Urban Voices My Hand is Your Hand is My HandAliette Dumont Saint Priest Barbara Eichhorn is a German born visual artist living in Austria. At the moment she is artist in residence for three month in Istanbul supported by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport Austria. Every year, the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport sends around 50 artists to the thirteen foreign studios of the republic, for a period of three to six months. Since the 1970s, about 950 artists have been invited to work in these temporary studios, in order to discover and expand the artistic situation on site and their own work in a new environment. In Istanbul the Turkish association diyalog in cooperation with the Austrian Cultural Forum Istanbul are supervising the program. In Vienna Barbara has her studio in the Sonnwendviertel district, a new neighborhood of the Austrian capital behind a newly built train station. This modern venue is a perfect playground for artistic expression, an opportunity Barbara seized with fellow artist Daniel Aschwenden for the Thishousebylines project in 2021. They were dealing with the “relationship between movement and drawing as contemporary, (analog) art media in digital times”. This matter is really central to Barbara Eichhorn’s work : lines, lines, and lines, the movement of the pencil on the paper going from one point to another until something comes out of it. The artwork she is producing is creating matter, shapes and structures from a succession of pencil lines. It is as much from the tracing of lines as from the spaces that separate these lines that the forms appear. Art residencies are always an occasion to see how an artist’s work is modified outside of his usual environment, an opportunity to explore other cultural contexts, and to establish intercultural communication. Being away is something that really resonates with Barbara Eichhorn’s work, as going in different directions is part of her way of working. She is wandering around Istanbul to have a look at the shapes, the lines and the contours, focusing on the movement that is leading her arm as she is traducing into another language the visual image that the urban landscape is sending her. The images are superimposed on each other, without hierarchy, creating a relational aesthetic that translates the urban landscape into forms and sensations. We are walking with Barbara Eichhorn through the Kadiköy district of Istanbul and visitng art spaces like Apartment 52 and arthere while she is preparing her contribution for the Mahalla Festival in Istanbul. This years festival will take place between August 23 and September 14 mostly in the Kadiköy destrict of Istanbul under the title Windmill Mountain dedicated to the Murmuration birds. Murmurations are huge groups of starlings that twist, turn, swoop and swirl across the sky in beautiful shape-shifting clouds. For the festival Barbara is preparing an interactive drawing performance with the title My Hand is Your Hand is My Hand. Hands lie on top of hands and together they follow lines drawn on paper. Take in, perceive, take with you, connect, pass on, and hand over. For the Mahalla festival Barbara Eichhorn will do an interactive performance in Kadiköy, Istanbul. She will draw collectively with passer-by and friends who are around on small papers. The performance invites you to linger, to ask questions, to reflect and to participate. It invites residents, neighbors and passers-by as well as interested art audiences. That’s the way of Murmuration.... Read more...Throwback on the Otonom Art Events in Istanbul: Garage, Art, Metal, RustAliette Dumont Saint Priest The Otonom Art Events, held between the 1st and the 6th of June 2021, describe themselves as « accessible, innovative, free, contemporary » art events. As the Contemporary Art Fair of Istanbul – one of the biggest international fairs of the country – was taking place at the same time a few kilometers away, the OAE was making a rather different proposition : garage, art, metal, rust… A succession of art studios were open to the public in the 6. Sokak and 9. Sokak of the district of Maslak, Sarıyer. Atatürk Oto Sanayi : skyscrapers, garages and art studios The landscape is rather surprising as you reach the neighborhood. The Otonom Art Events are established in the middle of the Atatürk Oto Sanayi, an industrial complex dating back from the 70’s. As the years passed by, the district of Maslak in which the garage is located transformed itself into one of the most important business districts of Istanbul, seeing dozens of skyscrapers emerging from the ground. Business towers, car garages, and art studios : the composition is particular but manages to create a singular harmony that « brings the art, the artist and the audience together ». Indeed, we are far from an exclusive and unwelcoming art gallery. The doors of