality at doing is much related with my approach, I produce and design interactions, dialogues and conflict resolutions between people considering diverse contexts of culture, code and communication. In that thinking, I propose a very social, political and critical approach and a position in the societies that we live in, so it is always a bit personal in each case, at this point, what we as Good Gangsters, produce -at the end of the day- as a proposal was a website and a fictional name, which owns everything we produce together. Our collaboration is not based on money, but audience…

So, in the end we can still be independently working together. I am inspired by the way we challenge each other and let each other live freely with that choice –whatever it is at the end of the day. I think, what we are learning together is basically how to make an adult choice with a childish hearth and an idealist mind. And we always stay together when the choices are being transformed. I sometimes feel like I am watching the stars in the sky at night from Grand London or Taipei 101 and from a very long distance, I see our collaboration as sharing life and producing good work together. That’s also what I feel good about my job, curating gives you a way of personalizing, interacting and mirroring with your work. It is a freelance form of capitalism giving you a chance to decide your salary, schedule and program. This does not mean being isolated and alienated as a member of post-fordist global society. I think both of us feel the importance of trying to be globally and locally critical…

For instance, as a curator, I decide on my own working schedule, my own salary and my own subject matter! Isn’t this great?

2) Do you think a curator should be critical? What is the connection between curating and producing a critic?

I think at least the curator I want to be is critical. However, there are different materials and forms of performance for curators and critics to apply. The relationship of art and text is conceptualized and exercised with different approaches to meet various purposes, albeit they both could give light on the visibility of an artwork or an exhibition. I do not play on the relationship between the noun and the adjective term; what concerns me most is my practice involved not as a representation of such relationship, but an active dialogue with artists and the public which opens possibilities to engage contemporary culture in diverse productions—thinking, debating, producing discourse, collaborating to fulfill or hollow our questions in social reality.

Practically yes, de facto not always. The feeling of doing something as a must kills your consciousness. You can’t possibly be critical if the form of critic is not independent from the subject of it. You have to be self critical in your approach in order to keep focus, so that’s why you have to be personally engaged into the critic but not personalize it at all.

This is a sort of thin red line: Curating is not a form itself but it is a sort of practice, which is based on eclectic forms of processing the artistic practice. It also involves producing and designing diverse forms of critic. Producing a critic can be also done by other ways, writing and political activism; but when it is curating, its subtlety is rare… Connection is there between the institution and the curator; how you transform the private money into a public discussion; without leaving a place for independently critical.

3) Do you think there are a certain criteria or condition to good curating?

Yes and no. There are a certain criteria to say what is good and bad curating, but I think there shouldn’t be any condition as an excuse for bad curating. One of my personal parameters for good curating is probably also about how a curator use well the given condition and context, since there are always different forms of power and resistance along curatorial practices. I think, how a curator could respond to them and operate outside of the box is critical to good curating.

I like to answer this kind of questions by categorizing or clustering like old school teachers. First you have to cough to sound more convincing... Eheu, eheu...and then explain; there are basically 3 main ways of being a good curator.

1. A good curator tries to maintain mostly the same conditions to artists s/he works with. S/he never buys a flight for her/himself when only paying for a bus transfer for the artist she works with or she accepts the conditions of getting fee as a curator when the artists are not in the same show or in the same institutional organization. A good curator builds up a fair economy for the team.
2. A good curator tries/is (to be) critical to his or her context. S/he should always-never take any situation personal, especially when it is time to be critical. This is the most difficult part of it; it is very rarely done by anyone. Working with institutions and organizations, s/he could easily turn into a conservative officer who only confirms his boss and say yes to his highest and no to her/his assistants. They only use and abuse their assistants and young people. They like to be the chief. Chief-waiters in big tables. Bringing paintings and decorations to their Apollo-dog-owners and feeling good when given chocolate.
3. A good curator opens discussions, which would not be opened without her/his projects. These discussions don’t have to be always popular or correct, but have to be based on observation, and related to the social and political context, and also risk taking in the present. They should be working within the contexts they are designed or produced in but not pretended.

4) What is a failure? What is a success?

Aha—do I have to distinguish between these two to be critical? But I really do not have an answer for this question. To me, it always depends on a specific subject in some certain context to ground this question, or better it remains as a conceptual dialectic.

Failure is the end of success, and the success is the end of failure. Success is not power, but gives power for controlling it as a tool of challenging it. Failure is not losing, but winning over the winner, if you still have your hopes. Being more interested into the process, rather than its product is a must for Good Gangsters.

5) When do you think we need an exhibition? And what does it mean to make an exhibition to you regarding creating a new space?

To me an exhibition is always a specific spacetime continuum. It has its physical dimension, but its mental horizon is perhaps the most critical and mysterious part, and probably it is where our aesthetic experience is constituted and where its impact lays. Whenever the linkages between the social-political circumstance and the insights of an exhibition are well curated, an exhibition could be staged in the public realm to stretch itself, take its visible volume to open conversations and discussions.

We need a show when the discussion is not possible anymore with words; when we need to see the ideas as forms and images. Not as illustrations or representations of ideas but reflections and digestions of them. Not only using ideas as an argument or discussion, but also as a way of producing and processing things. We need a show when we need to adjust ourselves to the reality and remember our dreams.

Let me talk about my “one-and-only” in the history of philosophy about regarding your question: According to Foucault, all spaces exists in a certain relation to each other and to the social structures of power, describing heterotopia as every schism between real and ideal social spaces. Although heterotopia exists in relation to social power, Foucault asserts that heterotopia is a kind of neutral zone beyond the dominion of conventional social structures of power and power relations. In other words, between real social and Utopian space lies heterotopia, a collective of material and conceptual social spaces that gerrymander around the jurisdictions of normal social structures of power.

Foucault was fetishized with the image of space as politics. I also consider his obsession of getting lost at S&M clubs as part of his meta-cognitive process in terms of his writings as production. He was looking for “the space” to think about space. Let’s not forget: Michel Foucault died of AIDS, presumably contracted in the San Francisco S&M clubs which he frequented, in 1984. He had previously described the high points in his life as: 1) his first LSD trip (in 1975, at nearly 50 years of age); 2) getting hit by a car and nearly dying while high on opium (1978); and 3) "sex with strangers."

I don’t have such a colourful sex life and I am boring in bed as a conservative-catholic old lady, but I can tell you what I am looking for when I am making an exhibition: I still believe in the possible presence of heterotopias, and for me making an exhibition also means reflecting heterotopias that you have visioning… An exhibition means a new space, and to me this has to be related to the idea of the fetishization of space, not always as a condition but also as a critic to this idea. People would respond to this as heterotopias are natural and found somewhere in life outside where as exhibitions are made by boring curators, however I would say, no there are not! Exhibitions are always there, with us. They just come out when we need them. So making a show is meeting with anonymous people who come to see your show, isn’t it like sex with strangers?

6) What's good gangsters to you? What do you want to achieve with it?

For me, it is a silent consensus understood by how we could work together as a collective, however, it voices loudly as well to the outer world. It is more like an attitude, chemistry or a sort of belief, or something we can be proud of and laugh about when we get old and walk with a stick. I do not think there is any kind of mission statement about Good Gangsters. Yet, it is neither airy. It is about how two people find collaboration possible and sometimes necessary in cultural production. This is based on certain shared interests, different knowledge and the common passion. In the past two years, we shared the same drive to target various important questions while we encountered different cultural context. There were mostly issues regarding to the globalization influence on the local art scene or individual, because we had found lots of crashes in between values and perceptions in different cultures, institutional setups, social realities, and so forth. We care very much about, in a personal level, how one struggle and survive through these confrontations, and we want to deliver an attitude for it. The Good Gangsters attitude. I can see how this thread of thought has been embedded since our first project ‘I don’t know what else to do with myself’³ to ‘Big Family Business’ and ‘Good Gangsters in Town’.

It was not set up for achievement. We started through a very natural process and because of certain needs. Especially in the beginning, it was meant to be a way of working together under the same title, sharing the ideals, and their costs. We want to create a better way of working together to experience the borders of “ideals” in our mind. We have always believed in (that there are) ideals, different from each other, might be from Kant or Hegel, we can discuss, but they are there with us, as we are in a cave like Plato. I can define myself as a Neo-idealist; I am co-edit a magazine that I share the financial costs with my editor friends and distribute it freely or I pay my ticket to make a show if there is no response from the applications if I really believe that that show must be done for a/some reasons… I don’t work for charity, but I take the risks and costs of my profession when there is a need. This also effects how you decide or move in your career; and my motivation is I want to be a good curator. What does this mean to me? I have already decided to take part in this transformation, in this profession, and in this discussion, I mean, the context that contemporary art practice develops has made me feel good as being part of it, producing in it… I will my best regarding my contribution to this sort of transformation of knowledge and society… This is how I feel good, money or success come and go…

On the other hand, I also feel we make a long way together; we have achieved a lot together. We realized two big projects in our home cities; Istanbul, Stockholm, and Taipei. These shows make a triangle together looping the mobility and the production in each context and transiting to the next one. We transformed the institutional organization that we have met through, Curatorlab¹. We first met in Curatorlab as the first generation participants after it changed into a research based curatorial program from an M.A. program. We will be back to Stockholm again, as a part of Manifesta 7, Curatorlab will host a final session, bringing together the Hot Desking² products.

These projects linked us together as collaborators and friends but also as the members of different cultures and identities. We have experienced the exchange of our cultures into a personal level. We have been based on all of these cities for a while and we have got some observations and experience in relation to how each of us deals with his/her culture. This is a very important step to us, and we both know that this is also very rare in people who work together. Mostly, contemporary art people are very quick and open to consumption of labour and others.

7) How do you engage it with your cultural/social/political perspective and practice? or what drives you into these?

One thing about Good Gangsters is that we are both down-to-earth people, sensitive to the surrounding context, and would like to give respond and kick it off. Our personalities help a lot in sharing the run-and-go discussion, and that’s why our projects and ideas are developed to correspond to the very specific context of the sites. For instance, in “Big Family Business”, we adapted the 10^th Istanbul Biennial as this project’s context and subject, and we responded to Hou Hanru’s theme on the local economics versus globalization with a critical discussion based project, which formed an open office in the local textile trading center and focused on the local artistic production while addressing to the social and economic crisises. In the exhibition “Good Gangsters in Town”, we took the position of Taipei Fine Arts Museum to the local curatorial practice development as the counter point of our discussion. In both cases, we have very strong political stances toward the local art scene, even though they could come from our love and hatred toward our personal backgrounds. They are personal and political; everything starts from personal requests and addresses to what we see in the socialpolitical reality.

I think your question is very important regarding media as the 4. Big Power. State (or bureaucracy), army and economy (or money) are ruling the world; and technology as an element of power has to negotiate with those in order to keep the balance of its demand and supply, so when I think about media, press and other sources of information processing today, I first see how it is engaged into the world of power regarding these three big channels; state and army needs media to refund money. So at some micro levels thinking, we repeat the same circles as cultural producers, we need to maintain our existence through money, publicity and production. Andy (Warhol) says, publicity is like eating peanuts, when you ever start eating, you can’t stop at all…

So I think, my curatorial strategy is based on that sort of consciousness. Naturally, my strategy is based on the story of how today’s password society functions; today the global village people control and plan their lives with codes and passwords, even identities and cultures are controlled by numbers and colours, rather than values and loves. This is what I am most interested at questioning.

My over-all intention and imagination is dedicated to that; I am not always breaking the rules; but I am trying to challenge these rules and regulations, passwords and codes, which make people unhappy and imprisoned, and propose new ones for freedom and love. I think, I am engaged into my society but I am also connecting it to another one. For instance, the cities such as Istanbul, Taipei, and Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen and etc. These are the cities where we worked in a professional sense, so I can say we have a sort of professional relationship with them regarding their context and art scene. That makes a network! This is my engagement with Good Gangsters . We founded a base for getting connected to the world, not only consuming but also proposing a possible form of collaboration and labour; sharing a ground for ethical and personal values.

