Letter from Istanbul
The Biennial Effect
Sarah-Neel Smith
Having just celebrated its 20th year, the Istanbul Biennial is one of the oldest and most well-known of the many global art biennials. Yet while the Istanbul Biennial is the object of widespread international press attention, other local art institutions receive far less exposure - easily leading to the impression that the biennial exists in a void of art activity. Until the late 90s, this assessment was not far off the mark: the biennial was the sole local, institutionalised outlet for contemporary art. In the past decade, however, the contemporary art scene has begun to expand at an increasing rate. Supported almost entirely by private capital, institutions like Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, and Santralstanbul have taken the first steps towards establishing a range of exhibition spaces and residency programmes. A handful of independent artists' initiatives and commercial galleries fill out the picture.
Though it is at present partially closed as it undergoes physical and institutional restructuring, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center is the most prominent contemporary art venue in Istanbul. Founded in 2001 by curator Vasif Kortun, Platform's facilities include a library, open archive, and residency programme forinternationalvisitingartists, housed together on Istanbul's main shopping street, Istiklal Caddesi. (Platform's now-absent exhibition space will appear again when the institution reopens in 2009 under a new name.) By playing host to a yearly series of art events and international speakers throughout the past few years, Platform has positioned itself as a hub of local art world activity. But its role as a conduit for international visitors is equally as important: Kortun and his staff are the city's primary resource for artists, journalists, and others seeking to acquaint themselves with the local art scene.
Platform's positioning as the dominant gate-keeper between Istanbul and the international art world is partially due to the small size of the local gallery market: there are less than 10 influential commercial contemporary art galleries in this city of over 13 million residents. Istanbul's galleries promote up-and-coming Turkish artists, or act as 'homes-away-from home' to individuals like Haluk Akakçe who have already established themselves abroad. If the power to determine which artists enter the wider circles of the international art world lies largely within the hands of Platform and a few galleries, one benefit of the smallness of the art community is the likelihood for independent artists' initiatives to gain visibility. During biennial season, even the humblest initiatives become potential Cinderella stories, as international critics and curators make the rounds.
There are, in fact, almost as many artists' initiatives as commercial galleries in Istanbul - there would doubtless be more if public financial support were available. Government arts funding is distributed by the Ministry for Culture and Tourism, a bureaucratic and conceptual conflation which supports categories like 'film', 'music' and 'Turkish ornamental arts' but leaves no room for contemporary art endeavours. Local initiatives frequently turn to private corporations or foreign consulates and cultural centres - the British Council, the Goethe Institute, or the Swedish Consulate - for aid.
As Banu Cennetoglu, who is behind artists' book initiative BAS, has noted, the community of Istanbul initiatives 'fill each other out'. Cennetoglu's publishing practice stands in contrast to Apartment Project's community orientation and PiST's art world-focused enquiries, while Hafriyat'sfocus on the 'symbols of the street' reflects the strong graphic design infrastructure in place in Turkey. Other projects include YAMA, a public video screen which recently hosted a Jenny Holzer work; and the newly opened gallery 5533, located in a former shop space.
The Istanbul Modern Art Museum and SantralIstanbul, a university-affiliated arts centre, possess larger exhibition spaces. Bilgi University opened SantralIstanbul, a new arts and culture campus, in 2007. At its heart is a 7,000 sqm exhibitionspace situated in an imposing former power plant. (Santral means 'electrical plant' in Turkish, but also resonates with the English 'central' - a strategic choice considering Santral's difficult-to-access location is some distance from the central Taksim district.) While Santral itself does not own a permanent collection, it aims to bring together a historical collection of Turkish 20th-century art with facilities for contemporary production.
SantralIstanbul's July 2007 'soft opening' brought together selections from the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe), and the Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla and Leon (Spain), and was symptomatic of these larger institutions' approach to exhibition-making. The Istanbul Modern Art Museum also tends to host 'best of' blockbusters in an attempt to draw a local, nonspecialist and tourist audience. Past exhibitions include 'Andreas Gursky' and 'Centre of Gravity' (13 internationally renowned contemporary artists), and two biennial-centred exhibitions, 'Venice-Istanbul' and 'Time Present, Time Past: 20 years of the International Istanbul Biennial'.
The Modern has emerged from a system of sponsorship which sees a number of the country's top holding companies pouring money into museums through their arts foundations: Sabanci University (of Sabanci Holding) has an impressive collection of Ottoman calligraphy, while the Rahmi M Koç Museum and Culture Foundation (of Koç Holding) runs a transport and industry museum. In the first instance of a local holding company funding a contemporary Turkish art gallery, Koç's foundation opened Tanas in Berlin in April, under the directorship of René Block, a former curator of the biennial. 'Tanas' is sanat, Turkish for 'art', in reverse. The Istanbul Modern was founded under the auspices of Eczacibasi family, who are also behind the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (Istanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfi IKSV) - the organisation that runs the Istanbul Biennial and the Istanbul Film and Jazz Festivals, among others.
Timed to coincide with the 2007 biennial, the Modern's 'Time Present, Time Past' exhibition brought together all of the biennial's former curators and a selection of artworks from each year in what was arguably its strongest exhibition to date. Still, the exhibition was a powerful example of the continuing effect of the forceful and intermittent biennial on the city's developing art world, a 'clean slate' just now beginning to be marked up. The shift in the local terrain since last September's 2007 biennial, for example, is startling: following biennial season projects, both the directors of the Istanbul Modern and SantralIstanbul left their posts (after only half a year in their respective positions), andPlatform will be without an exhibition gallery until just before the next biennial in 2009. In Istanbul, there is a palpable sense of local art institutions having 'pushed through' to the biennial season - a strenuous exertion followed by a long exhale.
Firmly positioned in a broad global network, the Istanbul Biennial can streamline issues like the city's cultural hybridity for an audience who come, see and leave - while institutions on the ground must navigate financial difficulties, highly mediated exhibition opportunities and the longerterm realities encompassed incatch phrases like 'cultural hybridity'. If this is a criticism levelled at biennials worldwide, it is particularly pertinent in Istanbul, where the biennial season and the 'off season' are in stark contrast. What should be a symbiotic relationship between the local art world and the Istanbul Biennial veers, on occasion, dangerously close to the parasitic. Yet local institutions and initiatives promise to act increasingly as a foil to this trend as their own visibility expands. Last month, the IKSV announced that the Balkan curatorial collective What, How & For Whom would organise the 2009 Istanbul Biennial. Just enough time to get ready.
This report was originally published in May 2008 / No 317, p40.
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