the studios are warmly open and sometimes you don’t really know if you are entering someone’s private place or an artwork studio. There is actually not much difference as these two streets, 6. Sokak and 9. Sokak, are the margin spots where different artists settled in the last years. They enjoyed these suburban areas as creative spaces to produce their work, thanks to the space and ambiance it could provide. One of the participants of the Otonom Art Events said « I actually came here because it’s the only place in Istanbul where you can put music really loud without being bothered ». Therefore, the Atatürk Oto Sanayi is an alternative place giving birth to an art in link with its surroundings. Metal and rust The 6th and 9th Streets are hosting some Turkish artists but not only, as they also accompany German-Turkish collectives like Metallwerstatt Tacheles and Komünart. That’s the case for example of the artist Hüseyin Arda, based both in Berlin and Istanbul, and to whom we owe the big metal rhinoceros installation. Cutting metal pieces and welding them together, there is no much doubt why he has set himself in this venue. More or less all the artworks shown during the Otonom Art Events are exploiting metal as their main component, creating a substance harmony with the rest of the district, the motos resting in the garages and the noise of the workers fixing cars a few streets away. This edition of the Otonom Art Events is now over but do not hesitate to have a closer look at their digital content as they regularly organize events.... Read more...A Few in Many Places : a meeting between physical and digital realmsAliette Dumont Saint Priest A Few In Many Places is an exhibition organized by ProtoCinema and held since the 24th of May on the first floor of Kıraathane ; an exhibition whose intention resonates with the purpose of the İstanbul Edebiyat Evi. Kıraathane is an archaic word composed of qiraat which in Arabic means “reading” and hane which means “place”, “house”, “space”. This word is used in Turkey in the sense of coffee house, where newspapers and magazines could be read while drinking tea or coffee during the times of the Ottoman Empire. It’s also the name of the İstanbul Edebiyat Evi – İstanbul Litterature House – located in Beyoğlu, whose doors are open since October 2018. This venue works as a proper house: a get-together place for artists, writers, and people using their freedom of expression at a time when the latter is challenged ; a place to discuss literature, art and creativity, exchange ideas and promote creation. a multidimensional exhibition A Few In Many Places is a « multi-city group exhibition which addresses on-going collapses and cycles of violence, through various forms of collectivity » as can be read on the ProtoZine, the zine that accompanies the exhibition. In other words, ProtoCinema is engaging a simultaneous discussion in 6 different cities : Seoul, Bangkok, Istanbul, New York, Santurce and Guatemala City. Far from presenting a globalized and asepticized art, all these interventions are careful to offer an interconnected art that’s still acknowledging its regional grip, with local artists for each one of the cities. On the curating aspect, a special attention is given to the use of « a sustainable exhibition-making model of reducing exploitation (of natural resources, labor and knowledge) and consumption (no shipping or flying) ». A Few In Many Places is a multi-level reflexion occuring in 3 different continents and 2 different universes, in both physical and digital realms. repetition & perception A few in many places can be understood as a willingness to return to the essential, to the ‘few’, to what is left when one got rid of the superfluous ; a persistent movement towards the atom, the tiniest component of what composes all of us, every substance, all over the world no matter where you find yourself. It is to such an extent that can be understood the work of Zeynep Kayan, one of the artists whose work is part of the Istanbul exhibition. She uses video and her body as tools to show endless repetitions of small physical movements, « recalling somatic knowledge which our bodies carry and transmit for generations ». This inherited, unconscious, sometimes violent physical knowledge emerges from the repetitions of movements, as the artist is trying to disarm the violence through repetitive cycles. One of her videos, titled An attempt to read from Thomas Bernhard (2021), represents the artist reciting a sentence from Bernhard’s Walking but as she recites she always interrupts herself before the end, and constantly goes back to the beginning of the sentence ; while in the meantime she carries water from one receptacle placed in front of her to another, and do it all over again. The repeated sentence says : ‘‘We have to continue what we aimed to start, while we are conscious that nothing is ever certain and nothing ever has integrity. If we keep giving up before we start, we would not get rid of disappointment and we would get lost in the end.’’ In the other room of the exhibition is the installation of ARK, an collaborative work by Kathryn Hamilton and Deniz Tortum. The 4 walls-room is plunged in darkness, there is just a tiny hole in the black paper that covers the only window of the space, allowing a single ray of light to get in. The installation is working as a camera obscura, projecting on the wall in front of the spectator the landscape of the streets outside. As you accustom yourself to darkness, you can discern the bridge of Haliç, the Bosphorus. This makes us enter into a reproduced world, a visual construction of reality ; entering into a discussion on perceptual knowledge. Hamilton and Tortum evoke the year 1970, when an object was scanned for the first time in an American laboratory, « transferred from the physical world into the digital one ». In an epoch when virtual reality is getting more and more common, when computing technologies are trying to create a reality more real than reality itself, we can think of these simulations as a way to slip away from the outside world when this latter is collapsing. Some organic elements are introduced into the installation, such as an orange tree, to highlight how reality and time still have a grip on real and material objects in the “real simulation”. The responsive aspect of the project led by ProtoCinema is central in the exhibition : the venue perfectly resonates with the artworks, the curating is in full coherence with the intention of the exhibition… All these factors make the visiting of the exhibition extremly fluid and the insertion into the dimensions created by the artists even more accessible. A Few in Many Places, Istanbul edition, curated by Mari Spirito and Alper Turan, is going on until the 21st of June in Kıraathane İstanbul Edebiyat Evi, Yemenici Abdüllatif Sk., 1. Beyoğlu.... Read more...Crystallised ArtRenata ProcopioTo good observers one thing is a fact: the past isn’t disconnected from the present, and at the same time will never be disconnected from the future. We live in cycles. Sometimes these cycles are more intense, sometimes slower. Slow cycles make us believe that history has crystallised. And often this is the impression I get regarding art in Brazil. Especially art as a manifest. Just as in the past, rupture movements keep happening in some societies. The ruptures are many, and lots of them arise through art. In Brazil the activist movement that shook the environment of popular music and Brazilian culture started between 1967 and 1968, happening under the name of Tropicalism and fitting into the post-war context, the development of the cultural industry and the introduction and consolidation of the media (radio and television). One of the most influential singers of the movement was Caetano Veloso with the song Alegria, Alegria. As Caetano later explained, the song is a report, in the first person, of a young man walking through the city. During a time of stagnation and lack of freedom, the song proposed movement and resistance. Caetano spoke of walking “against the wind”, that is, against the direction in which he was being pushed. No scarf, no document Nothing in my pocket or in my hands I want to keep on living, love I’m going Why not, why not Currently, the activist movement gained new actors,fighting against racism and privilege mainly represented through the favelas. Some examples are: Criolo – Boca de Lobo (Manhole) The manhole, also known as a hollowed out curb, is inserted in intervals of the curb. It is a piece with holes that allows water to drain into the drainage network. Its application is absolutely essential to prevent flooding. But that will not depend only on its application, and the song talks about how much durtness we have “under the ground”. Emicida – Boa Esperança (Good Hope) – He also got a documentary on Netflix Emicida’s documentary is divided into three acts: Planting, Watering and Harvesting. To rewrite history, the rapper shows the need to reconnect with the land, so that it is possible to rescue his roots. In the current times, this movement is necessary for society and politics, and also for Brazilian hip-hop. Djonga – Nós (We) About compliance, struggle against elites and inequalities, how this has made them aggressive and unfeeling after so many years dealing with compliance. The country – nowadays under the command of ‘Bolsonaro’s politics of hate, is caracterized as an homophobic government, once again dictatorial and fascist – still trying to follow the activist movement. The artists of the vanguard strengthen the current movement, which also gave voice to an activist festival (Ninja Festival), that surprisingly ended up with an unexpected ending: a kiss on the mouth