8) What is the importance of artistic research and what are your strategies of using it when producing a curatorial approach/statement?

I think this is a natural process that a curator gradually and eventually learns more about their practices from artists who they admire are also their working partners. Artistic research is a wild term that goes across various disciplines in creative ways, and therefore is the most incomprehensible discipline itself. I’d like to take account of what Brad Haseman calls ‘practice-led research’ or ‘performative research’ instead to address the need for the research paradigms beyond that of quantitative and qualitative research in curatorial practices, which in turn appropriates itself to carry social, political and cultural quests.

Art is not a sort of academic discipline or science or an educational practice. It can be used for/within education or science and it can also be a part of them, whereas it can also transform them into itself. Art includes research and the right to make research. On the other hand, art is also a sort of research practice, which produces research based works and processes and as you know from art historians without its research and process, no artwork has a value.

We are working with artistic practice and in order to understand artists’ practice, first we have to support artistic research. We have to provide the conditions and ground for research and critic. From a curatorial point of view, this is our responsibility!

My basic strategy is to understand artistic research and to support it to the level of its final production, sometimes as a form, sometimes as a presentation, sometimes a social interaction or a value. Some curators fail into the trap of analyzing artistic practice as an element of society or human; this is neither science nor education. This is life. Art needs to be -live.

9) 'Performativity' is one of the focuses in good gangsters, and it breaks through some lines across artistic practice. How do you apply this concept, and what do you see within this practice?

Continued from the previously mentioned term performative research, I think when such methodology is applied, it becomes an attitude, an everyday practice, a self-awareness and self-critique. That’s what performativity is about in Good Gangsters, since it is inseperation from the process of research and the production of such performance.

Performative curating or performing curating? Which one of them sounds more relevant to me? In both ways, you are producing some amount of interaction and communication with others but only in one of them, you are paid as a curator! This can be left as a puzzle here, but I think, I can’t stand it as a concept anymore. You know, in general, people abuse words; this is how they make themselves big in other’s eyes, they do it by using ‘bass’ words or passwords. I perform because I curate. Curating is an eclectic form of processing artistic knowledge with curatorial knowledge. “To curate” is a sort word that you can’t define without the word itself, as an oxymoron. I curate because I perform curating.

10) Who is a curator?

If I believe Beuys’ famous slogan ‘everyone is an artist’, then I also believe everyone has his/her turn to be a curator.

A curator is the one who curates! As I have told you before, I think, curating is such a subject matter that you can’t define (it) without using the word itself. If you do, for instance let’s define is as; a curator is the one who makes exhibitions and generates art collections. Then you risk its potential criticality and transformative impact; you risk excluding something such as producing critic or processing artistic practice or basically its DNA, which is the core of it, so better to include it then excluding. A curator is the one who curates...

WHO ASKED WHICH QUESTIONS?

1) Esther 2) Adnan 3) Esther 4) Adnan 5) Adnan 6) Esther 7) Esther 8) Adnan 9) Esther10) Adnan

Answers: Blue- Esther / Black- Adnan

1) Exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, TFAM, Summer 2008.
2) Curatorlab is a (Stockholm based traveling) curatorial research program at Konstfack, and Hot-Desking is one of the Curatorlab projects as part of the exhibition "TheRest is Now" by Raqs Media Collective, Manifesta 7.

image: Sabah Gazetesi arşiv.

Tam Erkmen'e göre havuz problemi (radikal, 29.07.09)

Tam Ayşe Erkmen'e göre havuz problemi

Adnan Yıldız

FREIBURG - 1827 yılında kurulan Freiburg Kunstverein, Almanya’nın en eski (ilk kuşak ‘kunstverein’ ) sergi salonlarından biri. 1950’lere kadar klasik modernizmi kuran sanatçılara odaklanan bu sanat kurumu, daha sonra dönemin önde gelen güncel çalışmalarına ve tartışmalarına yer vermiş. Şimdilerde Caroline Käding’in direktörlüğünde dinamik bir programa sahip. Ağustos ayının ilk haftasına kadar ise Türkiye’nin en önemli güncel sanat üreticilerinden Ayşe Erkmen’in ‘Mavimtrak’ olarak Türkçeleştireceğim, ‘Bluish’ adlı solo sergisine ev sahipliği yapıyor.
‘Mavimtrak’ insanın kalbini hemen çalan görkemli cam tavanıyla eşşiz bir tarihi binada gerçekleşiyor. Freiburg Kunstverein, 1930’larda yüzme havuzu olarak yapılmış ve uzun yıllar halka açık bir havuz olarak hizmet vermiş bu tarihi binaya 1997 yılında taşınmış. 9 metre yüksekliğinde, 400 m2’lik alanda, izleyiciye açık iki kattan oluşan binanın en can alıcı yanlarından biri mimarisinde mevcut olan ve ziyaretçisini hemen içine alan ferahlık hissi, alan-hacmi. İçine aldığı her işi yutacak kadar kıskanç, güzelliğine düşkün ve doyumsuz, ama ona dokunulunca bir o kadar cömert olabilen, kalbini açabilen, tutkulu bir mimari ruha sahip. Yani tam da Ayşe Erkmen’e göre bir mekân, tam da ona göre bir problem-miş. Havuz problemi.

Mekânın ruhu
Zira Erkmen, pratiğiyle mekânların ruhuna dokunan, matematiğini bilen, bulmacasını çözen bir duyarlılıkla çalışır. Mekânların gramerini iyi oturtarak, sadece fiziksel referanslara değil, mekânların dinamik fizikselliğine de işaret eder; böylelikle mimari şifrenin arkasındaki siyasi, sosyal, tarihi ve kültürel kodlara ulaşır. Onları görünür kılar, bizimle paylaşır. Özellikle mekâna özgü üretilen işleriyle, ki bunu uzamsal (spatial) mekân anlayışı ile ürettiği bazı videolarında da görmek mümkün, izleyicide tuhaf bir aydınlanma hissi bırakır; bu his, orada olmanın ve mekânın fizikselliğini paylaşmanın getirdiği, görmeye ve bakmaya dair siyasi ve tarihi ipuçları veren bir kavrayıştır.
Şiirsel değildir, ama şiirin içindeki saydamlıktan beslenir. Güzeldir, ama sadece estetik temsile dayalı bir yapıya oturtulamaz. O nedenle de ‘site-specificity’ (mekâna özgücülük) tartışmasının en bunalttığı anlarda belirerek, problematiği tek taraflı algılardan kurtarır; meseleyi sanat felsefesinin temel sorularına getirir. Bir mekânın yaratılmasında ve algılanmasında, hafızanın, zamanın ve alegorinin rollerini yeniden sorgular ve (bir unutulmaz Radiohead şarkısındaki gibi) sorar; her şey yerli yerinde -mi?
‘Mavimtrak’ içinde iki tanesi Freiburg Kunstverein için üretilmiş, üç tane Ayşe Erkmen işi barındırıyor. Bunlardan en göz alıcısı, bakmaya doyamacağınız, havada asılı duran bir yerleştirme. Masmavi. Tavandan gelen ışığın değişen renklerine göre -gün içinde- tonu açılan, koyulaşan bir mavilik. Bize mekânın eski bir havuzdan bozma olduğunu hatırlatan; uçurtma ve hafif yelken malzemesinden üretilmiş, üzerinde bastığımız zeminin altında duran havuzun ölçüsünün iki katı, haliyle de o ‘tarihi’ havuzu yeniden üreten bir matematikle havada beliren yeni bir havuz. Mavi renkteki malzemesiyle su, ölçeğiyle havuz ama havadan yükselen, tavandan sarkan, mekâna gökyüzünü getiren bir çekim. Gökçekimi. Bizi yerçekiminden kurtaran, yukarı doğru çeken, esrik bir özgürlük ve anlık bir ferahlık hissi veren, son derece fiziksel bir anıt. Havada asılı duran bir havuz problemi.

Çocukluğun uçurtmaları
Aynı anda bütün kapılar açıldığında içeriye ne kadar izleyici kaç dakikada dolar? Kaç tanesi ne kadar süre ile yukarı bakar, bakmaya devam eder ve yeni sorular üretir? Hangisi hâlâ çocukluğunun uçurtmalarına ve hayallerine sadık, hangisi en son ne zaman çimlere sırtüstü uzanıp gökyüzüne baktı? Bu mavi yerleştirmenin Freiburg’un havasıyla suyuyla da barışık, şehrin bağlamıyla da ilişkili bir dili var. Alman ‘Alman’ bir şehir olmayan Freiburg, İsviçre ve Fransa sınırında olmasının sonucu kültürel olarak melez bir atmosfere sahip; biraz turistik, sayfiyemsi, rahat bir şehir; şehri kesen kanallarıyla zaten ‘sulu’ hatta ıslak bir alan.
Kunstverein’ın hemen önünden akan suyu mekânın içinde devam ettiren bu yerleştirme yalnız değil. Ona, hemen yanıbaşında Freiburg versiyonu olarak üretilmiş bir Ayşe Erkmen videosu eşlik etmekte; bir genç kız şaçını kurulamakta. Loop.

Özgürleşme mücadelesi
Geçtiğimiz sene Berlin/Hamburger Bahnhof’ta gerçekleşen kapsamlı solo sergisinde de gördüğümüz bir projeksiyon ise üst katta yer alıyor; çeşitli coğrafi iklimlerden alınmış ikonik-ironik manzara resimleri dijital bir yükleme sürecini anımsatan bir dille (anbean) yavaş yavaş, kesit kesit açılıyor. Üst kattan bakıldığında içi boş bir deniz yatağına dönüşen bizim ‘mavimtrak’ yerleştirmenin arkasına geçiveriyor. Bizi zamanın suya dair izlerinde, hafıza-tarihinde ve akışında dolaştırarak, bu sergide yeni anlamlar kazanıyor. Mekânın mimari tarihi/tarihi hikayesi, evsensel bir dekora dönüşüveriyor, kendi mekânını yaratarak Freiburg’tan dünyaya açılıyor... Umut hiç bitmez ama ya birgün su biterse?
Karaman’da doğan, Freiburg’da yaşayan teyzem, sergi programı içindeki konuşmamdan sonra ona küçük bir tur veren Caroline ile sosyalleşirken -mavi yerleştirmeyi işaret ederek- Almanca şöyle bir şeyler diyor; “Hep baskı altında geçen genç kızlığımı hatırladım, özgürleşmek için verdiğim çabayı...” Ben de onu dinlerken, Adalet Ağaoğlu’nun ‘Ölmeye Yatmak’ını hatırlıyorum. Ayşe Erkmen haklı. Özgürlüğün rengi mavi, nam-ı diğer gökçekimi.

kaos GL, Temmuz 2009, "Ütopya" / Ütopyanın yeniden inşası...

ÜTOPYANIN YENİDEN İNŞASI, MILK ve queer-ELEŞTİREL DÜŞÜNCE

Adnan Yıldız

Kaos GL’nin Umut’u, benden ütopyaya dair bir yazı istediğinde, tuhaf bir içgüdüyle hemen son iki senedir tuttuğum defterlere; sergi hazırlama notlarıma baktım: meğer son iki senedir umuda ve geleceğe ne kadar odaklanmışım? Zira işimi bilenler için tekrara gelecek ama bilmeyenlere hemen not atayım, Antonio Negri’nin en güçlü siyasi önermelerinden biri olan “umudun yeniden inşası” üzerinden giden iki ayrı sergi üzerine çalıştığım bir dönemdeyim. İki serginin küratöryel araştırmasında da umudun fiziksel bir algı ve dürtü olarak izleyiciye geçmesi stratejisini güttüm, sergi formunu bir sunumdan ziyade fiziksel bir deneyim alanı olarak konumlayarak, yaratıcılık ve hayalgücü üzerinde yeni kontrol mekanizmaları yaratmaya çalışıyorum; yeni kanaat, tutum ve ikna kanallaları açarak, izleyiciye bir cümlelik çimdik atmak istiyorum: “UMUDU YENİDEN KURALIM!”

