The Suburbs, a Battle of the Curators, and a Long Night
I had been listening to the same song all day on the repeat button, “The Suburbs” (Arcade Fire, 2010), and when I landed at Dubai Airport it was still running on my headphones. By listening to it, I could feel the teen angst of white trash kids with a little bit of Larry Clark`s erotic impulse, Ken Loach`s social aggression, and Hanif Kureshi`s narrative quality. The company of the song became absolutely challenging when we arrived at the highway running from Dubai to Sharjah. It did not feel like we were moving from one city to another, but was more like we were going to the suburbs from the city center.
Later, the cab driver told me about the rush hours on this highway. Due to the high rents in Dubai, most people who work in Dubai live in Sharjah, just because they can afford better accommodation there. So, I was not wrong in my feelings… They are two different cities or emirates, ruled by different governments, but they are also becoming one city together for many who work in one and sleep in the other. A few days later I met Hassan Sharif in Abu Dhabi when I was visiting his monographic exhibition, and talked about his early works from 1980s. In one of his drawings he shows how he calculated the number of oil drums one needs to drive from Dubai to Sharjah, and also made a sculpture that looks like a pop-art-ish kind of oil drum as a gesture at an example. His vision of calculating this specific distance between the two emirates still survives today, when one looks at how they are socially, economically and historically connected to each other, especially due to their historical relationship and urban development.
For me, this distance was not only composed of time and speed, but also operated as “time-out” to question how my participation, contribution and attendance at an art event were shaped during the opening week of the 10th Sharjah Biennial. The main reason for my visit to the United Arab Emirates was my engagement with the March Meeting, which was also part of the professional program of the biennial that was happening almost at the same time with Art Dubai. Thus many visitors went to both events, moving back and forth between the two emirates. How we scheduled ourselves was related with our lifestyles.
Most of the residents who work in Dubai go to Sharjah in the evening to sleep. Most of us who were connected to the biennial were working in Sharjah and later going to Dubai for social life, just the other way around from how the local labor force is mostly organized there. As a critical observation of the situation that we were all in, the art crowd moved between these cities based on the accessibility of alcohol.
As the travel guide says, Sharjah is a "dry emirate", which means the sale or possession of alcohol within Sharjah is almost entirely forbidden. Most of the biennial program was organized around this social reality. We were given official lifts to the events of Art Dubai, for the parties organized by the art fair, so art people could have free alcoholic drinks. This was the main topic of the art crowd during the opening days of Sharjah Biennial: how to get to Dubai, with whom, for which party... I am aware of the social aspects of art life, and I also enjoy parties and dancing, but I was a bit disappointed about the fact that while there were many people there connected with the region, and it was a good opportunity to talk about what had been happening recently in Middle East, we never really arrived at a moment when things moved into a satisfying social discussion after the structured sessions, because there was always an anxiety in the air about catching the biennial buses to Dubai.
It might sound very dramatic, and the situation was obviously related to a specific context, but at the end of the day, openings as events for making exhibitions public still seem to operate similarly in almost every art context. The professionals are conditioned to be ready with their product for the opening day, and then they meet the art community and personal circles. The regular visitor who is not invited to or expected for the opening comes to the show after the opening, and rarely meets the professionals. Thus they mostly see the information desk, guards, or institutional reps. The intense discussions and ideas that bring the shows together happen during preparation and installation, and this form of production experience is not readily reflected in either the work or the audience.
Openings are mostly celebrations related to Western forms of social gatherings. Cheers! Moreover, they subsequently dominate the perception of the projects, considering how other professionals are involved. Most of the time the celebration becomes the main focus, and the content is mostly missing on occasions when the main discussion is just excluded from the table. During biennials there is a fever of networking and consuming social occasions, to meet new people or refresh contacts. This form of social life among the cultural managers blinds professionals, who can hardly focus on the works presented or envision potential discussions. A biennial like that in Sharjah should have taken its peripheral position as a practical base, to connect the global agenda to a current local context with social and political concerns. This might have opened a way for discussing why no one asked the curators of the show about the censorship issue, and why everyone was concerned about the position of the director who was fired by the Sheikh, the city-state`s ruler.
The installation from the collective Slavs and Tatars as part of the 10th Sharjah Biennial might be an inspiration for how the local context and the cultural forms of social gatherings can be adapted into contemporary forms of presentation. As the final station in their ongoing project “Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz” the collective started from the city’s history of commerce, and created a social environment composed of a tent, seating area and tea service transmitting their research. It was covered with colorful stitched messages, slogans and new aphorisms from the Polish resistance movement and the Iranian revolution, such as “Help the Militia: Beat Yourself Up!” or “Only Solidarity and Patience will secure our victory” -translated into Farsi. Rather than looking like a biennial venue, their spot was immediately filled with locals and children from the area, and provided connection with the local context.
One project that recently happened in Berlin was an interesting example in terms of twisting the idea of opening day and developing another way of communication with the audience. “The Battle of the Curators” at a local gallery called Grimmuseum, in Kreuzberg, Berlin, invited its visitors to vote for the better presentation of the same artist list by two different curators, Aaron Moulton and Carson Chan. During the opening people were looking at the works via two different maps, and trying to guess which curator installed which show, to vote as their favorite. It motivated the audience to deal with the puzzle design, and created an intense circulation that questioned the curatorial approaches. One might criticize the 'battle' for its focus: rather than the art works and their content, the curating was the center of attention. The audience will likely remember the names of the curators better than the artists or the works.