between the tropicalist activist Caetano Veloso and the rapper Criolo. Between unexpected actions without great gains for the population, one thing is a fact; in the Brazil of today as in many other countries represented by debilitated movements, if we try to see movements of ruptures, we can not find. They are mere appearances. And what is worse, the more we try to rescue history, the more we kill it. It would be more relevant to join ourselves together as humanity, in an attempt to save us from the history of an holocaust determined by a dozen of countries, to the misery of all the others. The proposal then is that we can assume a new kind of artistic attitude, rescuing through voluntary work the Histories of all the countries that have been crushed by the crises: let us start with the musician Chico César and his song Mama Africa. (The music was inspired by the African continent as a mother, from where so many children left/were taken for the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, etc. Thinking of the African diaspora and how many times this movement turned its back on its mother, exploited until today by the colonizers, and to whom no retribution was given). ... Read more...2020: A RESTROOM CULTURALITYIsidora2020: A RESTROOM CULTURALITY 2020 © Isidora Fićović and Daichi Misawa Installed in New Belgrade, April 2020 A restroom for visitors to reflect upon a cultural boundlessness, or culturality, of restrooms in the past, present and future, which comprises Gestural Rhythm of Dot recording a time dimension of a process of movements in painting, and a musical sound of circulator that may reflect the sound of present culturality in a place of installment. Material: toilet paper, painting or drawing materials (water color), environmental sound, real-time computer processing. When technological impact on society takes its role, might be a time for artists to play their role. Art, to us, does not seem to be something that only tolerates a specific ‘beauty.’ Things that are ‘ugly’ might be actually where humanity is. To be specific, restrooms such as Japanese one—whoa, it’s a space of traditional hospitality, having within touch sensors for flash, toilet seat heats, incredible softness of toilet paper, even a sound of nature—are considered here to be a site for carrying out another artistic investigation. Concept of the artwork generally relates to an idea of presenting a design of restroom as a demonstration of restroom culturality. Based on said concept, the artwork comprises: 1) ‘Gestural Rhythm of Dot’ recording a time dimension of a process of movements in painting, of yellow color symbolizing suns’ movement and of blue color rivers’; and 2) a musical sound of circulator that is synthesized with environmental sound reflecting the sound of present culturality in the place of installation. As a result, the artwork presents another view on restroom design, and also we hope it gives us a chance to reflect upon or test the notion, movement and music concerning restroom in the past, present and future, a moment of relief contemplating the boundlessness of the resting place. 2020 © Isidora Fićović and Daichi Misawa... Read more...talk with #anarchyzen ile söyleşiSabine Küper #anarchyzen is the label of a Turkish Street-artist. During the pandemic days the emptiness of the streets unveils a rich fundus of artworks from Graffiti to complex paintings. They provide a dialogue with the city and its ongoing topics. #anarchyzen is partly using objects in the environment and transforms them creatively. Söyleşi #anarchyzen Talk Cümlere sıkışıp kalmayan bir oluşun yolcusu olarak sanat insanları değiştirici etkileyici bir güce sahip ve insanları birleştiren bi yanı var tıpkı birbirimize çıkan sokaklar gibi… Art is a passenger not limited to words; it has an impressive power that changes people and unites people; just like the streets, which unite us, because we are all walking on their path … Yeldeğirmeni ve istanbulun çeşitli yerlerinde sokak işlerim oldu… gezgin bir yaşantım olduğu için gittiğim bir çok yere bıraktığım izler oluyor… I did street works in Yeldeğirmeni and various parts of Istanbul … there are traces that I left in many places I went, because I am traveling and strolling constantly… Bazen fikir mekanı seçiyor bazen mekan fikri tetikliyor… vapurlar trenler sokak duvarları reklam panoları logar kapakları doğal gaz ve elektrik kutuları baz istasyonları kameralar uyarı afişleri merdivenler okulların cevresi çöp kutuları trafik levhaları ve lambaları vb. her şey ve heryer sanat ile dönüştürmek adına özgür ifade alanım olabiliyor… Sometimes the idea chooses the space, sometimes the space triggers the idea … ferries, trains, street walls, billboards, logar covers, natural gas and electrical boxes, base stations, cameras, warning banners, stairs, garbage boxes close to schools, traffic signs and lamps