Umut’un istediği yazıyı yazarken, bu notların üzerinden geçmek istedim. Özellikle altını çizmek istediğim bir soru var, cevabım yok, ama soruyu birlikte formüle edeceğiz. Bugün neden (özellikle kuşak olarak) önümüze bir model koyarak ütopya üretemediğimize ama ısrarla literatürdeki ütopyaları tekrar ürettiğimize gelmek istedim. Soru bu: Neden sürekli eski ütopyaları temize çekmekteyiz?

Buraya, bu noktaya gelirken, en çok etkilendiğim isimler elbette yetmişlerdeki bilimkurgu geleneğini kuran gelenekten; hele hele hele 2008’deki ölümünün ardından, hele 90 yaşını kutladığı doğumgününün videosundan kalan gülüşüyle Sir Arthur Charles Clarke... “Gökyüzünden Sesler” kitabında zamana dair kurduğu kurgusal alt yapıda, insanın zamanı nasıl algıladığı ve biçimlendirdiği üzerine konuşurken, ilham dolu dilini ikna edici bir biçimde kıvırarak, hep tekrar ediyor: “mümkün olanın sınırları ancak mümkün görünmeyen şeyler denendiğinde belli olur, bir süre için, o şartta, durumda, zamanda...” Soruya vereceğim ilk cevabım bu alıntıdan hareketle: Bugün risk almayı ve deneme-yanılma metodunu desteklemeyen bir sisteme boğulduk, hemen başarı istiyoruz, hemen ünlü-zengin-mutlu olmanın peşindeyiz ve hepimiz kaybetmekten korkuyoruz.

Diğer yandan Yona Friedman, Archigram, Superstudio ve Archizoom gibi mimari referanslar, hele Peter Cook aurasıyla –Oslo’da- kısa bir karşılaşma anı, beni mekansal düşünme yönünde çok besledi. Milano’da yeni yapılan Boccini Üniversitesi binasını gezerken, Roma’da Colosseum’un yeni tamamlanmış restorasyonu sonrası turist kafilelerini ağırlayan hüzünlü haline bakarken, Venedik’te D. Birnbaum’un küratörlüğünde açılan bienali gezerken de aktı bilinç: Bütün bunlardan sonra, “ütopyayı” bir kavramdan ziyade, bir açı ve görüş olarak yazmanın daha etkili bir yol olduğunu düşünüyorum. Ütopyanın eleştirel düşünce açısından nasıl pozisyonlandığını ve aslında sadece edebi ve kavramsal bir şema olmadığını da yinelemek gerek. Zira mimari olarak daha net okunan bir yansıması var ütopyanın, modalaştıkça ve stilize oldukça içindeki agresif ve saldırgan siyasi dil ölüyor; bir janr’a dönüşüyor. Bunu en çok ve en net biçimde mimaride gördük, biraz da sinemada. Kubrick, Godard ve Tarkovsky... Ya da distopya dersek, Jarman, Fassbinder, Haneke... Ütopya’nın sonuç itibariyle ürün olarak elbette bir model yaratması gerek, sonunda bir dünya olarak önerilmesi için, içinde bütün bir gerçeklik kurgusu barındırması şart. Ama kritik olan, üretilen modelin sistemle nerede, nasıl, ne zaman karşılacağı.

Peter Lang, bir söyleşide Pelin Tan’ın sorusuna (1960’lardaki radikal eleştirinin, “ütopya”nın modernist tarifine karşı bir şey olduğunu düşünüyor musunuz? Bugün radikal eleştiriyi nasıl tanımlarsınız?) şu cevabı veriyor:

“...50’lerin sonuna doğru gitgide daha gözle görülür hale gelmeye başlayan modernizmin ve onun sosyal modellerinin çöküşü, radikaller tartışmaya başlamasalardı daha trajik olabilirdi. Büyük İtalyan tarihçi ve teorisyen Manfredo Tafuri, radikal manifesto ile alay etmiştir. Ancak toplumun esas işlevsizliğine, onun yüzsüz kapitalist yapısına direkt olarak bağlanmaktan kaçınmıştır. Bu çok talihsiz bir durum olurdu, çünkü radikal hareket, bu sistemin kuyusunu kazan az sayıda etkili araçlardan birisini üretmiştir. Bugün Marksist söylemin olmadığı bir dünyayı kabul etmemiz ve serbest piyasa kapitalizmine sıkı sıkıya bağlanmamız, her zamanki ütopya modellerinin kullanılmasına engel oluyor. Ayrıca şunu da biliyoruz ki, yeni eleştirmenler çok gelişmişler ve ilk alternatif modelleri, son dönem mimarlık yaratıcılığına malzeme olarak sunuyorlar...”

Tafuri’ye geri dönmek önemli bir tavır, hele ki bu retro-referansı Fütürizm’in 100. Yılını kutlayan İtalya sanatının kucağına düştüğüm bir anda yeniden gözden geçirdim. O nedenle okura fütürizm ve faşizm arasındaki tehlikeli ve gergin ilişkinin de unutulmaması gerektiğini hatırlatmak istiyorum. (bkz. F.T. Marinetti’nin hüzünlü hikayesi) Fütürist Manifesto’nun faşist İtalyan siyasetçilerinin ağzını nasıl sulandırdığını düşününce, bugün ütopyanın yeniden üretilmesindeki ısrarı daha iyi anlayabiliriz. Yeni bir ütopya yok, ama ütopya artık bir ihtiyaç, bir pastiş, bir retro-effect! Tekno gibi, graffiti gibi, 1 Mayıs gibi bir partileme imkanı. Bir kavramsallaşma yolu. Köprüden önce son çıkış!

Geriye bakınca geleceğin ölümünden bahsetmenin burada etkili olacağını düşünüyorum; artık gelecek bir kavga meselesi değil, bir organizasyon şeması, bir plan-program tahtası. Biz gelecekten ziyade kısa vadeli ve kendimizle ilgili planlar peşindeyiz. Ama o kadar da boktan değil durumlar, mesela Gus Van Sant’ın Milk’i, 2000’lerin sonu itibarıyla sadece bir film değil, aslında bir sanatsal müdahale idi. Siyasi olarak tavır alan bir eleştirinin tarihsel ve dökümanter dillerle birleşerek, bir kimlik mücadelesi olarak hikayelenmesinin hala ve hala işlediğini gösterdi. Bir anlamda devrim hala ve hala mümkün, daha güzel bir dünya her zaman hayal edilebilir, dünya hala ve hala değişebilir -dedi.

Yazacak çok şey var, söylenecek çok şey var ama burada şununla bitirmeli:

Bir tek gelecekten söz etmektense, geleceklerden söz etmek gerek.

Dünya(lar) Venedik'te buluştu, 09/07/2009, Radikal

Radikal, 09/07/2009

ADNAN YILDIZ (Radikal yazıları Arşivi)

53. Venedik Bienali, İsveçli Daniel Birnbaum küratörlüğünde kasım sonuna kadar ziyarete açık kalacak ve illa ki değişecek şekilde açıldı. Birnbaum, ‘Dünyalar Yaratmak’ başlığıyla gerçekleştirdiği bienal sergisi için sanat felsefesinden gelen akademik birikimini ve sanatçıya-stüdyoya yakın tavrını temel alarak ilerlemiş. Arsenal ve Giardini’deki iki sergide yer alan sanatçıların işleri arasındaki bağlantılar, Birnbaum’un sanatı tarifindeki temel motivasyonunu açmak isteyen nüanslar, bağlantılar üzerine kurulu. Arsenal sergisi, karanlık bir jestle, artık bizimle olmayan ve pratiğinin ölümsüzlüğüne adanan bir Lygia Page yerleştirmesi ile başlıyor. İzleyicinin birden içine düştüğü bu imgesel dehliz, serginin devamında kendini belli eden bir yaklaşımı müjdeliyor. Formun ve resimsel imgenin mekânla olan sanat tarihsel ilişkisine kavramsalcı bir gelenekle geri dönen bu yaklaşım, sergi içinde birçok kere deşifre oluyor; özellikle işler kendi mekanlarını yaratırken, izleyiciye fiziksel bir deneyim alanı yaratmaktansa, kendi auralarından geri yansıyor.
Bence Arsenal’deki en heyecan verici alanları Yona Friedman, Thomas Bayrle ve Jan Hafstrom gibi artık kendi bağlamlarında okumaları kalıplaşmış eski tüfekler kuruyor. Bu isimlerin bir anlamda bir yüzey sergisi olarak genişleyerek açılan Arsenal’deki yerleştirmede ortaya çıkmaları Arsenal’in artık kanıksanmış sergi formunu hemen kırıyor.

Önemli duraklar
Yerel deneyimleri mimari çözümlerle global bir harita gibi işaretleyen Marjetica Portc, kavramsal olarak bina yapısını soyan çizim ve yerleştirmeleriyle Anya Zholud, yerleştirmesiyle Cassevetes sahnesini yeniden kuran Karen Cytter ve felsefi bir içeriği bir form anlayışı olarak üreten Falke Pisano sergi içinde bazı önemli duraklar. Açılış haftasındaysa, hayat boyu başarı ödülünü John Baldessari ile paylaşan Yoko Ono’nun uzun kuyruklara yol açan performansı, yeniden üretilen ulusal kimlikler üzerinden güncellenen sanatçı pozisyonları odaklı Liam Gillick ve Ahmet Öğüt konuşması ve yerleştirmesindeki dev aynaları kıran Michelangelo Pistoletto aksiyonu Arsenal’in hafızasına kayıt oldu.
Arsenal’deki en güçlü cümleyi kuran ise hiç kuşkusuz Tirdad Zolghadr oldu; küratörü olduğu (bu sene ilk kez bir pavyon olarak sergi üreten) Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri sergisi Venedik Bienali’nin bir dünya fuarı olarak işleyen global ilişkiler ağına yaptığı eleştirel göndermelerle ve -radikal değişimlerle dönüşen- ortaya koyduğu yeni Arap dünyası panoramasıyla herkesi hemen içine aldı. İtalya Pavyonu’nun merakla beklediğim ve (100’üncü yılı vesilesiyle) F. T. Marinetti’nin manifestosuna adanan yeni-fütürist sergisi beni çok tatmin etmedi.
Giardini ise Arsenal’den daha çok malzemeyi, elektiriği ve heyecanı barındıran bir programa sahip. Politik doğrucu bir manevrayla 40 yıllık İtalyan Pavyonu Bienal Binası olarak yeniden isimlendirilmiş. Birnbaum küratörlüğünde, Giardini’deki ana sergide Arsenal’daki gibi kontrollü davranamamış; işler mekâna dağılırken aralarındaki ‘mantıksal’ bağları korumuş ama kendi alanlarında fazla yalnızlaşmış, sergi bütün olarak çok işlememiş. Kavramsal bir açıyla film malzemesi üzerine giden Rosa Barba, genç yetenek ödülü alan Nathalie Djurberg, imajın doğasına ilişkin mükemmel imza ve hikâye buluşmaları yaratan Philippe Parreno, Bacon’a ‘selam çakan’ inanılmaz güzellikteki resimleriyle Pietro Roccosalva ve arşivci dili anıtlaştıran Simon Starling sergiden hemen öne çıkan isimler. En üst katta bu sene ilk kez Venedik’e gelen ve enerjisiyle hepimizi kendine hayran bırakan Wolfgang Tilmans fotoğrafik imajı adeta bir mabete çevirdi.

