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In and Out of Istanbul
In the last decade, the once-small Istanbul art world has filled out with non-profits and independent artists' initiatives. Commercial galleries have been slower to appear, but a series of exhibitions timed to coincide with the Biennial opening in mid-September signaled that whatever the economic circumstance, the Istanbul market is open. Most of the art on view is local, but there is a tug of war for Turkish artists and institutions: whether to fill market demands for artworks chock full of "cultural specificity," or to argue for local work's more "universal" appeal.Read More
Boltart: Art in Turkish
In Turkey as in much of the Middle East, local art criticism is spread thin, dispersed across blogs and independent publications like the short-lived (and intentionally untranslatable) Resmi Görüş, which often don't survive long enough to become established sites for debate. The critical online art and culture magazine Boltart was founded some eight months ago, and is currently edited by Karoly Aliotti, a collection consultant in Istanbul, and Özge Ersoy and Merve Ünsal, both grad students based in New York.Read More
Walking the 11th Istanbul Biennial (With or Without Video)
Hou Hanru's 2007 Istanbul Biennial was a notoriously unwieldy affair. "Not Only Possible But Also Necessary: Optimism in a Time of Global War" assembled an unprecedented number of artists in multiple venues (two of them unreachable except via taxi), under an equally inflated curatorial thesis inspired by Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's weighty examination of the contemporary world order. The four-member, all-female curatorial collective behind this year's Biennial, the Zagreb-based What, How and For Whom (WHW), have clearly taken Hou's version as a model of what not to do.Read More
At the Istanbul Biennial with Platform's Vasif Kortun
In 2001, curator Vasif Kortun, former director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and curator of the 3rd and 9th Istanbul Biennials, founded Istanbul's Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. Over the next few years, Platform offered an international residency program, visiting lecturers series, and open artists archive, all of which drew artists, curators, and scholars to the city. Locally, Platform proved a social hub for a community historically devoid of a gathering place; it provided an alternate art education to that offered by Turkey's conservative fine arts universities; for some artists, it was a portal to the art world beyond Turkey's borders.Read More
Preview to the Istanbul Biennial
Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the 9th and 10th Istanbul Biennials, 2005's "Istanbul" and 2007's gigantic "Not only possible but also necessary: optimism in the age of global war,"-or NOPBAN:OITAOGW, as the snappier among us have called it-made a significant move from the city's "historic" venues (Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern) into a series of old factories, crumbling apartment buildings, and former shops and offices. 2005 and 2007's manifestations sought to free the Biennial once and for all from the country's historic burden of defining itself through its ancient past, and redefine Istanbul as a(n EU-ready) site of "alternative modernities" with political potential.Read More
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Mixed Media, 212 x 66 inches, Courtesy the artist.
Artist Kirstine Roepstorff was born and trained in Denmark, but lives and works in Berli
