Monday, March 12, 2012

"Translation" for frieze d/e Spring 2012 in DE EN and TR


Translation II

IN A WORD

In this series, frieze d/e asks artists, curators or writers to reflect upon one word and its impact
Image: Aydan Murtezaoglu, Karatahta, 1999-2002

My first serious intellectual split with my father – a devoted engineer in mind and soul – occurred after I told him that I had decided to do a degree in translation. For him, translation was an interesting but basically minor field; for me, it was the magic key to a wonderland where I could master the contexts of different languages and learn various vocabularies and their histories while becoming an active agent in communicating ideas from one side of a language divide to the other. During my studies, which were propelled by an almost obsessive interest in etymology, I was more drawn towards the processes of semiotics and, ironically, the issue of untranslatability.


The split I experienced with my father may be a symbol of the complex relationship with languages in Turkey, including Turkish itself. When Turkey was engineered as a republic in 1923, part of the revolution involved a complete change from Lisân-ı Osmânî (Ottoman, which was a balanced mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic, a translated language of translation) to a rationalized Turkish constructed with a Latin alphabet of 29 letters. We were taught in school that the change from the Arabic to the Latin script was necessary because Ottoman was too elaborate to be learnt and practiced by the common people. But the effect was to produce a violent cut from the imperial past and a trauma of collective imagination. Imagine how the transmission and translation of ideas is internally broken within the same landscape when you are not able to read newspapers published in your country 100 years ago. That’s why today, Turkish is a language rich in daily idioms and expressions with a strong literary tradition while it suffers from a lack of fluency in the intellectual terminology of concepts and ideas. And maybe that’s why part of the society – obsessed with engineering – realizes neither the value of multiple languages used in the country, such as Kurdish, Armenian and Greek, nor people’s right to be educated in their mother tongue alongside Turkish.
Rodchenko promoted the idea of the artist as an engineer who would constantly build the future. Translators ask a different question: What is lost and what is found when the imaginative and mental grammar is broken in this way? Recently, as my father reminded me of our split, I tried to explain the continuity that I see in my practice from translation to curating. The translator’s question provides me not only a tool for transformation but also a sensitive base to produce new critical positions to respond to the present day. He preferred not to continue this conversation. And I preferred to convey this experience here firstly in English – in this context, a neutral mirror which enabled me to process a critical distance in my relationship to my mother tongue.
—by Övül Durmuşoğlu
Övül Durmuşoğlu is a freelance curator and writer based in Berlin and Istanbul. She will be a Goethe Institute Fellow at dOCUMENTA (13).

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Thursday, January 12, 2012

the long nineties by lars bang larsen @ frieze


The Long Nineties


Revisiting art’s social turn and the 1990s – the decade that has yet to end

Mocked and ridiculed, the 1980s met a pitiful end at the hands of a generation of artists who considered a market-friendly, object-based art their ideological nemesis, and punished it summarily for its false richness.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but ask around in my (Northern European) corner of the world, and I would guess that many of those who were working back then will confirm this picture of a generational showdown. By contrast, faded and forgotten as they may be, ‘the long nineties’ remain unsubverted.1 The symbolic revival of Félix Gonzáles-Torres at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, for instance, echoed his status as a guiding star of curating and art theory of that decade.

However, during the last five years, as the historicization of the ’90s gains momentum, the jury has gradually reconvened. The case being weighed is that of art’s relationship to the social. In 2007, Ina Blom published On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture, examining the practices of many of the prominent artists of the ’90s and after; a 2010 symposium at Tate Britain was entitled ‘Art and the Social: Exhibitions of Contemporary Art in the 1990s’; and Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship will be published by Verso in 2012. The art-historical claim of the latter is that the ‘social turn’ should be ‘positioned more accurately as a return to the social, part of an ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively’.2 I will proceed more sceptically – or counter-socially – by revisiting the ’90s through the social as a problematic not only for art, but also in relation to the ‘governmentality’ of our time – Michel Foucault’s term for the economics and relations of power that shape a society as a field of possible action.

Unlike the slippery ’90s, which haven’t yet found their closure, there is some certainty to be found in the ’80s. The art of that decade took distinct forms – such as appropriation or neo-expressionism – whereas ’90s positions were summed up in a single term: ‘contemporary art’. Not a new term, exactly, but indicative of a new state of connectivity and synchronicity, in which contemporary art experienced a major upgrade (or was it a paradigm shift?). Art’s markets and modes of circulation changed, as did professional and political attitudes towards it. Art became animated by biennials, magazines and art fairs; by artists who strayed from the studio and integrated their mobility into their work; and by curators who shed the historical baggage of the museum’s archive. The general activity that surrounded art – its media, infrastructure and social activity – became as prominent and energetic as art itself.

Around the same time, art’s social turn occurred. This gave visual art a new lease of life at a point when it had otherwise been declared dead (along with the avant-garde, the novel, the human being, the author, etc.). The idea of the social contradicted the demonization of reality and presence of much of the work of the ’80s. No longer something remote, academic and monumental, art became a situation or a process. A work was now a club, a bar, a meal, a cinema, a hang-out, a dance floor, a game of football or a piece of furniture: think of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s soup kitchens, Angela Bulloch’s bean-bags or Apolonija Šušteršicˇ’s public structures. The sole author and the contemplative beholder were atomized in works that called for togetherness, and were often created by collectives or self-organized entities. The art institution started to reflect on itself as a critical space, and exhibition formats opened up in turn. Art took place anywhere – in front of a video camera, on an answering machine, in the urban space. Everyday life became meaningful again, even a refuge from late capitalism.

