Cengiz Tekin, "Enentegre," C-print, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

If Şener Özmen (the subject of last month’s Turkish and Other Delights post) is the godfather of Diyarbakır’s contemporary art community, then his long-time collaborateur, artist Cengiz Tekin, is its prankster, its Puck, and possibly (though this is pure speculation) its Keith Richards. He exudes a sly, crackling energy, walks with a fast gait just this side of nervous, and is constantly grinning, cracking jokes, and generally entertaining those around him. Despite the considerable language barrier between us (his English was definitely better than my Turkish, but then again my Turkish is limited to ordering takeout and buying groceries and bus tickets), Tekin was, along with Özmen, an engaging and endlessly generous host during my stay in Diyarbakır. I will never forget the two-hour bus ride we spent entertaining ourselves by going through a children’s Turkish-English textbook/dictionary at random, laughing hysterically at its bizarre contextualizing sentences for such essential vocabulary words as “lobster,” “beach ball,” and “criminal.”

Unsurprisingly, this spirit and humor spills into Tekin’s art, where seemingly typical, unremarkable people, locations, and situations are staged and tweaked by the artist to reveal the underlying violence, trauma, instability, and uncertainty that remains the reality for the Kurds of southeastern Turkey. Often they capture moments just before or after a violent act has taken place, but it is never clear what exactly happened (or is about to happen), why the act took place, or the identity of the victim or perpetrator. For example, in Tekin’s 2007 photograph, Natürmort (Still Life), a man lies splayed in a field of wheat, his face obscured by the stalks. Dressed in blue, his attire mirrors the fiery sky that looms above the field, making him seem like a piece of the heavens dropped to the earth. The gun in his limp hand implies that a shoot-out or stand-off of some kind has just transpired–or could it be a suicide? Is the angle of the gun, still cocked and pointed up, a coincidence of the way he fell? Or is he still alive and playing dead in order to ambush his foe, or escape further fighting?

Cengiz Tekin, "Natürmort" ("Still Life"). C-print. 2007. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

Likewise, in his 2009 essay, “The Stranger,” critic Süreyyya Evren questions the unnatural angle of the neck belonging to a man sandwiched between a giant stack of blankets and pillows in the 2003 photograph Untitled (Press) (one a series of similar images Tekin created involving a human figure inserted into such stacks of bedding), wondering if he is even “really alive? Or faking death like some animals do to survive?” Evren sees Tekin’s photographs as giving voice to “the Stranger,” who, he argues, is

“crucial in the construction of Turkish national identity, and who has been in this position since the beginning of the Turkish Republic. This ‘privilege’ of being considered as ‘the Stranger’ is given to people who are categorized as ‘others within ourselves.’ These strangers, who originate from ‘us’–the Ottoman Empire–and who on various political grounds played an important role as the other for the new Turkish Republic, are the ones who in the national imagination supposedly represent the biggest threat (the ethnic side of this spectrum contains most prominently Armenians, Kurds and Jewish immigrants, and Arabs of various origins).”

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Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (still), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

While preparing to travel to Diyarbakır, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, I discovered that telling Turkish people who live outside of that region that you’re going to visit Diyarbakır is akin to telling an average suburban American you’re going to hang out in an inner city housing project or along the wall dividing Israel and Palestine. Their eyes grow big, there’s a lot of gasping and “ooooh”ing, and they ask you, incredulously, “why would you want to go to Diyarbakır? It’s very dangerous there, you know.” Some treated it a bit like I was going on safari–a worthwhile, possibly exotic and educational, endeavor, as long as I had the proper guidance–and protection. Because Diyarbakır is not only the largest city in southeastern Turkey but also the capital of Kurdish culture in Turkey and the epicenter of a significant amount of violence throughout the 1980s and 1990s, inevitably the news of my travels sparked conversation about “the Kurdish question”–that is, the question of what freedoms and rights ethnic Kurds living in Turkey should be granted. For example, since the founding of the Republic, teaching Kurdish in schools and printing or broadcasting media in Kurdish has been outlawed, and celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, was forbidden. In the past five years some of these restrictions have been eased, but the subject remains controversial, with many über-nationalistic Turks remaining opposed to the reforms.