etc. Any place can be an area of free expression wit artistic tools…... Read more...3D Masks as a New ArmourJulie PetersOvercome the Void of a Plague – The Art of 3D Production In times of material shortage for public goods, artists are often the ones who make the difference, using their creativity, their materials and their solidarity. arthere is an art space in Istanbul, Kadiköy, run by artists who have formed a strong art community. The art centre gathers artists from the Middle East, Turkey and around the world with a management team from Syria, France, and Turkey. Initially founded by and for Syrian artists with difficulties accessing workspace after leaving their country to settle in Istanbul, arthere is a space for artistic creation, away from war and political rivalries. Hosting all sorts of events such as film screenings, installations, performances, workshops and exhibitions, arthere always looks for news ways of promoting creativity and expression, while serving a good cause. That is how Omar Berakdar, initiator and member of arthere, decided to get the machines working. It’s been one week now that the “printing farm” (that’s how he calls the five 3D printers that arthere owns) is working without respite to produce two types of protective equipment against Coronavirus: The first one, a normal triangular plastic mask where a replaceable tissue or filter fit in. Fixed with rubber bands, it is useful for daily situations and easy to clean with an alcoholic disinfectant spray. This mask can be used for medical purposes and successfully replaces the normal ones which should be thrown away every 6 to 8 hours. The second one is a plastic structure supporting a shield for people working in close contact with infected people: in hospitals, supermarkets etc. Those are the “easy ones” that arthere produces the most. They prepare 10 to 20 of them and send them all together to hospitals. They are already in use at hospitals in Bursa and in Gaziantep. The initiative was set up by a community of 3D printer owners (3BoyutluDestek) that drawn more and more attention lately due to the general shortage in available masks for medical staff. The shield’s designs are available online, practical and easy to assemble. When there is need, arthere sends the masks to anybody who asks. But that’s not going to last long… The material needed for the 3D printers are rolls of plastic string. Raw material goes into a tube, gets melted and transformed into a plastic shape. But for the moment, Omar and his team only have a filament called PLA, which is inconvenient because it melts or deforms when heated up to 60°C, common practice in hospitals for disinfecting and cleaning purposes. The material that would be needed is PETG. Since the outbreak of the virus, arthere, as many other places, had to cancel the totality of their program. Being a space for solidarity, for mutual support within the community, making masks was seen as a responsibility. It isn’t only about the masks; it is the position of an art space, an active group of people who want to respond to the crisis. It is possible to support arthere’s initiative by contributing to the required material: PETG filament. It can be sent directly to the art space at the following address: Rasimpasa Mh, Beydagi Sk, 3A, Kadiköy, Istanbul. Or, if more information is needed: Tel. +905380867691 / info@arthereistanbul.com.... Read more...Interview with the artist Elmas DenizIsidoraI’m glad to introduce this raw audio file of conversation with the artist Elmas Deniz, dear friend and colleague that have met a decade ago on the artist in residency program in Istanbul. The interview is about her artwork exhibited at the 16th Istanbul Biennial titled “The Seventh Continent”, lasted from September 14 to November 10, 2019. In her conceptual works, Elmas Deniz calls attention to ecological changes occurring with capitalism and the age of Anthropocene. She examines the changing of the landscape and the deterioration of the nature by humankind. Deniz is showing two works about disappeared flows of water. The first one is a three-dimensional topographic relief of Istanbul, spanning the area from Şişli to Taksim Square. On this relief, lost rivers and creeks are marked on the current roads. Deniz’s other piece centres on a creek near which she grew up, near Bergama. This wall installation, which focusing on the small and insignificant, calls attention to natural and human-caused environmental transformations and extinctions. Interview by Isidora Ficovic, visual artist – isidoravisualart ... Read more...HOW WE LET THE BERLIN WALL FALL TOO EARLY…Thomas BüschWith the “SHLIM-LINE Show” on the 24th of October 89 we (Johannes Beck & Uli M Schueppel, as studio guest Christoph Dreher / Die Haut) produced a show live in the West Berlin Radio100 in which we suddenly announced the fall of the Wall. The whole thing had triggered tremendous reactions – but perhaps not necessarily led to the real fall of the Wall 2 weeks later … or did it? On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of this “SHLIM-LINE SHOW”, as an acoustic journey into a West Berlin night, here for the first time to listen (slightly shortened & sorry, only in German!)