Photo courtesy of Vasıf Kortun.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the trajectory of recent Turkish art history. As Chief Curator and Director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992, Kortun completely changed the spirit of the event, shifting its focus from a national to an international one. By inviting artists from around the world to participate, Kortun facilitated the introduction of a great number of foreign artists to Turkey and of Turkish artists to the international community.

In addition to his groundbreaking curatorial work both within Turkey and abroad, he is also the founder and director of several contemporary art spaces in Istanbul that provided unprecedented research and exhibition resources to the Turkish art community and nurtured an entire generation of artists. This work began with ICAP Istanbul Contemporary Art Project (1998-2000) but was primarily conducted in the two institutions he opened in 2001, Proje4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. In 2007, Kortun began work on a new, even larger institution, scheduled to open this April, whose details he discusses in this interview, to be published in two parts. Stay tuned tomorrow for the second half of this interview.

Elizabeth Wolfson: Let’s start at the beginning. Can you talk about your involvement with the Curatorial Studies program at Bard [College] in the 1990s?

Vasıf Kortun: Ah, the Curatorial Studies program. I started the museum there. And the library and all of that stuff. I was there for almost four years.

EW: This was in the ‘90s?

VK: ’93 to’97.

EW: Are you still involved with the college or the space?

VK: No, I was there for a couple of days last year giving a talk to a graduate class. On and off. But there’s no structural affiliation.

EW: What was that experience like, working with the college and founding that program?

VK: It was an interesting situation for me. I had never been in that situation before. There was no precedent, so you could do whatever you wanted. Or you could do anything you wanted in the sense that there was no index.

I thought it could be an experimental space, a big laboratory. That was my main position, figuring out how to move the institution from one place to another. And there was just the beginning of the first major curatorial generation, of people who are now in their forties and late forties. And none of them were in institutions at that time. And the American exhibition practice, especially institutional practice, was just absolutely awful. Extremely conservative, downright stupid, uninteresting. I mean there are always a few people doing interesting things, but overall really bad. So that was the idea, but it became kind of more corporate, after I left. It started doing regular exhibitions as if it could be in Manhattan. And then it moved again under Tom Eccles, it got more interesting.

But it was like a learning experience for me, testing things out in a genuine, almost naïve way.

EW: It seems like a lot of your work has been about testing out new ways of running art institutions and doing curatorial work.

VK:  The opportunity that was presented, that kind of method space, that kind of way of working, the Bard program was quite right for that kind of thing. And we did well at the time. In 1996 we received the biggest review that the New York Times has probably ever written on an institution. And you don’t get space in the New York Times, there are a lot of institutions out there. So all of these things are great, you get kind of a context. It also allowed me to build a kind of network context with people who I thought were very interesting at the time, people I wanted to work with. So all of those things gelled at the time. And then I came back [to Istanbul].

But the Platform thing was also kind of chance, in a way.

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Turkish and Other Delights columnist Elizabeth Wolfson is filling in for regular Inside the Artist’s Studio writer Georgia Kotretsos this month and next.  — Ed.

Ben Durham in his studio in Lexington, Kentucky

Ben Durham lives and works in Midway, Kentucky, just outside of his hometown of Lexington. He received a B.F.A from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. His work has since been included in exhibitions at Country Club, Cincinnati, OH and the 21C Museum in Louisville, KY and is held in several private and public collections including that of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2010) and the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago (2009). Currently, Durham is the subject of two solo exhibitions that opened simultaneously this month at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York City and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles.

Durham’s practice functions as a highly personalized exploration of the nature of memory, a close analysis of the twin processes of remembering and forgetting. The subjects of Durham’s portraits are friends, classmates and acquaintances from his childhood in Lexington. In a ritualistic daily process, Durham combs the Lexington police reports for familiar names and faces, collecting their mug shots and arrest records. Through a variety of techniques, he merges disparate bodies of knowledge—the account created by the Lexington police department, his own memories of these individuals, maps of neighborhoods related to their lives—to create new portraits and new maps that provide a more complete and complex history.

Ben Durham, "Robert," graphite text on handmade paper, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

In his Text Portraits, Durham creates a written account of excavated memories of the subject, using it to create an eerily accurate portrait of the individual composed entirely of text. Often densely layered, the text wears away the paper’s surface to depict shadows, hair and eyes, while light cheeks and shoulders remain legible. In his series of Map Diptychs, lines representing the streets where the subject has lived repeat over each segment, acting as a kind of topographic skeleton underlying the subject’s silhouette on one side of the diptych, and on the other as an abstract diagram. In a third series, the Map Composites, dyed paper is sliced along the street grids of specific neighborhoods relating to each subject. These pieces are reconfigured and arranged to form a silhouette of the subject’s mug shot, creating “new combined streets and territories… a personal topography built of many maps.” Due to his thoughtful creative process and rigorous studio practice, Durham makes an ideal subject for Inside the Artist’s Studio.

Elizabeth Wolfson: Can you describe the evolution of the process utilized in the Text Portraits? How did you develop this process? What was the initial inspiration?

Ben Durham: Learning to make paper as a student at Washington University in St. Louis was the catalyst for the creation of the first Text Portrait. I viewed the papermaking process as a sort of meditative performance and, in the end, it changed the way I thought about artmaking. Quite simply, I was faced with the first blank sheet and realized no way I had worked in the past would serve the nuances and conceptual potential of the handmade paper. Before any drawing was begun, before I even knew what I wanted to draw, the paper appeared as a monumental headstone, an Anselmo stonework, a skin surface marked by a history of scars and wrinkles, an unmarked map without orientation. Honestly, before I even knew what to draw, I was perfectly aware that the sheet of paper was already the most interesting thing I had ever made.