Gözler Hollanda’daydı
Giardini’deki pavyonlar arasından öne çıkanlar konusunda eğitimli gözler hemen Hollanda Pavyonu-Fiona Tan’ın sergisinde; Almanya Pavyonu’nda Alman bir sanatçıyı görmeyi bekleyenleri şaşırtan Liam Gillick’in formun içindeki siyasi bağlamı deşen sesli-kedili mutfak yerleştirmesinde, Shaun Gladwell’in motosiklet üstünde yavaşlayan Avustralya’sında ve Steve Mc Queeen sinema salonuna dönüşen İngiltere’sinde birleşecektir. Mc Queen iştah kabartıp, etkili bir ‘spectacle’ yarattı; film seanslarına bilet kapmak için sabahtan önünde uzun kuyruklar oluşturan ‘izleyiciler’ bienalgezerden sinefile dönüştü. Dominique Gonzales-Foerster ‘in Giardini’de ana sergideki filminde başını masaya koyarak, ‘artık ne yapabileceğini’ bilmediğini itiraf etmesi ve bienal tarihiyle hesaplaşması, ıssız bir zamanında Giardini’de kamerasını dolaştıran ve aç köpeklere odaklanan Steve Mc Queen ile karşılıklı iyi çalıştı.
Partisiyle, Danimarka Kraliyet Ailesi’nin katılımıyla paparazzileşen açılışıyla, eşantiyonlarıyla Danimarka ve Kuzey Ülkeleri Pavyonu sergisi en çok konuşulanlardan biriydi. I. Dragset ve M. Elmgreen (too nineties!) 90’lardan gelen bir tavırla, genç ve klasik isimlerden oluşan sağlam bir ‘queer’ koleksiyon yaratarak sordu: Para nelere kadir, neleri satın alabiliyor, kimleri tavlıyor; tasarım, sanat, kraliçe, çıplak oğlanlar ve havuzda bir ölü!

Balkanlar’dan güçlü işler
Alçakgönüllü ama kavramsal olarak güçlü yerleştirmeler yine Balkanlardan geldi; Romanya’nın video labirenti ve Çek ve Slovak Cumhuriyet’inin bahçeyi devam ettiren (blokları yıkan) ‘loop’ kavramsalcılığı son derece sağlam kurgulardı. Şehre dağılan pavyonlardan mansiyon ödülünü Dragset ve Elmgreen ile paylaşan, Singapur’un sinema tarihi hafızasını güncelleyen Ming Wong sergisi ve Filistin Pavyonu hem işler hem de atmosfer açısından mekânlarında güzel işledi.
Venedik Bienali’ni geriye sarınca, bugünkü sanat üretimine ve tartışmasına dair bazı noktaları korkmadan masaya getirebilirim. Birnbaum sergisi, yıllardır formun geri döneceğini muştulayan sanat tarihçileri olumladı. Ama formun geri dönüşü görkemsiz, kavramsallaşmadan, yenisiz ve bir koşul olarak, ‘kutlanmadan’, dönemsel bir geçiş olarak kabullenildi. Özellikle öne çıkan bazı işlerde, imajın dijital teknoloji devrimiyle hızla dolaşması ve sirküle edilmesiyle değişen görsel dünyaya yönelik bir tavır hemen okunuyordu. Fiona Tan, Shaun Gladwell, Mc Queen, Öğüt ve birçoğu imajı yavaşlatarak, dondurarak ve kırarak izleyiciye ve dünyaya kısa bir mesaj çekti: (slow down) ‘yavaşlayalım.’ Çılgın partilerin yerini krize duyarlı minik kokteyller ve yayın odaklı üretimler almıştı ki, son yıllarda giderek prodüksiyon fetişine odaklanan güncel sanat üreticileri bu alçakgönüllü jestlerle tazelendi. İşin içinde ne kadar para olduğundan çok bütçelerin, zamanın ve tartışmaların nasıl kullanıldığının daha önemli olduğu noktasında birleşildi. Birnbaum, çok heyecanlı ve ilginç bir gösteri sergisi yapmadı, ama her fırsatta vurguladığı ‘kesilen bütçesiyle’ ayakları üzerine basan (down to earth) bir buluşma sağladı.

ENG,The Politics of the Stage or The Stage of Politics/The Seductiveness of the Interval, the catalogue for the Romanian Pavilion,53.Venice Biennial

The Politics of the Stage or The Stage of Politics

By Adnan Yıldız

On stage, I am in the dark.

Maria Callas

Local Stories

An image of a bust from my early childhood memories is still vivid. It rested on a pedestal in a small park in my hometown, Karaman, in Middle Anatolia. When I used to walk home from school, it was an inevitable stop, a sort of stage for childhood fantasies and a hidden place for questioning the political borders of a psychosocial territory. The bust represented a local historical figure, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey, who was the second ruler of the beylik (feudal province) of Karamanoğlu, and on the pedestal of that bust was inscribed his famous proclamation of 13 May 1277: “This day henceforth, in the dervish convent, in the council, in the palace, in the parliament and in public places, no language other than Turkish shall be permitted.” Since the text was inscribed only in Turkish, I was greatly concerned for those who do not speak Turkish, curiously questioning the logic behind the text: If you don’t speak Turkish, and if it is not permitted to speak any other language than Turkish here, how then would you know this, given that this information is communicated to you only in Turkish? I always felt a kind of thrill as a child when I heard people around me speaking those other languages. How would they have been punished for their transgression?

For me, that park was a perfect example of a conceptual stage that requires neither an actor nor a director. It was an installation that performed continuously within everyday reality. It was an imaginative stage that I had discovered; and it fictionalised itself every morning with another story. The silence in the park was enough for me to fantasise about situations which would somehow challenge the context of the declaration. Sometimes I would imagine people there, around the park, speaking other languages, although this might now sound like a Benetton campaign from the 90s, but back then it was more than just a childhood fantasy. It was the instinctive, natural response of a young child, of a pure mind, to the political atmosphere of Turkey in the 80s. Unspeakable pressure and a high level of control within the public space were the cost, the collectively footed bill called “transitional democracy”; it meant never feeling safe and if you were outside on the street late at night – you might have been taken for a terrorist or an anarchist. To spend time alone in that park in front of that bust was inspiring for me in order understand where I was living, whatever happened here, to understand what was going on…

This situation reminds of the writings of Soviet exile Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued that the “carnivalesque” brings a kind of liberation to the lower class, insofar as “it is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates.” In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin refers to the “carnivalesque” in literature as a kind of activity or situation that takes place in the carnival, whereby the social hierarchies of everyday life -- their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths -- are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. In a carnival, a fool can be a wise man or a king appear as a beggar; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell). The bust was the centre of the carnival, and around it there were all the people with their costumes; the uniforms, gestures, and attitudes of everyday life in the city. On the other hand, today, the feeling of that atmosphere in the park sounds like it was a Brecthian stage. Regarding the politics of stage theatrics, German director, Bertolt Brecht dreamt of a theatre which alienated the audience, criticising the class conflict and oppression of its time. The term Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt) is metaphorically depicted as a hammer, which fights against corruption. In the Brechtian theatre, the audience is invited to experience a form of fiction that shockingly reflects on truth and reality. “To see one’s mother as a man’s wife one needs a V-Effekt: this is provided, for example, when one acquires a stepfather. If one sees one’s form-master hounded by the bailiffs a V-Effekt occurs: one is jerked out of a relationship in which the form-master seems big into one where he seems small.” (cit. John Willett, The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht).

That declaration might have operated as a V-Effekt for me since I used to see it every day, knowing that there were many other languages spoken around me, and also possibilities of hosting people who spoke languages other than Turkish in the city… The presence of that declaration in the public space was only one of the million stories about how public imagination is manipulated and controlled in Turkey. It was a fiction out of an engagement with history and politics; even if they do not speak our language, they are not allowed to speak any other language. Then who were they? With whom did the declaration communicate, and from whom was it protecting our language and culture? In fact, the answer was not so far away from me. It couldn’t be the tourists; for example – as part of the hidden curriculum – at elementary school, it was always repeated that tourists bring foreign currency to the country, so we like them, and when they are around, we behave ourselves… And we were also encouraged to learn a second or third language in the school, therefore it couldn’t be English or German, so what was the language that should not be publicly spoken? At that time, there was a Kurdish labourer who helped my father in his business, called Celal. Furthermore, I observed that when I sometimes tuned in to the Kurdish-speaking radio channel to invite him for a tea break, he would kindly turn the sound off if any other people were around… Now, I know why. I started to learn who they were; they were the people who lived together with us; our friends, neighbours and relatives. There was no cultural antagonism between people, cultures or languages; it was a set made by some actors who worked for the state in the state, and it is always the innocent people who always suffer, get hurt or killed.

Later, they replaced the bust with a monumental statue, now holding a ferman (edict) on which the same text from the declaration is inscribed, again only in Turkish. In addition to Mehmet Bey’s declaration, there is also another statement on the front of the pedestal now; and this time it is from Ataturk, (1881-1938) the founder of the Republic, saying, “Turkish Citizens who are successfully capable of protecting the high level of their national independence should also emancipate the Turkish language from the invasion of foreign languages.” Maybe the transformation of that declaration from a thirteenth-century case into a Cold War weapon was not only a representation of a closed system, but also a reflection of how culture, identity and language have been officially staged in our country. The declaration has been handed down from the thirteenth century, and it had nothing to do with the national identity of its time, since nationalism is conceptually an invention of the modern age. Mehmet Bey’s intention was probably to provide a sort of uniformity and centralisation in Central Anatolia against Persian dominance. But the micro-politics behind the mentality that keeps the statue with that statement in the public space relates to other concerns and still exists in that context. Regarding the omnipresent position of Kemal Ataturk, it is not so strange for me to see his words connected to a statement from the thirteenth century. He was misinterpreted and exploited by almost all of the political movements in the country, and everyone has borrowed a sentence from him to validate their own political identity. In 2007, during the 10th Istanbul Biennial, some academicians started a campaign to inculpate the curator of the show, Hou Hanru, for his references to the sociological reading of late modernism in Turkey. Hanru was referring to a valid contextual framework which is still taboo in this country. The recent design of the statue, now including a sentence from Ataturk, is not a coincidence. It is the destiny of every argument in this country…

Using history as an element of manipulation, and culture as a stage for control, the Turkish army, the bureaucratic elite and the bourgeoisie have exploited the cultural and historical aspects of the country, creating a fictional past and a designed national identity. After the military coups, especially after the one in 1980, there a post-Cold War process was also staged in Turkey, the same as in many other places around the world, black-listing any other/minor language, identity or culture as a potential enemy of the state/nation/country. For instance, for many years it was an issue of human rights and democracy; before August 2002, the Turkish governments placed severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish, prohibiting the language in education and the broadcast media. Since last year, Kurdish parents have been allowed to give their children Kurdish names, Kurdish teachers to hold classes on the Kurdish language, and Kurdish broadcasters to set up their own television station. This year, the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) launched an exclusive Kurdish-language television station in an undoubtedly historical step that reflects the changing attitude of the state toward its Kurdish citizens. Many people interpreted this step as an important change in the state’s approach toward Kurdish citizens, but some others, as an investment by the Islamic government in Kurdish votes before election day. Is this also a stage of politics?

News flash: A Kurdish singer who had been working for a television show at this recently launched Kurdish speaking channel of TRT resigned several days ago, complaining about the social pressure inside the institution, and stating that she had even been censored by the channel several times. Is the stage really changing, or is it just changing another décor on its surface?

So what about the audience?

Global Affairs

National borders, militarist-territorial strategies and Cold War politics have also been undergoing a post-Fordist transformation in the last decades. In short, contemporary forms of capitalism have been undergoing massive changes in the previous decades as a result of digitalisation, mobility and internationalism, introducing new forms of self-organisation and everyday politics. Apart from national economic borders and the international territorial consensus that has controlled the markets, their value and accessibility, since the beginning of the twentieth century, there are currently new virtual societies and communities that share, exchange, shape and circulate information, knowledge, experience and products such as e-bay or Youtube. For example, the shift in the form of encyclopaedias, considered the traditional form of information production since the Enlightenment, to today’s open sources, such as Wikipedia, produces a reflexive and collective process for the exchange of information.