So why would I want to travel to Diyarbakır? The art scene in Turkey is famously concentrated in Istanbul–what interest could a formally war-torn and politically unstable region of the country hold for a yabancı (foreigner)? In fact, Diyarbakır has produced some of the most active, intelligent, and influential figures in contemporary Turkish art. These would include artist and curator Halil Altındere, Berat Isik, Ahmet Öğüt (who, along with Banu Cennetoğlu, represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009) as well as Suat Öğüt and Mehmet Öğüt, Erkan Özgen, and Cengiz Tekin. (Fikret Atay, another well-known Kurdish artist, actually hails from Batman, a smaller city located about two hours from Diyarbakır.) All of these artists have exhibited extensively both throughout Turkey and internationally. But the godfather of the Diyarbakır art community is undoubtedly Şener Özmen. For the past twenty years, Özmen has worked not only as an artist but also as a poet, art critic, translator, and teacher. He collaborates constantly with his fellow Diyarbakır-based artists, has nurtured a new generation of artists, produces texts for exhibition catalogues, designs covers for Lîs Publishing (a prominent Kurdish language publishing house based in Diyarbakır), writes fiction and poetry, and supports the work of the Diyarbakır Arts Centre. In an essay included in the recently published monograph A Sener Ozmen Book, critic Süreyyya Evren describes him as “an artist who cannot relax.” When I visited Diyarbakır, I was honored that Özmen took the time from his busy professional and personal life (he is also a father and husband) to serve, along with Cengiz Tekin, as an attentive and wildly entertaining host. At one point, while we were riding a dolmuş (mini-bus) from Diyarbakır to have breakfast at Hasankeyf, a historical site located on the Tigris River (which, sadly, is likely to be destroyed in the near future by a hydroelectric dam project), Özmen casually remarked that this was the first day off from work that he had ever taken. It sounds like hyperbole, but given his extraordinary output, I am inclined to believe this was true.

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AslıÇavuşoğlu, "A Few Hours After the Revolution," neon installation, 2010.

A small black and white newspaper photograph hangs on the wall of Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s studio, located in an old warehouse in Istanbul’s Karaköy district. The photograph is crowd shot, taken from above, and thus mostly of the tops of people’s heads. It is from the 9th Istanbul Biennial, in 2005. “That’s me,” she says, pointing to one of the tiny figures in the crowd. The Biennial was the first large-scale “art event” that Çavuşoğlu had ever attended, and she points to this moment as the point at which she realized she wanted to be an artist, to be a part of the community represented by the Biennial. Though she had completed her BFA in Cinema and Television at Istanbul’s Marmara University the year before and had already completed one of her earliest works, Dominance of Shadow (a project in which the poster for a made-up film was posted on rented billboards throughout Istanbul) and even participated in a group show at Platform Garanti titled That from a long way off looks like flies, she was not yet working full-time as an artist or even thinking of herself as such. Attending the Biennial changed all that.

Aslı Çavuşoğlu, "Dominance of Shadow," posters, 2004

In the nearly six years that have passed since this turning point, Çavuşoğlu has pursued her career at a breakneck pace, establishing herself as one of the most intellectually stimulating and active members of a new generation of young Istanbul-based artists, most of whom were born either in the years leading up to or directly following the 1980 military coup. Though they work in a variety of styles and media, these young artists, much like the generation of Turkish artists that proceeds them, all have at least one foot planted firmly in the field of conceptual art and continue to explore questions located at the intersection of art, everyday life, and politics in the tradition of artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Beuys, and the Paris-based, Turkish-Armenian artist Sarkis. While rooted firmly in the political realities (and surrealities) of life in Turkey, the many opportunities, made available to them at the early stages of their development, to participate in residencies and exhibitions throughout Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, has enabled this generation to consider the conflicts and contradictions that characterize their locally specific experience through a broader lens that connects the local to the global flow of capital, labor, bodies, information, and ideas.

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Street view of PiST///. Courtesy PiST///.

PiST///Interdisciplinary Art Space is storefront gallery space and artist project co-directed by artists Didem Özbek and Osman Bozkurt. Opened in 2006, PiST/// is located in Istanbul’s Pangaltı neighborhood, a frenetic, working class area located adjacent to posh Nişantaşı and one metro stop from crowded, chaotic Taksim Square. Despite its proximity to these areas, Pangalti feels like a different world, and even Istanbullus who live nearby confess to to rarely heading into that part of town. “It’s so far away!” an acquaintance who lives in Tophane exclaimed when I mentioned my planned visit to interview Özbek and Bozkurt. When I reminded him of just how close it was, he seems surprised. “I guess you’re right,” he responded thoughtfully. “But it seems very far.”