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Extrastruggle, "Uluslararası Kredi Derecelendirme Kuruluşunun Türkiye'nin Kredi Notunu 'BB-'den 'BB'ye Yükseltmesinin Ardından (Following the Increase of Turkey's Credit Rating from "BB-" to "BB" by an International Credit Assessment Institution)," 2010.

Extrastruggle is an enormous project which began in 1997. It works on imaginary demands from imaginary customers. Just like a graphic designer designing a logo for a client, it designs logos for all communities under social pressure.

So begins the introduction to Extrastruggle (Extramücadele in Turkish), the “enormous project” belonging to artist Memed Erdener. A graphic designer by both training and until recently by trade, Extrastruggle uses the straightforward language of corporate design to explore the collective Turkish subconscious and express the complex, sometimes contradictory, thoughts, feelings, and needs of the country’s social minorities. “I don’t do art for or about me,” Erdener told me while walking with me through his recent exhibition, I Didn’t Do This, You Did, at Galeri NON in Istanbul’s Tophane gallery district. “It’s about us.”

Us—also to be understood, to quote one of the exhibition’s accompanying essays, written by artist Nazım Dikbaş, as “that strange crowd called everyone.” Erdener’s exhibition turned the gallery space into a stage, displaying a frozen scene from the drama of contemporary Turkish society, populated by characters and character-types both fictional and real. A totem pole of fiery red heads of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, balanced precariously atop a white star, a symbol of the Republican government. Its state of unbalance stood in sharp contrast to a second, steadier pillar positioned a few feet away, comprised of pairs of cartoonish female eyes peering out from beneath a single black veil, topped by a crescent moon, a symbol of the Ottoman tradition. In these twin sculptures, is the star an unstable foundation, the crescent a proudly worn crown? Or is the latter a pair of demonic horns, the former providing a vehicle for multiple perspectives and greater flexibility? Despite their physical proximity, the many gazes of the two totems do not meet, each refusing to acknowledge the existence of the other.

From left: Extrastruggle, "Türk Totemi (Turkish Totem)"; right: Extrastruggle, "Bir Kadın Despot (A Female Despot)"

“Extrastruggle has no political views,” the introduction concludes, “It does not take sides. It is impossible for it to do so.” Erdener’s project is an exploration of signs, of iconography, of the linguistic possibilities of graphic design when removed from the field of commercial advertising and applied to other communicative purposes. In this sense, Extrastruggle is as much an artistic experiment as a sociological investigation, the veiled girls, Atatürk portraits, and other familiar figures from Turkish politics and culture all red herrings in a body of work that is less concerned with politics than about pushing the boundaries of design.

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Art21 is pleased to announce our newest column on the blog — the first of several new endeavors for 2011.

Turkish and Other Delights is a column devoted to exploring contemporary art practice in Turkey. Rather than seeking to provide a comprehensive or definitive account of the contemporary Turkish art community, this column will serve as a space for both reflection and documentation as guest blogger Elizabeth Wolfson* travels throughout the country interviewing artists, curators, and gallerists and reviewing exhibitions, museums, and galleries. Taking advantage of her current location at a small university in the central Anatolia region of the country, where she is working on Fulbright grant, Turkish and Other Delights will focus both on subjects located in Istanbul and those in more remote regions of the country, seeking to capture the diversity of identities, practices, and experiences of the Turkish artistic community. Additionally, this column will aim to provide readers with a broader perspective on the country’s recent emergence as an internationally renowned art center by placing its central themes, practices, and concerns within a wider historical, cultural, and geographical context. Turkish and Other Delights appears on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month.

Formerly based in St. Louis, MO, where she attended college and graduate school, Wolfson has spent the past several years writing about art and culture for a variety of local, regional, and international publications. She has also worked at a number of area art institutions including the Saint Louis Art Museum and White Flag Projects, St. Louis’s largest non-profit contemporary art gallery. She holds a master’s degree in American Studies with a concentration in visual culture studies from Saint Louis University.

*The views expressed by the author are solely her own and not those of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.   — Ed.

Photograph by Cengiz Tekin, courtesy Outlet-istanbul.

“Why Turkey?”

This was the most common response I received last year to the news that I had received a Fulbright teaching grant and thus would be relocating to the country for nine months. Everyone, it seems, wants to visit Turkey; in 2009 President Obama made it the destination of his first visit to a predominantly Muslim nation shortly after his inauguration, and no less distinguished a group than the collective readers of the New York Times’ Travel section nominated it as their top destination for travel in 2010. But the notion of moving there, for nine months, and not even to Istanbul, but to a tiny town in the middle of the country, a ten-hour bus ride away from the cultural capital—this seemed to strike people as a bit excessive, more of an investment of time and attention than was actually warranted. Strangely enough, upon my arrival in Turkey, I encountered this same half-confused, half-incredulous attitude among Turks themselves. Upon arriving at my university and meeting my students and colleagues, I was constantly faced with the same question: “Neden Türkiye?” “Why Turkey?”

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Patti Smith, "Horses," Arista Records, 1975. Photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Examples of the influence of music on art are as iconic as they are profuse: Jackson Pollack madly swirling paint around him as Dizzy Gillespie blares on the hi-fi; Andy Warhol’s cover design of the denim-clad male crotch for the Rolling Stones’ album, Sticky Fingers; Robert Mapplethorpe‘s portrait of Patti Smith for the cover of Horses; Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s stint as a punk rocker while playing in Gray; Mike Kelley‘s early involvement in the Detroit-based noise project Destroy All Monsters; Robert Rauschenberg taking inspiration from John Cage’s musical interest in chance by creating bodies of work such as his White Paintings and the Combines.