One may also conclude that the conditions of image production have been democratised, making it much easier and cheaper to exchange images, thanks to new technological developments, digitalisation and the Internet. Nevertheless, human imagination and critical creativity continue to be manipulated and controlled by the codes and systems of the State, Army and media-reproducing mediocracy. Western Europe and North America are expanding the borders of public control and capitalising on the channels of information processing for the sake of security, as opposed to increasing demands for free information, education and knowledge by many activists and intellectuals. India, China, and Russia are, in this case, the rising stars, yet their repressive policies of censorship are notorious. On the other hand, U.S. President Barack Obama is the first elected president to have campaigned with a CNN debate, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, using the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents. In his article What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream? Noam Chomsky, whose work has analysed the forms of this media transformation and produced an extensive, critical discourse on anti-globalisation, writes: "What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don't like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system. What has it to do with our consumer behavior?”

This reminds me of a recently produced art piece. Filmed at a real television studio in Berlin, Canadian artist Lynne Marsh’s Camera Opera is made up of a series of choreographed movements from different cameras around an anchorwoman, creating a Brechtian stage for the viewer as a performative critic of mass media broadcasts. In organised harmony, the operators circle around the studio, focus on the anchorwoman and pan out to expose the set, equipment, lighting, audience seating and each other. The performance is based on the Strauss waltzes that navigate the operators’ movements. What we see is how the television studio is organised through and by means of camera views, and how the set may become a performative space based on a series of codified relations. Engaging the Brechtian techniques of alienation, Marsh turns the cameras on themselves, denying their traditional role of relaying information and exposing their participation in the manipulation of what the viewer is presented with. As a conceptual entity, the stage exists in everyday reality, and it is transformed into the forms of everyday communication, exchange and visibility again and again. Like everything else, the stage is also televised, digitalised, virtualised today. Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture in terms of how contemporary image politics evolve: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” and “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

The evolution of contemporary image politics, the position of the audience, and the conceptualisation of the stage are closely linked to the phenomenon of globalisation, multiculturalism, and the continuously changing model of post-Fordist society. According to Slavoj Žižek, the only universal hegemony is global capitalism; without opposition, all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. Even progressive multiculturalism, in the form of radical, (deconstructive) particularism, has been taken over by global power, as analysed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire. This was wholly visible during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, in the spectacle of the 2008 Olympic Games Opening ceremonies in Beijing, etc. Related to this point, Berlin-Singapore-based artist Ming Wong’s practice has to be briefly mentioned here as an artistic gesture. He duplicates a scene from the movie, Welcome Mr. Marshall! a Spanish comedy film from 1953, directed by Luis García Berlanga and considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema. It is about a small town in Castile, Villar del Río, which warmly welcomes some visiting American diplomats by disguising their town and themselves in Andalusian style, in order to display the side of Spanish culture with which the visiting American officials will be most accustomed, in the hopes of benefitting under the Marshall Plan. Wong reinterprets or reconstructs a speech given to the town to boost their morale and encourage them to undergo the cultural transformation, replacing America and Americans with China and Chinese. Neither America nor China, it is called Empire as a global form of capital control and oppressive power. Nevertheless, there is always hope. In his book Time for Revolution Antonio Negri proposes a term, the “reconstruction of hope,” in order to posit the questions “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions with a socio-cognitive approach: “In the bio-political postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But… probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope.”

Global Exchange

In one of the common interpretations of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who is described by Ophelia as "th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form" (Act III, Scene 1, lines 148-9), the character of Hamlet is mostly defined as a reflection of the reactions of all the other characters in the play, and especially the audience. Some critics such as Stephen Booth, William Empson et al. have further investigated the analogous relationship between Hamlet, the play, and its audience. For instance, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude interprets her son’s actions as the result of her “o’erhasty marriage,” while Polonius, most obviously, misreads his own expectations into Hamlet’s actions (“Still harping on my daughter!”), though many other characters in the play participate in analogous behaviour.

Let’s go back to that park, and imagine that Brecthian atmosphere or “carnivalesque” mise en scène here again in the age of global war. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the statue in that park has functioned as a mirror for its audiences, or passers-by; a public stage for its citizens whispering what they think, how they think, and in fact what they are afraid of. Perhaps the impact of the statue on the citizens is like the way in which public performances by Harry Houdini, who was a legendary magician, escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer, were perceived by his audience: “It is not really happening, that’s why it is so real…”

Perhaps the citizens who have kept their silence for years and never confronted the logic behind the monument might never guess how the story is going to end. As far as we know from George Orwell’s fiction, Animal Farm there is a line that will remind us of the old story: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others…”

www.adnanyildiz.blogspot.com

P.S. 1 This text has been written using the research notes for the exhibition project There Is No Audience, an Exhibition about Public Imagination (22 May-31 August 2009, Montehermoso, Spain), which was a selected proposal for the 2009 Curator Grant from the 370 applications sent to the open call.

P.S. 2 Turkey has been shaken by the news a few days later I finished this text. 44 people were murdered in Zangirt (Bilge) Village of Merdîn (Mardin) province by government paramilitary forces, village guards (korucular) on 5 May 2009. The attackers used heavy weapons. 1200 rounds were fired. The weapons belonged to the state, so did the bullets. Before its name was changed to Bilge as part of the assimilation policies of the Turkish state, the village was used to be known as "Zanqırt" in Kurdish.

image: The public monument, Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey, Karaman

www.seductiveness-of-interval.ro

ENG, TIME-CHALLENGER

Time-Challenger by Adnan Yıldız

Time-Challenger was born as an exhibition proposal for the open call of the Curator Curator project, which is a collaborative organization between Enough Room for Space from Rotterdam and HISK, a post-graduate program currently located in Ghent. The original proposal was based on the idea of opening a space-time for a discussion of how artistic reconstruction has been operating today through diverse conceptual approaches and contextual references in relation to current image politics. Recently, there have been numerous exhibition projects addressing artistic re-enactments, remakes, reproductions, and reinterpretations …Time-Challenger takes into consideration the art historical and analytical framework of these projects while taking a different direction by connecting the discussion to Antonio Negri’s concept of the “reconstruction of hope.” Just after the proposal was selected by Enough Room for Space, I did a research visit to the exhibition space and engaged in discussion with the residents of the studios and post-graduate students there during the Open Studio Week. Finally, the proposal has been crystallized by these discussions and aspects of the artistic production at HISK and has now turned into an exhibition about critical reconstruction. The term “critical reconstruction” is borrowed from Gary Wolf (Venture Kapital, Wired Magazine, 1998) who writes about the reconstruction of Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coincidentally, or perhaps as a sign of Zeitgeist, this proposal was completed in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the site of much of the most dynamic reconstruction in Berlin since 1989.

In Seven Easy Pieces (2005), Marina Abramovic acts out select historical performance artworks from 1970’s artists (such as Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys etc.) including two of her own. The series of performances at Guggenheim Museum (New York) sharpened the tendency of questioning the timing of re-enactments, remakes and reinterpretations etc. in the art world. In an interview in the New York Times in early November, 2005, Abramovic explained the impetus for her most recent performances, stating that she “felt a strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced [her] as an artist. ‘There’s nobody to keep the history straight ... I feel almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it.’ And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.”

Many artists today have been using similar approaches and strategies of reinterpreting ar t history as well as transforming world history and culture. Rather than framing the discussion as a form of artistic production through an art historical perspective, Time-Challenger aims to deal with the timing of these productions to relate these tendencies to the repositioning of contemporary politics, image culture and digital-visual capital. As an exhibition about critical reconstruction, Time-Challenger reformulates the critique as an open-ended process of personalizing the situation, performing artistic know into a synthesis of many perspectives. To make things public, there always needs to be a personal position. The process of making things public in contemporary art practice not only brings together art works but also makes dialogues visible in order to create a physical experience for potential interactions.

To deal with the monsterous experience of global capital, Antonio Negri proposes the term “reconstruction of hope” in his Time for Revolution (2005): “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions through reconstructing hope: “In the biopolitical postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But ... probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope (or better, as in Alma Venus, dystopia) have been laid. (144-45).” Time-Challenger shares a common conceptual ground with the exhibition project, There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination (22.05.09-30.08.09, Montehermoso, Spain) and focuses on the same terms on a different level.* Here, Time-Challenger is more interested in the possibility of reformulating the discussion of artistic reconstruction in relation to the political atmosphere of our time and integrating the strategy of reconstructing hope into the process.

Through rethinking modernism, Time-Challenger will display some artistic reconstructions that challenge pre-given definitions and realities of our past and present time — related the problematic of timing. In the exhibition, Gökçen Cabadan displays paintings that depict contemporary visions of family and health and transform the ready-made images at an abstract level of reconstructive criticality. Developing a conceptual identity and an expressive quality, Viron Vert’s drawings and collages include elements of history and culture through personal memories and attachments. Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s video A Turkish Doctor: Ömer Ayhan ironically fictionalizes a success story reflecting the power of the media over content via an evening news program. Romeo Gongora’s Prison is composed of monologues from four prisoners and establishes a critical dialogue on society and models of justice (punitive/rehabilitative). By using a level of abstraction through ready-made images and painting, André Catalão’s installation is a reflection of the artist’s cultural memory. Olof Dreijer’s sound installation is composed of animal sounds and provides a fictional space through reconstructing the perception of nature and the elements of evolution.

As an unforgettable gesture, Felix Gmelin’s Farbtest II, Die Rote Fahne, Colour Test II, The Red Flag is composed of the original shot and the remake of Gerd Conradt’s tracking shot of students running through the streets of West Berlin from 1968. Gmelin’s father had been one of those waving the flag, and the two-channel video loop directly reflects on Negri’s point. Lauren von Gogh conceptualizes a personal story, and reconstructs an everyday experience for the audience in order to create a social critique. Susanne Kriemann’s publications presented on a table include different strategies of recontextualizing the form of images; they are unique examples of experimenting on the format of publication and reading images. Makode Linde’s silk screen prints stimulate a contemporary critique of the history of culture and identity: logos from global sport industry delicately installed into the illustrative portraits of African figures remind us of the exploitation of labour. Christodoulos Panayiotou works with archives and personal memories of sound and image, recreating new dimensions in the perceptive levels of the audience through his installation. Borrowing the images from the world of exploration and discovery (in this instance, National Geographic) Rinus Van de Velde performs his artistic research through his charcoal drawings. There is also a video interview with Ulus Baker by Aras Özgün, What is an opinion? presented in the exhibition that opens a channel to the audience regarding the social process behind the construction of any opinion.

This discussion will be linked to the question: “how does any form of artistic reconstruction develop a level of criticality through its production process, and how does this criticality embody a public challenge?” within the framework of the exhibition, which is designed on the basis of Paul Virilio’s strategic methodology: “Play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more.” (from the interview with Paul Virilio by Jérôme Sans).

by Adnan Yıldız

* Like Time-Challenger the proposal for the exhibition There Is No Audience was also produced for an open call. That one was selected from 370 proposals, sent from 35 countries as Montehermoso 2009 Curator Grant.

