texts-metinler: STATION by Kim Einarsson & Adnan Yıldız

From the screening, 27.05.2010 / Sergels Torg

STATION

Kim Einarsson & Adnan Yıldız

Station is a long-term project based on the idea of moving together in time and space towards a conceptual destination. The project started as a discussion about the contextual references of Konsthall C and was later shaped by curatorial and artistic research around questions of mobility, the transfer of narratives and discourses as well as regulations of the public domain. These discussions can also be applied to the context of the collaborating institution in this project: Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

The project is based on a relatively long personal history. We (Kim Einarsson + Adnan Yıldız) were both based in Berlin where we worked as freelance curators. Consequently, we often carried projects into new contexts, bringing concepts from one place to another resulting in few opportunities to keep up a long-term dialogue with an audience. Sharing a close friendship, we worked in the same studio in Berlin and made collaborations at different levels. Within a year of each other, we both started working at institutions. Since January 2010, Kim Einarsson has been the director at Konsthall C. Adnan Yıldız started working at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 2011. This shared personal history of collaboration and previous mobile and short-term projects motivated us to create a long-term project that would search for alternative forms of exhibition making and developing critical thinking for the transformation of democratic society.

The story begins with questions of audience and public space…

Adnan was attracted by Kim’s invitation to make an exhibition at Konsthall C and especially to the idea of investigating the question of the relationship between the roles and positions of an audience and a citizen. Defining Konsthall C as a form of public space, the working process has been based on questioning the process of making discussions public as well as relating this action to the politics of an institutional setting. By initiating projects that use different formats, temporalities, levels of participation and that involve time-consuming processes and collaborations with different audiences, the program of Konsthall C continuously explores different modes of production and communication. Early on, the artists Aykan Safoğlu (Berlin/New York) and Lisa Torell (Stockholm) were invited to become our fellow travellers. In a number of works, both of them have focused on social movements and the politics of public space, albeit in very different ways.

Through a conceptual mode of thinking, we were interested in taking aspects of empirical thought and everyday reality into consideration. Any exhibition starts in one’s mind when one decides to visit it. It begins from the moment we decide to travel to it, both physically and mentally. Departing from this point, the abstracted form of our curatorial idea originated in the artistic experience, the role of the audience, and in Konsthall C as a station - a temporary stop and public site of our working process.

Konsthall C is situated in the Stockholm suburb Hökarängen that was built in the late 1940s and was once a typical manifestation of the Swedish welfare state and Social Democratic policy. The art space was founded on artistic motivations to investigate the democratic aspects of Modernist social planning. The urban plan of the suburb was made by the same architect who later went on to plan Sergels torg (Sergel’s Square, a public space in the very centre of Stockholm). Organized according to neighborhood planning ideals, Hökarängen consists of smaller neighborhoods with their own sub-centres. Konsthall C is located in such a centre, in a so-called ‘centre building’. The ‘C’ in Konsthall C stands for ‘Centre’. The building hosts a number of social services and small enterprises, and the exhibition space can be found in a former communal laundry. Part of the space is still used as laundry for the residents of the area. Konsthall C’s historical, geographical, and conceptual connection with the city centre as well as the actual experience of spending time in the public transport (on the green metro line) between the two places – from centre to centre - inspired us and the project.

The First Episode: The Bus At the Station

One of the most forceful motivations behind the project Station was the methodological aspect of the production process. The content of the project has been developed by the rule of learning by doing. Rather than taking already existing schemas, discourses or discussions, the process has been based on the idea of experimenting with the content. During our early discussions around the politics of movement and public domain, a film reference emerged and played a key role in how we approach public space, mobility, and the city.

The Bus / Otobüs (Tunç Okan, 1974) was shot at Sergels torg more than three decades ago, yet the story still retains a contemporary relevancy. The film is about a group of Turkish men who expect to arrive in Germany as migrant workers but are left in a bus in the middle of Stockholm without their passports or any money. The film was banned in Turkey for some years after the 1980 military coup but this did not prevent it from becoming a legend. The film starts with the bus arriving at Sergels torg, and displays a panorama of the location and of people on the street including the policemen, street musicians, demonstrators, tourists etc. Operating as a stage for a story about survival and alienation, the city turns into a jungle, a labyrinth or a prison, where the characters get lost and it all ends in tragedy.

As research material, the film provided us with a groundwork from which we could develop a grammar and common vocabulary, especially in relation to the way the film approaches the city. As a reference however, it was not known in the Swedish context. This motivated us to make a screening of the film the first event within the project. Taking this screening as a departure point, the physical experience of watching the film together on the location where it was shot 33 year ago, became a political gesture or a public intervention. We did not position it as an art event or promote it as a film screening. We did not make the director’s name public. All communications in relation to the screening were made using one sentence without any other references: “The Bus at the Station, 27 May 2010-21.00 Sergels torg”. This was the only information given to the audience. The idea of screening a film in order to develop content for an exhibition made the close collaborative nature of the project on a curatorial, organizational and editorial level very important. The screening was regarded by all of us to be the main experience in order to start the discussion. Lisa Torell had furnished Sergels torg with fifty plastic garden chairs of the standardised type you can find all over the world both for public and private use. The screening started with an animated text piece by Torell called Europe was global. A young filmmaker from Berlin, Kaan Müjdeci was visiting Stockholm the same week, and after the screening of The Bus, we also premiered his short movie, Tag der Deutsche Einheit (2009-2010), a comedy that takes place in Görlizter Park in Kreuzberg. Müjdeci’s film is about migrant thieves, the German attitude towards them and presents a walk through a public park as a daily adventure. Aykan Safoğlu documented both the preparation and the actual event.