PiST/// space, pre-renovation. Courtesy PiST///.

In many ways, PiST/// does feel miles away from Tophane’s plucky commercial spaces and Istiklal’s larger galleries, standing shoulder to shoulder with newer institutions such as Arter and the just-opened SALT. Its isolation within the institutional geography of the city is indicative of Özbek’s and Bozkurt’s dedication to critiquing the status quo of the professional art community. However, PiST/// is more than a “cube,” more than four walls and a roof which enclose objects or events. It’s a set of practices, an experiment in relationships, collaboration, business models, and professional endeavors. “PiST/// is not an exhibition space” they explain, but rather a medium of “experience exchange,” a means by which individuals with the same interests and concerns, engaged in the same kind of work, can share knowledge, resources, and experiences so that no one has to reinvent the wheel and when the tide rises in one place, boats all over the world rise together.  Yes, things happen in PiST///–lectures, screenings, discussions, and, indeed, exhibitions–but these activities are only a portion of what “PiST///” truly means for its directors.

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Photo by Nursel Kaymaz.

Burak Arıkan is a busy guy. When we met in Istanbul two months ago to discuss his work, he had recently returned to the city from a net art conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was preparing to leave for a human rights conference in Senegal the next day, and already had upcoming trips to China and Mongolia scheduled. In addition to his own art practice, which explores the aesthetics of data and networks as a creative medium, Arıkan conducts workshops, teaching students both how to conceptualize their own visual networks and to use the complex programs that render those networks visible, and is also active with various human rights organizations in Turkey. Most recently, he has been busy preparing new work for the Hüseyin Alptekin retrospective that will serve as the inaugural exhibition at SALT, opening on April 9th, that uses his visual mapping technique to explore aspects of Alptekin’s work and biography.

Arıkan’s work takes many forms and extends all the way down from the final, exhibited objects–digital prints, videos–to the hand-crafted electronics and complex software programs that generate those objects. For nearly seven years, his primary project been capturing and making visible the social, political, and economic networks in which all people are embedded and which provide the basic infrastructure of human society. Sometimes the subject of these works are specific communities, such as 2010′s “Antakya Bienniel Artists Network,” which, by mapping the dynamics between individual artists participating in that exhibitions–who had exhibited in the past with whom, how many exhibitions they had participated in over the course of their careers–created a portrait of both that event and the Turkish contemporary art community generally.

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Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, "Beni Çok İyi Tanıyor... / She Knows Me Very Well...," ink on paper. 2011.

In talking to dozens of artists, curators, and critics over the past few months, over and over I have heard the same term used by those located within the community to criticize Turkish art: didactic. Merriam-Webster defines didactic as “intended to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure and entertainment;” synonyms include “sermonic,” “moralizing” and, “preachy.” Undoubtedly this sentiment is in part a reaction against much of the work produced in Turkey during the 1990s that dealt explicitly with issues related to the intersection of Turkish identity, culture, and politics. If in retrospect the manner in which some work addressed these topics seems heavy-handed, it could be argued that this practice mirrored the heavy-handed way in which the Turkish government was combating dissident elements of society during this period, particularly in regards to its armed conflict with Kurdish nationalist groups in the southeastern region of the country during the early and mid-1990s.

In 2011 there is no longer an open military conflict within Turkey’s borders, but Turkish culture and politics remain as complex and indecipherable as ever. This is a country fraught by shadow governments (both real and imagined), conspiracies, and hidden agendas. Turks never seem to take anything the government does at face value; there is always the assumption of incomplete information. Like an underwater oil leak, this opacity in Turkish political life filters out into the wider society, impacting not only the way individuals view and treat each other, but the way they think about themselves.

Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, "İzin Verirseniz Size İlk Merak Ettiğim Şeyi Anlatarak Başlamak İsterim / If You Allow Me I Would Like To Begin By Telling You About The First Thing I Was Curious About," ink on paper on plexiglass, 2011.