__________

EXHIBITION AT THE HISK (CHARLES DE KERCHOVELAAN 187A, 9000 GHENT, BELGIUM) OPEN FROM THURSDAY TO SUNDAY, FROM 14:00 UNTIL 18:00

SUPPORTED BY THE FLEMISH COMMUNITY IN THE FRAMEWORK OF CURATOR CURATOR, A PROJECT INITIATED BY MAARTEN VANDEN EYNDE AND MAAIKE GOUWENBERG (WWW.ENOUGHROOMFORSPACE.ORG)

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE HISH / HIGHER INSTITUTE FOR FINE ARTS (WWW.HISK.EDU)

ENG / TO THE FUTURE AUDIENCE (Montehermoso, 22 May-31 August 2009) / "There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination"

To the Future Audience
by Adnan Yıldız

After a long research process, this exhibition is possible thanks to the cultural policy of Montehermoso and the Basque country of Spain. “There is no audience” was born reflexively as a critical statement about how contemporary art practice is circulated today, the result of two years collaboration with the curatorial research program Curatorlab at Konstfack (Stockholm). It has also functioned as the starting point for many further collaborative projects (www.bigfamilybusiness.net, www.goodgangsters.com, www.you2best.blogspot.com, Muhtelif and Hot Desking for Manifesta 7 etc.), which are all designed to investigate practical and alternative forms of exhibition making and to question the role of the audience in the “game”. At the outset of my research, this exhibition proposal sought its inspiration in the transformation of the audience from a receiver into a performer and in the exhibition space, miserably empty after opening parties, as well as in the self-referential art community, traveling around the world from one biennial to another with a “network fever”. As a curator, one of my interests in the field is to investigate why and when we need to exhibit, and for whom we do produce. Now, over the course of my research, my proposal’s position has become “an exhibition about public imagination”, taking into the consideration its manifestation in a public institution and its selection from an open call that received 370 proposals, sent from 35 countries. The precious responsibility of being selected through a transparent process –rather than a closed competition- has motivated me to invest in a potential discussion I find crucial in the field in order to reformulate our roles and positions as well as our strategies and approaches.

The exhibition proposal is based on a set of urgent questions intended for collaborative development, such as: Who is our audience today and who will they be tomorrow? How do we contribute to the construction of a public imagination? What is the balance between media and content in art practice today? How do history, identity and culture operate through the circulation, promotion, presentation and discussion of contemporary artistic practice? How does the transformation of audience profiles –from receivers into users/performers- shape artistic production in terms of participation, contribution and reflection? And most significantly, how do we reproduce ourselves through these practices and through the different channels of contemporary art in order to make ‘things’ public (as a direct reference to Bruno Latour)?

As the creative team of the project, we are increasingly interested in how these questions can possibly penetrate the everyday life of its audience, the everyday politics of the citizens of the city that hosts the exhibition, and the everyday reality of the institution that produces it. Considering the impossibility of denying the impact of the local context on contemporary artistic production, “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” is conceptually designed through the approach of integrating proactive elements derived from its local context in order to build a globally relevant structure. It is connected to the seminar program of Montehermoso with a discussion session as well as to the library of Montehermoso through the side-project “Open Table”, a temporary installation of printed matter (books, periodicals, etc.) during the show, alongside the fact that the public agencies, NGOs and local media have been asked to exchange ideas and information. Repeating Paul Virilio’s provocative question, “contemporary art, sure, but contemporary with what?”, “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” proposes in this context a possible answer – “contemporary with the audience” – in an attempt to produce new perspectives and refreshing, additional questions…

“There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” departs from the continuously changing position of the audience (as a user, profile, citizen, reader, passenger, party-animal, fashion victim, performer etc.) and its local and global connection to artistic research and production. The project examines how public imagination, social criticism and collective creativity are perceived today in diverse cultural political and social contexts, seeking to understand how artistic research and knowledge respond to these transformations. A quote from Louis Althusser may theoretically anchor the proposed questions: "Capital appeared a century ago (in 1867). It retains all its freshness and is more relevant and actual than ever." Briefly understood, contemporary forms of capitalism have been undergoing massive changes in the previous decades as a result of digitalization, mobility and internationalism, introducing new forms of self-organization and “everyday politics”. Apart from national economic borders and the a territorial international consensus that has controlled the markets, their value and accessibility, since the beginning of the 20th century, there are currently new virtual societies and communities that share, exchange, shape and circulate information, knowledge, experience and products like e-bay or Youtube. For instance, the shift in the form of encyclopedias, considered the traditional form of information production since the Enlightenment, to today’s open sources such as Wikipedia produces a reflexive and collective process for the exchange of information.

One can also conclude that the conditions of image production have been democratized, making it much more easier and cheaper through new technological developments, digitalization and the Internet to exchange images. Nevertheless, human imagination and critical creativity continue to be manipulated and controlled by the codes and systems of the State, Army and media-reproducing mediocracy. Western Europe and North America are expanding the borders of public control and capitalizing on the channels of information processing for the sake of security, as opposed to the increasing demands for free information, education and knowledge by many activists and intellectuals. India, China, and Russia are, in this case, rising stars, yet their repressive policies of censorship are notoriously well-known. On the other hand, US President Barack Obama is the first elected president who campaigned with a CNN debate, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, using the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents. In his article "What makes mainstream media mainstream?" Noam Chomsky, whose work has analyzed the forms of this medial transformation and produced an extensive, critical discourse of anti-globalization, writes: "What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don't like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system. What has it to do with our consumer behavior?”

According to Slavoj Žižek, the only universal hegemony is global capitalism; without opposition, all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. Even progressive multiculturalism in its form of radical, (deconstructive) particularism, has been taken over by global power operates, as analyzed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in “Empire”. This was completely visible during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, in the spectacle of the 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremonies in Beijing, etc. In his“Time for Revolution” Antonio Negri proposes a term, the “reconstruction of hope”, in order to posit the questions “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions with a socio-cognitive approach: “In the bio-political postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But… probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope.”

Through displaying examples of artistic research & practice, "There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination" aims to reconstruct survival values and produce a multifaceted hope for future audiences by converting the reader into a viewer, injecting performative, sonic and narrative intelligence into contemporary vision, while questioning the role of access, value and the media in the contemporary image politics. Opening a critical panorama of today’s visual tendencies, it investigates the possibilities of a ‘spacetime’ for the research, production and discussion of a fundamental question;“who is our audience today?” The exhibition starts with a commissioned sound piece from Olof Dreijer & Mamori, who responded in this work to the question “how do we live with and remember exhibitions?” Reminding us of the natural habitat we share with other living organisms on Earth, the soundtrack is composed of animal sound recordings from the Amazon rainforest, performed for the opening program and installed during the show, as well as distributed to local radio stations and clubs and produced as a CD for the audience who wants to “keep the rhythm”. The artist duo, Hadley +Maxwell contribute to this statement with drawings of fictional studio and stage environments. The depicted scenes show equipment and furnishings in the studios, such as sound baffles, microphones, and stage lights, with the absence of performers. The absence of performers provides an ambiguity for us to speculate how performance is fictionalized through the mechanisms of the music and entertainment industry and imagine a conceptually naked mise en scène for the audience. Christian Hillesoe and Johan Tiren exhibit letters sent to the CEOs of global corporations with the responses they received to the questions they posed. This long-term research project (2000-2009) ironically questions the role of the audience as a buyer and seller and the representation of ”culture branding”. Fikret Atay’s video “Theorists” challenges the curious gaze, spying on a dormitory in southern Anatolia. The video defines a psychological territory of a community that is composed of young ‘hafiz’ candidates who practice memorizing the Quran, creating a thin red line between the image codes of theorists and that of “terrorists”. Borrowing the language of encyclopedic representation, Elmas Deniz shows a drawing of an astronaut figure that also looks like a fetus, referring to the euphoria of birth as well as celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first human step on the moon (1969), an unforgettable moment in the world’s history of images. Johanna Billing’s videos deal with diverse forms of participation and contribution, providing possible spontaneous scenarios to the construction of contemporary performance.

For the exhibition, Can Altay proposes a spatial design for the viewer, who can also be considered as a passenger in the space. This architectural gesture creates a possibility of imagining the absence/presence of the audience and their encounters, passages, and static instances, bringing the term "spacetime", which combines space and time into a single construct – the “spacetime continuum” – to the table as the fourth dimension of the exhibition. Filmed at a real TV studio in Berlin, Lynne Marsh’s “Camera Opera” is composed of a series of choreographed movements from different cameras around an anchorwoman, creating a Brechtian stage for the viewer as a performative critic of mass media broadcasts. As a locally sensitive statement, Ming Wong duplicates a scene from the movie, “Welcome Mr. Marshall!” a Spanish comedy film from 1953, directed by Luis García Berlanga and considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema.

For the video installation, “ZAN - *T185…” Byrne reconstructed interviews done with peripheral ‘celebrities’ from early issues of “Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine by finding them in archival microfilm records and re-shooting the interviews with contemporary, New York-based actors. Converting the form of magazine into a video language and the documentation into a fiction, he delicately plays with the history of a ‘scene.’ Alikidd, in collaboration with Jade Sou, presents an installation made of a vintage dress, designed by Scherrer for Isabella Adjani alongside a series of drawings that fictionalize a stalker. This collaboration successfully reflects how fashion recreates itself again and again through a history of images and how performativity in its culture operates through the personal internalization of the image and obsessive identification with the icon. Parallel to the show, there will be a screening program of the film “La Commune” by Peter Watkins, including the video interview with Ulus Baker, entitled "What is Opinion?", in order to create political discussions through the invitation of local activists and political organizations.

Thanks to the participating artists who made this exhibition and the discussion around it possible through their dedication, effort and patience; to Noam Chomsky who has provided a great opportunity to me to reconsider his text here within the project’s conceptual framework; to Ulus Baker for his eternal presence; to the creative professionals, partners and collaborators who have worked with us; to my family, friends and colleagues for their inspiration and finally to the dream team of Montehermoso. After a very long process of trial and error, plus risk and challenge, here is “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination”, inevitably waiting, of course, for its past, present, and future audience.

For now, let us end by returning back to the tradition of the stage, taking from William Shakespeare: “the rest is silence.”

BİR İLKBAHAR SABAHI DEVRİMLE UYANMAK, Radikal (08/05/2009)

Berlin'deki Tanas'ta açılan Aydan Murtezaoğlu ve Bülent Şangar'ın sergisi 'İşsiz işçiler-sana yeni bir iş buldum' adını taşıyor. Alışveriş merkezlerine ve montaj hatlarına göndermeler içeren bir sergi bu

ADNAN YILDIZ

Hemen herkesin işsizlik sigortasıyla geçindiği, salaş kafelerde pineklediği ama durumdan pek şikâyet etmediği, Orta Avrupa’nın ‘affordable’ -yani paranız çıkışır- parti şehri Berlin’de başlıyor hikayemiz. Geçen sene bu zamanlar bir Kutluğ Ataman işi ‘Küba’ eşliğinde rakı+simit ile açılan, sanatın tersten okunuşunu kendine isim olarak bulan Koç destekli galeri Tanas ise mekanımız. Tanas, mayıs sonuna kadar Aydan Murtezaoğlu ve Bülent Şangar’ın ortak üretimi ‘İşsiz işçiler- sana yeni bir iş buldum!’ adlı performatif bir süreç sergisine ev sahipliği yapıyor. İronik bir manevrayla hemen daha girişinde izleyicisine alışveriş merkezi müşterisi muamelesi yapıyor; beyaz önlükleriyle sizi karşılayan iki genç önlerindeki tezgâhtaki parfüm şişelerini göstererek, Almanca soruyor: “hangisini denemek isterdiniz?” Şimdi tam da burada havaalanlarının ‘duty-free’ kozmetiklerinin kokusunu düşleyen okura acil bir not atmak lazım ki, serginin devamı kendini ele versin: Kokular, Beyoğlu kalabalığına çıkanlara tanıdık gelecek, Çin’den ithal parfümler satan dükkânlardan yayılan türden. Aslı gibi kendisi, taklit ama gerçek.

