Turkish and Other Delights: An Introduction
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?”