The task of making sense of the daily experience of living within such a convoluted political culture has been taken up by a new generation of artists who are exploring these topics on a more micro level and in a more personal way. This new approach is exemplified in Yeni Eğlenme ve Dinlenme Biçimleri/New Forms of Rest and Entertainment, the current exhibition of drawings by Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, on display at Istanbul’s Galeri NON through the end of this week. Dikbaş specializes in finely etched, comic-like portraits that capture the thoughts of anonymous characters in medias res as they meditate on moments of conflict, vulnerability, defeat, and alienation. Alternatively sympathetic and satirical, he shows a deep sensitivity to his characters’ basic humanity even as he pokes fun at their shallow insecurities and petty, self-centered obsessions.

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biriken (left: Melis Tezkan, right: Okan Urun). Photo by Beatriz Toledo. Courtesy of biriken.

biriken is the five year old interdisciplinary, collaborative project of Melis Tezkan and Okan Urun. Working at the intersection of performance art, installation art, and traditional theater practice, Tezkan and Urun exploit their divergent backgrounds—she studied media and communication and has worked extensively in video production, while he studied theater and acting—to create performative works that, in the Brechtian tradition, draw attention to the constructed nature of reality both within and outside of the performance space. In their projects, live performance mixes freely with projected video, looped audio, and/or textual elements, leveling the playing field between sensory experiences and representational techniques. “We use actors and video at the same time,” Ukun explains. “The actor for us is not more important than the video, or the video than the actor. The text is not more important than another element. Everything is important or not important. This co-existence of the video and the actor and the text—we hope—is less theatrical, less hierarchical.”

Though they first met as teenagers growing up in Istanbul, attending the same “weekend school” (the classes Turkish high school students take to prepare for college), biriken was actually born in Paris, where Tezkan and Urun reconnected as graduate students attending La Sorbonne, where he studied theater and acting and she continues to work towards her doctorate in aesthetics. After months spend discussing their art and their shared social, political, and intellectual concerns, “we said, ‘okay, instead of talking let’s do something together, and do something different,’” recalls Tezkan. This was in 2005. In 2006, when they collaborated on their first project, Simdi bizim evin yerinde cukur var (“Now there is a hole where once stood our house”), they realized they needed a name. In Turkish “biriken” means “accumulated” or “built-up.” “This was the idea—instead of talking, accumulating ideas,” they would create art out of their built-up thoughts and plans.

biriken, Urun in "Now there is a hole where once stood our house," 2006

As it happens, this concept of working with a mass of accumulated materials applies not only to the duo’s use of their amassed conversations and schemes, but also their practice of drawing on the cultural baggage of their generation. “Our generation is the MTV generation,” says Urun. “It’s also our common point with the world. I think sometimes I feel more comfortable talking about something common then trying to explain local things to everyone.” Thus their projects are littered with references culled from across the pop cultural landscape of the past thirty years. For example, in Now there is a hole where once stood our house,  Stacey Q’s 1985 hit single “Two of Hearts” provides the soundtrack to Urun’s live performance, in which he maniacally shifts between Jazzercise-style and Flashdance era dance moves and moments of intense, almost paranoid introspection. A projected video of Urun, jogging through the streets of Paris, fills the wall behind him; downstage, two small television sets show a live feed from a video camera set up on stage that records his movements about the stage.

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Following is the second half an interview Elizabeth Wolfson conducted with Vasif Kortun. Read part one here. — Ed.

Photo courtesy of Vasif 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, continued from Part I.

Elizabeth Wolfson: So obviously these archives, your library, are a very important part of the work of this institution.

Vasıf Kortun: It sits at the core of what we do.

EW: Where do you think the impulse to devote so much of your resources to these types of activities comes from?

VK: Well I know where it comes from personally—my father was in press distribution, so I grew up coming home to piles of printed materials. In high school we had an amazing library at a time when nobody had books in their homes—maybe some people did—or the idea of libraries in a high school was just unthinkable. I was a horrible student, but I spent most of my time in the library. And that was just great.

The lack of databases in Turkey, the lack of networked materials, it leads to the kinds of mistakes that I made as well. When I was starting out I thought “Oh I’m the first this, I’m the first that,” this kind of youthful arrogance, is actually the result of this erasure. You can do this because no one’s contesting you. Three dictatorships, three coups d’etat…. It makes it easy to make mistakes.

EW: Because with each regime change, erasure takes place.

VK: A very serious one, each time. So all of these things combined, I don’t know, from the early 1990s I really wanted to have a space in Istanbul where I could have a library. These days it’s not as critical, because the library is not a space anymore.

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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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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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