Mekâna girişimle, mola vermiş sergi çalışanlarının tezgâha doğru ilerlemelerini görmezlikten gelip ilk olarak duvar boyunca uzanan çizimlere koşuyorum. Gözüm beni oraya doğru itiyor, en arkada Aydan ve Bülent’in oto-portremsi-figürlerini okuyabildiğim uzun bir kuyruk çiziktirilmiş. Bu karne kuyruğu mu, yoksa pasaport mu? Ne bekliyor bu işadamları, Asyalılar, fundamentalist dinciler ve global devrimden hayatta kalan diğer imaj-kimlikler burada? Arkamda ise sürekli tişört katlayan bir grup genç var, ‘S’ şeklinde bir strüktürün etrafına dizilen bu ‘personelin’ meşguliyetinin bir anlamı var mı? Yoksa kopan anlam parçalarının kökeni kapitalizmin temel örgütlenişi ‘assembly-line’dan yani berbat Türkçe’yle ‘montaj hattından’ mı gelmekte? Köşede 1 Mayıs gösterilerinden imajların basılı olduğu, formunu bu gösterilerdeki pankartlardan alan bir yerleştirme öbeği var, nasıl sakin, nasıl sessiz, sanki unutulmuş orada...

Ücret hiç de fena değil
Gençlerin arasından en sıcak kanlısı ve Humboldt’ta tarih okuyan Deniz yanıma gelip konuşmaya başlıyor. Çalışanlar için düzenlenen ‘mola-mekânında’ bir bardak su ikramı eşliğinde sergi için İngilizce-Türkçe üretilen kılavuzlarda yazanın onun Marksist yanına nasıl da inceden dokunduğundan bahsediyor, daha sonra çoğu öğrenci olan bu ‘part-time’ personele ödenen saat başı ücretin hiç fena olmadığından bahsediyoruz. Ben Aydan ve Bülent’in işlerinin haritamsı bir kavramsal şemada retro-okunabildiği duvar sticker’larına doğru yürümek üzere yerimden kalkıyorum.

Son zamanlarda beynimden çıkmayan ve okuduğum, yazdığım herşeye bulaşan Antonio Negri kitabı (‘Time for Revolution’ / ‘Devrim Zamanı’) yanımda olsa da, bu güler yüzlü arkadaşa hediye etsem diye içimden geçiriyorum. Çıkarken parfüm şişelerinin başında duran Adrian “...ben aslında müzisyenim...” deme gereği duyuyor. Yaratıcı emek sınır tanımaz, demek isterdim ben de cevaben ama henüz böyle bir cümleyi şak diye Almanca yapıştıramıyorum. Orada Negri’nin “umudun yeniden inşaası” kavramına dönüyorum, şu kısmı burada alıntılamadan edemiyorum: “Materyalist, dinamik ve kolektif bir zaman algılayışı olmaksızın devrimi düşünmek dahi mümkün değildir.”

Bir ilkbahar sabahı devrimle uyanmak
Bu yazıya oturduğumda çocukluğumdan hatırladığım şarkılardan biri tekrar geri geliyor. Şarkıyı, “bir ilkbahar sabahı güneşle değil, devrimle uyandın mı hiç” diye İstanbul’a doğru söylemek geçiyor içimden. Burada Youtube sansürü olmadığı için Samime Sanay yazınca, İstanbul Boğaz görüntülerinden yapılma amatör bir video klip çıkıyor. İnternet devrimi sonrası izleyicinin sadece duvara asılana bakan, alan ve gören bir pozisyondan, performans gösteren, tekrar eden, eyleme dönük, tasarımsal bir profile dönüştüğü 2000’lerde ‘devrim’ çok nostaljik ama inadına hâlâ umut verici, kışkırtıcı bir ses olarak duyulabiliyor. Kendi mikro devrim fikirlerini Tanas’ı bir pilot mekâna çevirerek uygulayan Aydan ve Bülent, Baader Meinhof ’un kanlarını zaten yıkayamazdı ama Berlin’e neşeli bir devrim hissi getirebildi, demek gerekiyor. Bu iş vesileyle Koç’un parasını çalışarak okuyan öğrencilere aktarmaları nedense ve bana-ne ise içimi soğutuyor. Sermaye düşmanı da değilim ama...

Sergi programı içinde (tarihiyle anlamlı) 1 Mayıs’ta gerçekleşen ‘event’lerinde ise, galerinin önünde uzun bir kuyruk oluştu; insanlar (tıpkı içerideki desenlerdeki gibi) galerinin önünde ne olduğu belli olmayan ama kuyruğun uzunluğundan dolayı iştah açan görünürde bir ‘fırsatı’ bekliyordu. Tanas sanki olmuş, İş ve İşçi Bulma Kurumu. Berlin’de 38 galeriden oluşan ‘Berlin Gallery Weekend’ etkinliği içinde yer alan bu projenin önündeki kuyruğun galeriye girmek için bekleyen izleyiciler olduğunu düşünenler bile oldu. 1 Mayıs’ta Avrupa’da iki şehirde cereyan etti olaylar; İstanbul ve Berlin. Polisin ani bir müdahaleyle gece yarısı dağıttığı, aslında yaratılan gerginliğin tek anlamının acı bir hatırlatma (polis=devlet=devlet=polis) olduğu Kreuzberg partisinden eve dönerken aydım; aslında her yerde tek devlet, tek kuvvet ve tek ideoloji hakim. Umudu özgürleştirmek için hâlâ neyi bekliyoruz?

ENG / A Review of the Taipei Biennial 2008 (RES, April 09)

A Review of the Taipei Biennial 2008:
(When) Global Attacks On A Local Paradise

By ADNAN YILDIZ

a) Taipei City Context and Curators’ Approach

After landing at the Taipei International Airport, on my way to the hotel, I was listening to my taxi driver’s choice of program, which apparently was broadcasting the morning news in Mandarin. All I understood was the same word being repeated in English, and a country name (“America”). Probably the reporter was talking about the financial crisis, which is the biggest since the Great Depression of 1929: “depression, depression, depression”. Even if it is a global “depression” that is closing in on us from every point of the world economy, it did not so much depress me at that moment. In fact, I kind of liked the way it was becoming a pastiche of itself, as in a Dadaist performance. It may be a “Global Depression” but I was in a local paradise.

At that time, maybe because of jetlag and cultural disorientation, I had not realized that this small incident would come back to my mind during my stay in Taipei visiting the Biennial show. Traveling into the capital Taipei by taxi, moving from the sub-urban outskirts into the center, I had a chance to watch how the urban sprawl has been changing Taipei’s face throughout different sections of the city: Here, some abandoned houses and factories, there newly developed housing estates, and old gardens making way for apartments… Old letter types and logos faded away between bright signs of led lights, huge advertising and mobile companies’ billboards.

Since the 1950’s Taiwan has grown from an agricultural into the model of a developing industrial society. Since then, the island state has seen many changes and transformations. China always casts its powerful shadow over the country, and whilst America is Taiwan’s chosen ally against this threat, Japan is influential on its industry and fashion business; Taiwan was once heavily ‘Japanized’ and there are still many from the older generation who speak fluent Japanese. Expanding into an urban city within a short time period, Taipei has experienced all the challenges of transport, tourism, and the service industry. Moreover, it is developing its own synthesis of global identity, following the track “think globally and act locally…”

Taipei Biennial 2008, which is curated by Manray Hsu and Vasıf Kortun, aims to present a large-scale panorama of today’s neo-liberal capitalist globalization through diverse positions and statements. Bringing together 47 artists with their projects that have either been commissioned or re-adapted, the Biennial looks at global issues in their specific local context. In their statement, the curators underline that Taipei Biennial has always been embraced by the citizens of Taipei, and their primary aim was to create a platform for its people to generate a collective public discussion, which will hopefully continue after the show closes rather than focusing on an international/professional audience as a reference as so many internationally recognized biennials do.

This is the Biennial’s working strategy in terms of the links between the organizational structure, its budget, and target audience who pays the entrance fee. Taipei Biennial is organized by Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) as part of its official program. A majority of the Biennial’s installations and events take place in the museum.

Kortun and Hsu have developed an interdependent structure in the city between institutions and individual projects, and this structure already has triggered a discussion through one of the pieces in the show: Jun Yang’s proposal which asks an interesting question; “How ____ a contemporary art center ___ in Taipei?” for a city, where the local art market has already begun to connect with the international market. It is clear that the Biennial audience is not provided with a “happy meal menu” show with a “tops of the pops” artist list, but an exhibition, which is primarily based on an honest and natural relationship with the city. The audience is throughout included in the discussions. This strategy turns into an efficient starting point where the show not only works for the local audience, but also for the professional/international art scene. Moreover, the context-sensitivity, which this approach produces, covers the whole map of the show and creates a ground for the audience. As mentioned before, most of the installation takes place in the TFAM, however the audience can easily forget that s/he is in a museum setting since the installation is smartly penetrated into that context; rather than an institutional representation, it is more like an alternative form of discussion about today’s economical and political spheres of liberalism. That’s why it is not only for the audience, but also for the global players to see how transparent it is as a ground.

At the end of the day, the Biennial in Taipei happens to be as the curators wrote in their text: “every situation is specific”.

b) The Exhibition Guide as a Tool of Democracy

The exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is the heart and soul of the Biennial program. From the entrance of the museum to the second floor the works are positioned as open-ended discussions and reflexive proposals. A collective from Argentina, Internacional Errorista, welcomes the viewer with an installation that looks like a stage for a demonstration, or what is left after a real one; papers on the ground and moments from the memory; politicians, politics, and public voters in the public space. The term Internacional Errorista is conceived from The Errorists that first appeared as a protest group during the visit of George W. Bush to the Summit of Americas in Mar del Plata in 2005. This performing art practice continues its process just after the action in the lobby of the museum, taking over the ‘empty’ public space, which is run/rent/sold by state money. How you define “museum” and think about its relation with economy and state also engages you in a discussion about the way you perceive the state economy: a) as a capitalist form of control, b) a national power that keeps the borders, or c) a trans-global entity, which transmits its local values into market dynamics. The collective not only questions the audience by their absent presence but also provides a persona, which could be also reflected again and again on the audience, for them; the audience is given a stage where they can perform their virtual citizenship in their own understanding and experience their possible participation in any demonstration they have been, a) as a demonstrator, b) as a member of the police force, or c) as a speaker.

The multiplicity of shadow identities creates a silent comedy in the space like a sort of 2008 version of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”. The installation also makes the museum staff more visible in the lobby when they move. Instead of seeing them as usual in an institutional emptiness like a sort of Matrix background the audience now see them as figures on a stage of shadow characters. For instance, as far as I saw, almost all the museum guards were middle aged or elderly, fewer men than women who sat at their desk all day, drinking green tea with a social smile, and dressed like stewardesses or stewards. In this installation, where everything looks as if it is a stage for a Brechtian play; that looks like the two dimensional characters are aware of the presence of the audience and the other characters in the museum as guards or hosts, these attendants all looked like “aged” flight nannies for First Class kids; as if you were a child of six or seven and you have flown too far into the atmosphere, where the air staff on the plane has aged and you also have become adult. The Errorists play with your imagination in a delicate manner of transforming an institutional space into a possibly real but conceptually artistic experience.

Seso Sedlacek’s “Beggar Robot” is the second stop in the show. Passing it, the robot moves its hands towards you – like a beggar – since it has sensors and the hands move like those of real beggars on the street. This work is about how humans are becoming robots on the streets in order to survive as “public space pets” that try to survive by selling the most private aspect of their life, their misery. This robot in the museum is also like a proposal, Sedlacek suggests that “by applying do-it-yourself strategies and participating in open source and common goods, we can create a more inclusive environment for the growing number of people who feel excluded, disposed, or simply unsatisfied with the mainstream.” This robot is allowed to enter to a museum, which a beggar – under normal conditions – cannot enter; they cannot pass through the security, which is manned by police officers paid by the state. Nasan Tur’s “Backpacks” comes next, with videos that show public space actions and bags, which are used / to be re-used for these actions. They all create a conceptual imagination; invisible “tourist” profiles; artists, curators, audience as tourists – mobile entities in the public domain.