The presentation that I assumed to be curated by Carson intentionally positioned a piece at its center, creating the whole narration around it as an architectural gesture, whereas the other (I guess, from Aaron) was trying to keep critical distance from each piece and playing a neutral role in presenting them. In the end, there was no clear position for me to vote for my favorite curatorial work; one dominated the artistic statements by composing a meta-form or meta-language, and the other lacked the power or passion to connect the relationships among the contents. Nevertheless, the scene on the opening night was satisfying in terms of how the audience's behavior was supposed to change.
Rather than drinking and smoking outside of the gallery, people were moving from one show to the other, and were concerned about the ideas behind the installations. Including the audience in the game was a smart gesture, and also an unexpected way of interacting with the public. Most of the time the viewer is not invited to make direct comments on the works, or not integrated into the process as direct participants or contributors. The idea behind “The Battle of the Curators” provided an opportunity for establishing an alternative relationship with the audience. The audience became a sort of gambler betting on the game, which connects the audience to some rules, regulations, and responsibilities. It was openly proposing to share the values that would be produced by the show. It was more than an opening party.
When I was visiting the Frankfurt Kunstverein as curator in residency, Chus Martinez, who was directing the program at that time, asked me to investigate why the Turkish / Kurdish community seemed to have so little interest in coming to their openings. There had been some attempts to bring them in to the space, but none of these proved particularly successful. Once when I was talking with a Turkish taxi driver in the city I asked him if he knew about the art museums and galleries in Frankfurt. He knew about most of them, but never thought of going because, no matter what was hanging on the walls, “they just drink wine”. As an outsider looking in, that was the only thing happening as the main event. Since he was not into wining, or a social environment of that sort, he never felt like going there.
It was then that I really started to question the roots of the dominant rituals of contemporary art culture from a cultural perspective, in terms of how they function, and by/for whom they are mostly organized. A social critique is also related to how it happens, and the dynamics of its social time. But serving raki[1] would not be a better way to bring the Turkish community to the opening. For instance, Tanas, a privately owned gallery in Berlin that mostly shows artists from Turkey, serves raki during its openings, and it is visibly clear that it does not work there. Apart from the art scene, I haven’t seen any one from the local community. It doesn't ring a bell with the public to bring in the community, or make it more interesting for regular attenders. It is also against the nature of the drink, since you mostly drink raki when sitting around a table and chatting. This gesture on the part of the gallery strikes me as some kind of Orientalist idea or an exotic fantasy of Turkey.
A recent experience in Stuttgart could also make an interesting contribution to our discussion in terms of how alternative forms of exhibition/presentation can challenge audience behavior. After I started to develop the program for Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, as the new artistic director I was interested in using the opportunity of participating in the big event, “Lange Nacht der Museen” in Stuttgart to challenge its inter-institutional framework and its impact on the audience. For this event all the art institutions and spaces stay open till late, and the audience circulates among these organizations all night long.
As a result of discussions with the team and reviewing observations from previous years, we came to some open conclusions about the situation. The typical Lange Nacht der Museen audience moves from one place to another in crowds, and really stays only a very short time at each; the groups come into the gallery, scan everything quickly, and leave in minutes. Their expectation were based on the motivation of consuming as much of each art event as possible in the same evening. So, the dilemma was related with another form of entertainment: people who would have been watching TV at home were coming to see the shows, and were moving between art spaces as if they are zapping between TV channels.
As an invited curator, Viktor Neumann from Berlin developed a video-screening program, “Our Darkness”, that started at 7:00 p.m. and continued till 3:00 in the morning. It was designed in different chapters that focused on conceptions of art and the museum, transformation of the global society and human relationships, social reality and media, body and gender politics and some other topics. The sequence of the video works might almost have been considered as a send-up of the television world, in which the evening news, prime time, films, sports, eroticism, etc., play different roles and have special times, schedules and audience strategies.
The visitors who were coming in groups for the Lange Nacht der Museen were confronted by two screens and the presence of a different type of audience. This audience were lying on comfortable pillows, carefully watching the screens. They looked like they had a different feeling about the space. In this setting, what is offered to the audience is something different than they were expecting, something like what they left at home: TV, since you can never watch all the TV channels at the same time.
Each would remember different moments from the whole performance. As an event aimed at reconstructing the political conscious, the screening either frustrated its audience, who were not able to consume the whole content, or it convinced them to stay till the end. The motivations behind moving in the opposite direction for the local visitor, as opposed to biennial visitor - party monster and social networker all in one – or getting lost in a puzzle that presents a tension like a boxing match called “The Battle of the Curators”, or getting angry with a program that runs the whole night when you expect to turn around some paintings, sculptors and `hot chicks`, are endless. The questions become clearer when we also consider how we construct our relationships and propose a dialogue with our audience.
[1] [1] A non-sweet, anise-flavored spirit popularly consumed in Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Bosnia and other Balkan countries as an apéritif, in particular with seafood and mezze.