... Read more...Soufiane Ababri, Memories of a Solitary CruiseSabine Küper The first solo exhibition in Turkey of Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri. « Memories of a solitary cruise » at “The Pill” offers an immersive journey into fantasy, western representations, and projections by sensitively avoiding counter-stereotyping. The set-up of the exhibition invites to a kind of shielded Boudoir. The audience has to cross through a thick double-layered brown curtain to enter the exhibition space. “Bedworks” is a title artist Soufiane Ababri invented for his small scaled colorful paintings. Çüneyt Çakırlar, lecturer for film and media studies at Nottingham Trent Universities School of Art and Humanities, underlines: “Ababri swerves from a professionalized and disembodied space of art production to a personal, sexual intimate and affective territory. The bed becomes the studio”. The artist is tired of underlying racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic biases in average societies conscience and in the mainly social pedagogic oriented discourse of political correctness. The value of the esthetics of the memories of a solitary cruise is the mixture of banal daily erotic scenes, satirical quotations of classical idealizing sculpturing features and casual formulated but touching written reflections on home- and homelessness. The Video-scene of the artist in a kitchen brewing coffee has a refreshing anti-exhibitionist touch. The 15th Istanbul Art Biennial in 2017, curated by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset and entitled “a good neighbor”, had given space to several positions by artist working on queer themes. One of the most impressive positions was Mahmoud Khaled’s Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man (2017). Conceived as a fictional museum, the audience entered a house in the lively neighborhood of Cihangir with an audio guide and discovered that the absent inhabitant of the house was an Egyptian man who moved from Cairo to Istanbul a decade ago. A narrative of queer persecution in Egypt and later in Istanbul is told through this unknown man’s belongings. Soufiane Ababri’s show at The Pill is a valuable continuation of the topic and the metaphor of cruises as an internal journey with a political context. The exhibition-text contextualizes: “The exhibition’s starting point is a public policy polling survey made in the United States in 2015 which found that 30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats said they support ‘bombing Agrabah’ – the fictional nation of Disney’s Aladdin – the pool emphasis a whopping 41% of Donald Trump voters favor bombing Agrabah adding to the evidence indicating that his support is disproportionately drawn from the least knowledgeable parts of the electorate. This tragi-comic news suddenly reveals the strength of collective belief mechanisms and in this case raises the question of how exoticism influences the way the ‘exotic subject’ is perceived and how he is determined as other. Soufiane Ababri uses parodic tools to deconstruct the multiple layered constructions of what exoticism should be in the eyes of a Western viewer”. This effect isn’t to limit on the Western Viewer. In an age of global manipulation and stupefaction this news would have worked in a lot of places. The current show is extremely recommendable and consolidates the importance of the visionary Gallery in Istanbul’s upcoming district Balat. The Pill had hosted the show “Animal Farm” by Turkish artist Ferhat Özgür during the time of the 15th Istanbul Biennial. It was brilliantly creating connections to the Dystopian novels of George Orwell and the current stage of politics in Turkey. Showing Soufiane Ababri position now is a fine elaboration of a very central topic in the current political atmosphere, where queer topics are banned from most public spaces. The Tangier-born artist has been living in France for the past 16 years since studying at the National School of Decorative Arts and completing a master’s at Lyon’s School of Fine Arts. “My drawings tell the stories of the communities in which I belong. I am a homosexual North African immigrant who is part of a small middle class in a postcolonial generation. My experiences are central to my drawings and I hope they can highlight some of society’s stigmas,” Soufiane told the London based “It’s nice that-Platform last June. Soufiane Ababri, Memories of a Solitary Cruise. 10.01.-23.02.2019. The Pill, Müselpaşa Cad. No.181, 34087 Balat- Istanbul ... Read more...
