UTOPIAN PROMISE LIES AT THE HEART OF ISTANBUL BIENNIAL’S 10TH OUTING
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Daily Star staff

Daily Star – Lebanon

Friday, September 14, 2007
Lebanon

Nearly 100 artists reclaim the potential of art to imagine the world
better, more just and more fulfilling

ISTANBUL: An archetype of socialist-modernist architecture with its
transparent facade of single-glazed glass and aluminum fretwork,
the Ataturk Cultural Center (AKM) is one of the few buildings strung
around Istanbul’s Taksim Square that actually works in terms of size
and scale. It doesn’t impose or tower over the space before it. Built
like a stout, utilitarian rectangle, it breathes easily due to its
aerated front.

It is considered an emblem of Turkey’s modernist, democratic drive
and a unique repository for both cultural and political memory. But as
the country’s economy dovetails with neoliberalism and the movements
of global capital, and as gentrification outpaces the preservation
urge is Istanbul, many people seem to want the AKM gone – replaced
by some postmodern pastiche that would generate better revenue or
scrapped entirely for a more corporate-style commercial complex.

The site was originally meant for an opera house, to be designed in a
neoclassical style in 1930s by French architect Auguste Perret. But
the project stalled, shifted in function from opera house to
multi-purpose cultural center and in form from fey neoclassicism to
austere modernism. The commission passed into different architects’
hands until Hayati Tabanlioglu picked it. When the AKM finally opened
in 1969, it was called the Istanbul Palace of Culture.

A year later it burned to the ground after a fire broke out during a
performance. It was dutifully rebuilt. The AKM reopened as such in
the late 1970s, and while it hasn’t been particularly well managed
or maintained, it continues to host state-sponsored operas, ballets,
orchestras and more.

To walk into "Burn It or Not," one of the six primary nodes in the
extensive tissue that is the 10th International Istanbul Biennial,
is to stumble into the middle of a heated debate over whether the
AKM should be demolished or not.

The biennial’s curator, Hou Hanru, seized the building as the epitome
of his theme and invited 16 artists to install new or existing work
there. The result is a concentrated dose of art revisiting modernist
architecture to investigate its seeming obsolescence and revive its
utopian promise.

Utopian promise is, after all, at the heart of this edition of
Istanbul’s biennial, entitled: "Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary:
Optimism in the Age of Global War." An independent curator and
critic who was born in Guangzhou, China, and is now based in Paris,
Hanru has enlisted 96 artists and collectives from 35 countries to
rake through the wreckage of modernism and reclaim its facility to
critically assess and creatively respond, and moreover to rejuvenate
its ability to dream and invent.

Hanru’s emphasis falls not on the historical project of modernity in
the developed world, which is basically done and dusted, but rather on
the processes of modernization in the developing world, the Third World
– those places in the world where modernizing was and is fraught by
associations with Westernizing, thrust upon newly independent states,
left to rot or transformed into something else entirely.

The underlying question posed by the biennial is, more or less, how
can contemporary art pry open the potential – once lodged in the heart
of modernism but since hardened by neoconservative cynicism, conflict
zones and capitalism in its crudest form – to imagine a world better,
more just and more fulfilling, and then will that world into existence
through the creation of works that stoke the same potential in the
spaces of cities and in the minds of citizens?

The artists of the biennial have produced and/or presented more than
150 artworks, using the urban fabric of Istanbul – so relevant with its
rich, labyrinthine history and its geographic straddling of Europe and
Asia – as a laboratory. Their projects are sifted into six sections:
"Burn It or Not" at the AKM; "World Factory," sliced brilliantly
into the blocs and spaces of the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market;
"Entre-Polis" and "Dream House," both installed in an old customs
warehouse next to the Istanbul Modern museum in Karakoy; "Nightcomers,"
a series of video projections in 25 locations in the city (based on the
concept of the dazibao, when the lower classes during China’s Cultural
Revolution were encouraged to post critiques as bold-lettered posters
in the public realm); and a final section devoted to a myriad set of
special projects.