During the screening, one of the greatest experiences was witnessing the everyday routine of Sergels torg unfold while simultaneously watching the film. There were a certain number of the audience and art professionals who knew about the film screening in advance, however the most striking outcome of the screening was having a lot of passers-by who stopped when they recognised their city, their public space and their sphere on the screen. The director Tunç Okan was there with us as was the producer of the film Gudrun Zachrisson Ones. They had not seen each other since the film was shot.

On the next day an open discussion was organized at Konsthall C with contributions from the director and the producer. An installation by Lisa Torell was exhibited which consisted of the repeated triangular patterns in black and white granite of Sergels torg made out of carpeting. The exhibition space also included monitors for the audience to watch The Bus and some other films such as Myglaren (Swedish for con-artist or charlatan) and I am Curious (Blue) as a bibliography for our discussions.

There were two important points that came up during the open discussion. When former actor Tunc Okan was talking about The Bus as his first directorial experience, he often used the term open script in his statements. He was shooting footage for the film in parallel with the process of writing the script with the cast. The scenario was developed after he read a story in the newspaper about innocent people being cheated when they were hoping to migrate to Germany. Departing from that story, he used the elements of Sergels torg and positioned the city as an open studio for his film. Taking a nightclub, a toilet or a metro station as a conceptual base, and providing the space for the actors to improvise, he was again and again testing what would/could happen when people encounter each other without a shared language or culture between them. The film inspired us in terms of how the city could operate as a place for the imagination. The way that the script came about brought us to the idea of focusing on the public space and considering its potentiality for social and political transformation and (un)controllability.

Kleine Reise: Stuttgart

After almost a year, the team (Kim, Adnan, Aykan and Lisa) met in Stuttgart for research meetings and worked at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart for several days discussing the question of what had stayed with them after the screening.

We were all a bit disappointed with the director’s current political agenda; a strong artistic mind was now more interested in market politics and telling sexist or nationalistic jokes. This was also a new challenge for us; to face artists as survivors of struggles from the legendary seventies, which was the ”real” time of politics and art. Listening to him when he was talking about how they made the movie in high quality / low budget conditions, we were impressed by his experimental approach. He was working with both amateur and professional actors in something akin to a workshop process and developing the script in relation to the architectural, social and political aspects of the film set. Today, he is based in Europe and his life has changed after he moved here. The nostalgic effect of the movie has definitely created an illusion for us; we expected him to be a sort of Che figure, but maybe we found him to be more like our parents, neighbours or elders who talk about money, sex and politics in an offhand manner and without any critical concern.

We read Image and Violence by Jean Luc Nancy, got drunk at a karaoke bar called Monroe’s, and talked about the Hauptbahnhof situation in Stuttgart (Kein Stuttgart 21). The terms political consciousness and political imagination have been released as crystalline concepts for future destinations…

Station C (Station at Konsthall C)

On Wednesday 31^st August 2011, we are opening the exhibition project Station C, which is the second episode in our series of public presentations. Artists Lisa Torell, Aykan Safoğlu, Sylvia Winkler/Stephan Köperl and Slavs and Tatars are contributing to the exhibition at different levels.

Lisa Torell is interested in the social and political changes of public space and freedom of speech. She studies the aesthetics and language of spatial and contextual conditions in order to both elucidate them and to bring them down to something we could all be part of or relate to. In her work for Station C, she deals with how the public space is regulated and organised and how it’s visual codes communicate with us. Vinyl photo prints that you normally would find on the streets as large advertisements are transformed in this instance into acrylic paintings in an exhibition space.

In relation to his academic background in film studies, Aykan Safoğlu (Berlin/New York) brought another reference from Iranian cinema into the project; Cafer Pahani’s Ayneh/The Mirror (1997). The film is about a little girl, Mina, who waits after school for her mother to pick her up. Her mother doesn't show up and Mina takes off across Tehran in search of her home. Halfway through the film, the little actress takes off the fake cast and then her headscarf announcing that she is not acting any more. She quits.

In Sylvia Winkler’s and Stephan Köperl’s (Stuttgart) project, STIEFKIND ZOB / Stepchild central bus station (2011) the point of departure is the new bus terminal -in Stuttgart- which has been relocated to the periphery of the city in an area largely defined by its marginalised community. Functioning as an iconic stage and demonstrating how public space is controlled and regulated by neo-liberal politics, the artists’ performance focuses on the organisation of space, through a song composed of lyrics about the bus schedules scored to the popular melody “Ich war niemals in New York”.

Slavs and Tatars define their practice as the study and creation of factional polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. For Station C the collective has created a new series of work called Not Moscow Not Mecca that addresses the notion of cities as destinations. It also refers to the two major narratives of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, that of Communism and of Islam. Not Moscow Not Mecca is inspired by a policy of the Soviet Union in the mid 20^th century, called ’To Moscow Not Mecca’, of communising the Muslim peoples of Central Asia. This experiment inevitably failed, but it was a rare collision of culture, politics and ideals that took place without the mediation or triangulation of the West or capitalism.