Shaun Gladwell’s videos are also about actions, but he appears (or performs) in his pieces with an abstracted style of movement; they are urban expressions (on a motorbike or a bus) as poetically beautiful statements. Lene Berg’s video piece “Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache”, a delicate film episode about art-history and politics, is about a drawing by Picasso. The drawing is produced on the occasion of Stalin’s death and commissioned by Aragon for “Les Lettres Françaises”. The historicity of the discussion about artistic freedom and political ideologies is the reference point of the artist as a contributor to the Biennial. Berg reflexively staged a historical example with a conceptually designed storyboard or a desktop film, which fictionalizes an experiment done by Picasso during the Cold War. Focusing on one drawing, she created a discussion about what an artist can/might/must/should/shouldn’t articulate through a political party (in this case the Communist Party) or another public media. Roderick Buchanan’s video “Here I am” that simultaneously shows two bands marching next to each other complements Berg’s work: one video calls for the removal of British heritage in Ireland, other is for preserving the British heritage.

The show gains momentum in the following sections where it becomes clear that a globalist point of view is being challenged by new politics and critics in the public space, as in the form of site-specific intervention by Lara Almarcegui or an investigation on border control by IRWIN. It continues with artistic reflections: Christodoulos Panayiotou’s archeological research of “ready-made” images from Cyprus turns into a site-sensitive slide-projection installation; Mario Rizzi’s film, which is about two foreign women (an Indonesian and a Vietnamese) in Taipei deconstructs the orientation of the context of the biennial and tries to create a balance between diverse modes of Orientalism, and Self-Orientalism; and Bbrother’s wall painting (for/in a museum) as a graffiti is organically connected to Cheng-ta Yu’s documentary videos of his public space intervention on the street..

Some artists helped me to sort out Burak Delier’s “Counter Attack”, a decoratively designed documentation of a social intervention (or another neighborhood project), a temporary public installation in form of a huge banner – installed with the participation of the schools and a young community – over the houses of Shijou Community. The work is based on the sad story of Shijou construction workers who worked on the contemporary architectural projects Taipei 101, and whose houses now are on the brink of destruction. The banner carries the words “We Will Win”. The statement was written in English as the banner was “speaking up to the heights”, thus communicating directly with airplanes, skyscrapers, and others (big brothers) who control and watch us from above (as a counter attack). But there was a question: Who decides what to say for whom?

An artist who is also showing in the Biennial, Jun Yang has answered my question: “What to say was already decided before getting on the plane to Taipei, so it was like a closed discussion, how can you speak for these people just after staying one week or ten days in the city? What a generous gesture and a brave heart? If he were a local artist doing this, then it wouldn’t be such a nice story on the museum wall…”

On the second floor, the exhibition continued with a video-based surface, which reflects a wide variety of video content ranging from diverse artistic to activist approaches. The presented artists such as Nevin Aladağ, Ziad Antar, Anetta Mosa Chisa and Lucia Tkacova, Nicoline van Harskamp, The Yes Men all share critical positions as well as similar humorous tonalities. Katya Sander’s installation, a 3D visual experience positioned between the videos, shows the four different views from the museum into the surrounding landscapes; one is the real landscape to be seen from the window of the room, whereas three others show recorded material. The installation does not only function as an architectural stage but also interacts with the other works in the show as a research-based, site-specific installation. This makes for the most interesting twist in the show: a formalistic and site-specific approach that ends up with a critical transformation of its own context, extending its conceptual approach and opening a virtually distorted panorama for the viewer who looks at it through a museum perspective. The distortion of perception is complemented by the illusion of the exotic, namely Kuang-yu Tsui’s “Invisible City: Taipari York” which reproduces international cultural heritage such as the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty and puts them in a Taipei context, thus transforming them into local everyday situations or teasers made of postcards.

The second floor is composed of installation units; rooms host different project-based collaborations such as IAA, Superflex, The Yes Men etc. Various forms of presenting research and practice together, combining performance with documentary and interaction, create a vivid and dynamic platform that demonstrates how contemporary artists produce global strategies to get in touch with local realities. One of them is Superflex with a playful installation. They produced “Free Beer” for the Taipei Biennial audience and designed an alternative economy to make the buyer-seller relationship more visible (and at the same time maybe even more abstract) in the museum context in terms of its production, circulation and collaborative identity under the Creative Commons license.

There is also an artist-curated exhibition at the Biennial, “A World Where Many Worlds Fit” by Oliver Ressler. However, the show is not as promising as its name but more or less a didactic scenario and a dry statement that makes it easy for the audience to anticipate the end of the story. So most likely, people do not keep watching till the end. Rather than taking a position or producing something political, it mostly shows people who involved in political activities or engaged in a discussion. Allan Sekula’s slide projection meets with Petra Gerschner’s poster – and it cannot compete with the open structure of the Biennial, but becomes a representation of an old story: “Yankee go home”. There was one piece I could not part with: Mieke Gerritzen’s video “Beautiful World”, something like a moving version of a slot machine that churns out sounds, logos, messages, quotations and effects from global contemporary culture such as Twin Peaks or Antonio Negri, bringing about a world of controversy and allegory.

The Taipei Biennial map includes a metro station, Taipei Beer Factory, and some other spots in the city. In my opinion, the show at the beer factory should have more material inside, or let’s say the organizers might use it more efficient as it is – both architecturally and contextually – the most challenging and interesting venue on the map. Instead of stuffing the museum space with most of the pieces, Taipei Beer Factory (Taipei Brewery) might open a new contextual and open frame for some of the works like Nasan Tur’s “Backpacks” or Superflex’s “Free Beer”. At the point when it starts to trigger the visitor to look at the factory again, the show suddenly ends with an art historical gesture: Didier Fiuza Faustino’s installation that provides a chance of experiencing Yves Klein’s legendary proposal from 1960, “Leap into the Void”. Definitely, the beer factory needs more input…

The Madrid based collective Democracia’s monumentally beautiful and politically poetic installation, including a multi screen projection of a film about the demolition of El Salobral in Madrid, creates a unique environment that puts ghetto life in a contemporary context and leaves a very strong impression. For me, a question like “What is the end of globalization going to look like in the neo-liberal capitalist societies?” has become more and more apparent and dominant during my walk between The Errorists and Democracia. While the first serves more as a parody of public space, redefining it as “the territory of power”, the second is a lyrical epilogue about a real situation of legal terror, which turns into a homage to the people living in the ghetto.

c) Global Hell and Local Paradise

Taipei Biennial has been developed as a reflexive and a critical discourse against the mainstream politics of today’s neo-liberal society. Globalization means more than a factory in China shutting down because they cannot sell their denims to Americans any longer who, in turn, start to lose their jobs because of the financial crisis, since the American banking system, which is based on borrowing and consuming also effects the Chinese markets. If America is not going to buy all these consumer goods anymore, since they can’t pay back their credit card loans, then what for is China going to produce all these products? To whom are they going to be sold? The global crises also decode the global traffic of capitalism, which has been organized on the condition of buying and selling without any logic. But this is not the whole story; globalization also means that a 15 year old girl who works for 60 cent an hour at that denim factory also borrows money to afford pills that help her stay awake during her night shift. How can any economist explain this? How the global economy attacks the local paradise is the real story.

In one of his early writings, Walter Benjamin reflected on capitalism as: “Capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma. Capitalism has developed as a parasite of Christianity in the West (this must be shown not just in the case of Calvinism, but in the other orthodox Christian churches), until it reached the point where Christianity's history is essentially that of its parasite—that is to say, of capitalism.” In a nut shell, what he is emphasizing is positioning capitalism as a religion that he focuses on the pure cult without any dogma. Capitalism needed a kind of common optimism, a general believe in its promises of happiness and liberty. Moreover when it is the moments of big economic crisis, this always reduces the "gloriole" of capitalism and of economy and along with this process neoliberal arguments about deregulation as the way to universal troubleshooting are loosing their power of persuasion. That’s why the local territories, which still have some of their traditional and moral values, beauties, and patterns (that have not been transformed after capitalist revoltion) look like local paradise... Where you can escape from the harsh capitalist models, but at the end find the most direct and wild face of it.

Just a few weeks before the biennial program, China and Taiwan have signed historic agreements to establish regular direct flights and allow more mainland tourists to visit the island. This was the first time since the two sides have been holding their first formal talks till 1999. It was almost the right time to make a change, so the biennial also plays the role of opening many discussions around one basic challenge for Taiwan; the challenge of how to be a participatory member of a global transformation and to negoatiate resisting as an independent unity. The biennial as a show is a generous attempt – not stuck in its ambition, audience, budget and borders, but also aware of its limitations and edges… It has a lot of stories for its audience. Today, it is not easy to be generous in a world that the official global language belongs to buyers and sellers, they are the ones who rule it.

BONUS TRACK: QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Adnan Yıldız: How do you think showing at Taipei Biennial will (or has) influence(d) your practice?

Bbrother: Well, it is the first time that I am shown in a museum as a "graffiti writer". When you paint on the street at night with a bag of 12 spray cans and a climbing rope, it is just a matter of being busted or not. However, when you are in a museum, you have to deal with many other things, such as curators, executives and your audience which is, you are in the system now. To me, graffiti is an unrestricted way to express myself, to speak to different people in unexpected ways. Being in the show, you can only choose "one way". Your audience has been selected and they are already trained to see your work as an art piece. I think, showing at Taipei Biennial reveals the contrary roles of being an artist and being a graffiti writer.

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Adnan Yıldız: How do you think showing at Taipei Biennial will (or has) influence(d) your practice?

Cheng-ta Yu: It is a great opportunity for me, especially as I am still a student. It gives me a wonderful experience to work with international curators, artists and a museum as well. It is a good start for my art life and I treasure it.

A.Y.: How is the local audience responding to the Biennial and particularly to your work in this context?

C.Y.: I googled some blogs about 2008 Taipei Biennial and found lots of responses from the local audience who seems to like it very much. This exhibition shows something about Taipei in a humorous way; it makes people realize what the works really say and what the idea of the show is. I am also happy about getting some positive feedback on my work. Lots of people told me that they watched all of the videos and loved them. Especially on the weekend, people have to line up for watching my videos. Really unbelievable!

A.Y.: What does the Biennial mean for Taipei?

C.Y.: The most important point of Taipei Biennial is not publicity for this city. I think it is a good event for developing the artistic practice in Taiwan. Taiwan is a small island in Asia, and particularly our art history is not too long. The Biennial is a standard for art people and provides a new vision for Taipei. In this respect, Taipei Biennial 2008 did really a good job for Taipei.

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Adnan Yıldız: What does the Biennial mean for Taipei?

Kuang-yu Tsui: The First Taipei Biennial was cutting-edge among Asian countries and the sort of show that helped promote the city. But later the focus transferred slowly towards the quality of the Biennial itself. Now it finds its position again. Of course there is some competition between Asian countries, but it seems to be meaningful to built a platform and connect Taiwan to other artists and put it in an international context. For example, this time you can find that many technical resource and education systems as well as the art community in Taipei are involved in and supporting the Biennial. It is a good opportunity for both sides (especially for local ventures) to engage and 'know' what is happening inside or outside Taiwan. Maybe this is not true for all participants and locals, but it is still something valuable for some. I do not expect local or international artists could really react to this Biennial or Taipei City, but what matters is the process of people communicating with each other.

images: from theflamingoandtheboy visit to taipei 2008; Internacional Errorista, view from the second floor, TFAM/ Didier Fiuza Faustino, Opus Incertum, Taipei Brewer / Democracia, Taipei Brewery Factory / Lene Berg's video, "Stalin by Picasso..." at TFAM

thanks to VK, MR, feng-wei, erick heroux, azra genim and freya chou...