"Burn It or Not" coheres around art projects about modernist
architecture, such as Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan’s eerie
photographs for the "Ghost City" series, documenting an abandoned,
half-built housing project called Mush, "a dreadful wilderness of dead
buildings." New Yorker Daniel Faust offers equally chilling photographs
of the United Nations headquarters, a building designed by Le Corbusier
and compromised by city politics involving powerbroker Robert Moses,
the Rockefeller family and more.

Permeating the entire building is an exquisitely executed installation
by Turkish artist Erdem Helvacioglu, who has rendered the history
of the AKM in sound samples – processed and unprocessed recordings
of performances that took place there, scraps of ambient sound from
the empty building and the surrounding noise of Taksim Square, and
interviews with people about the structure. The result is a space
haunted by invisible ghosts, and emotionally moved by orchestra
crescendos that rise and fall between melancholy and autocratic terror.

"Entre-Polis" is more of a free-for-all, with more than 40 artists
and artists’ groups given free reign with the theme. At times,
the boundaries between "Entre-Polis" and "Dream House," another
section meant to be open only at night, are fluid to non-existent,
which feels right – the busting of barriers, political and otherwise,
being a key strategy here. More politically pointed work is presented
is the cavernous warehouse than in the AKM, along with projects that
are more lusciously, unabashedly beautiful.

Humor also courses through the venue, thanks especially to Taiyo
Kimura’s outrageous television screen crammed into a corner and wrapped
with toilet paper, projecting "Video as Drawing," which takes already
extreme body art performances even further.

Works to stop viewers in their tracks include Damascus-born and
-based artist Buthayna Ali’s striking yet strangely familiar "We,"
a room full of sand and countless swings in black canvas and rope,
each adorned with a noun written in white Arabic script: love, war,
nation, etc. Paul Chan’s video installation from the "7 Lights" series
is like a painting set in motion, splayed on the floor, toying with
light and shadow and an undercurrent of apocalyptic dread.

"Entre-Polis" proper includes a terrific video by up-and-coming Turkish
star Fikret Atay of a young man transforming buckets and sticks into
hot beats over the Istanbul skyline. Jonathan Barnbrook’s "Friendly
Fire" takes hold of urban guerrilla-style fly postings to comment on
the inanity, horror and stubbornly cyclical nature of contemporary
warfare. Hamra Abbas, born in Kuwait and based in Lahore, sounds
one of the weirdest and most wonderful notes with "Lessons in Love,"
taking the erotic poses of miniature paintings (depicting positions of
copulation and presumably for a pedagogical rather than pornographic
purpose) and transforming them into enormous sculptures made from cheap
materialism, conflating sexual intimacy and bland consumer culture.

But perhaps most striking is a triumvirate on the subject of Armenians
in Turkey circa 1915 and the touchy issue of minorities in the country
more generally. The filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s long horizontal video
installation "Auroras" is paired with Kutlug Ataman’s single-channel
video "Testimony."

In the former, Egoyan excavates the story of Aurora Mardiganian,
an Armenian exiled in 1915 who landed on New York’s Ellis Island in
search of her brother. Her story was appropriated by Hollywood and
turned into a film with commercial weight behind it in 1918. She
herself starred in the movie, "Auction of Souls," but was so doubly
traumatized by the experience that she threatened suicide and ditched
the film’s promotional tour. Seven replacements were hired, thus the
seven heads that convey her story in Egoyan’s video, which probes
trenchant questions about mediated history, the authenticity of
testimony, and tragedy conveyed as entertainment.

Ataman’s piece consists of interview footage with Kevser Abla, his
105-year-old former nanny, whom he learned was Armenian when he was
young, was told never to mention it, and pries open her story through
a long and affectionate talk.

Lastly is the group Extrastruggle’s terrifically street-wise poster
project "What?" featuring caricatures of minorities in Turkey on
posters that viewers are meant to interact with by scrawling all
over them. A plea for the critical as opposed to commercial intent of
graphic design, Extrastruggle’s piece is a clear attempt at wrenching
change and realizing a city, and a country, where all are equal.

The 10th International Istanbul Biennial runs through November 4 at
various venues throughout the city. For more information, please call
+90 212 334 0763