This is how artists escaped the melancholy slipstream of Modernist painting and sculpture, and no doubt a reason why the young art scene at the time greeted the reintroduction of art’s social dimension enthusiastically. Importantly, however, the affirmation of the social indicates an ambiguity with which social space, and history itself, had become imbued. On the one hand, the artist was no longer Postmodernism’s agent, hovering above the delta of history, selecting and copying styles from all times. The artist was now down in it. On the other hand, history had ended – a claim put forward by conservative thinkers vis-à-vis the end of the Cold War, but which was also argued from a different perspective by critical minds such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who saw no outside to the present order.

The ‘no outside’ predicament was an attempt at reality-checking the effects of ideological conflict cancelled by Tony Blair’s and Gerhard Schröder’s ‘Third Way’ paradigm. Left and right merged, state and economy were integrated in increasingly informal ways, and politics lost its fixed points. Foucault described neo-liberalism as sociological government: in this model, the realms of the social and cultural – rather than the economy – are mobilized for competition and commerce.³ During the 1990s, a new economy began brimming with imperatives to socialize through email, mobile phones and, later, social media, and as social and economic processes were pulled closer together, both art and power became ‘sociological’. The reification of the social form became almost indistinguishable from social content. In other words, the social can also be a simulacrum: an instrumentalization of models and tastes that are already received and working in the culture at large.

Management theory expanded into art, as Richard Florida’s notion of the ‘creative class’ (2002) and James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine’s The Experience Economy (1999) submitted aesthetic concepts to socialization. In some cases – such as the UK’s New Labour government, who came to power in 1997 – cultural policies organized art around the economic centre of society in much the same terms. It wasn’t just a case of management theory colonizing aesthetic concepts, though: the art system was itself involved in rationalizing the idea of the artist as manager.

These factors contributed to art being pulled up from the underground, down from the ivory tower and in from the margins, making it part of governed reality in new ways. From the point of view of a ‘creative’ economy, aesthetic concept and artistic behaviour became models for productivity. This doesn’t turn the art that artists created into a passive symptom; but it was a development that placed high stakes on the cultural analysis inherent in the art work, if the work were to avoid melding with the manifest social needs and ends of the state, society or any other milieu.


In September 2011, the exhibition ‘Spectersof the Nineties’ opened at Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht. Curated by Lisette Smits, in collaboration with Matthieu Laurette, the project proposed a reading of critical artistic practices of the ’90s, but via a materialist analysis that took the technological revolution as the cause of the change not only of society but of artistic practice itself. The organizers presented these as cases to contest both the forgetting of artistic practices of the decade and the way some of these have been dismissed as ‘affirmative of the system’ and of neo-liberalism.4 Even if one shares this materialist analysis, it looks like Smits and Laurette don’t agree with my position that the ’90s are unsubverted. But I could counter that significant artistic positions of the decade have rarely been associated directly with power the way that the works of Jeff Koons, for instance, were read as unambiguous symptoms of Reaganism.

However, I do agree that a historical look at the ’90s is relevant in light of artistic practices that dealt (or deal) with social space through meta-strategies of semiotic playfulness or forms of structural critique, such as those of Renée Green, Jens Haaning, Pierre Huyghe and Aleksandra Mir. In 1996, Haaning relocated the entire production line of a Turkish-owned textile factory in Vlissingen in the Netherlands – including immigrant workers, goods and machinery – into De Vleeshall, a Kunsthalle in neighbouring Middelburg. Self-referentially titled Middelburg Summer 1996, the work showed art and the social to be ever-changing placeholders for each other that would never coincide: it was part of the social world where it was created, and at the same time its aesthetic content set it apart from what already existed.

One could also speculate that, without Postmodernism’s keen sense of historical repetition, the ’90s was also the long decade that forgot it was part of the 20th century. Let me quote works by some of the big names: Olafur Eliasson’s Green River (1998–2001) was, apart from its locations, identical to Nicolás García Uriburu’s Coloration du Grand Canal (Dyeing the Grand Canal, 1968) in Venice; Maurizio Cattelan’s sub-letting of his allotted space at the 1993 Venice Biennale to an advertising agency in principle repeated Poul Gernes’s 1970 collaboration with Citroën and Bang & Olufsen for the Louisiana Museum’s ‘Tabernakel’ exhibition; and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) echoes the film Fussball wie noch nie (Football as Never Before, 1970) by Hellmuth Costard, which followed George Best through an entire football match. When comparing these works, should one look for copies or coincidences? Were these artists in their own way creating a reception of postwar art that art historians had failed to write? Or did a global culture industry make it possible to reproduce the 1960s neo-avant-garde because art was now legitimated through powerful spheres of circulation (institutional, commercial and mediatic) that didn’t exist then?

One can only begin to answer these questions by acknowledging that the social signifies something fundamentally different at different historical times. The category of the social evades an understanding of historical continuity because it privileges space over time, presence over form. It is fundamentally contemporary, a concept without speed and virtuality – and this is how it may fail as a chronopolitics. At the same time, apparatuses inherent to the social sphere also synchronize by creating bubbles in time: the marketplace creates simultaneity in consumption, and because the spectacle wants art big and easy, it disregards the archive and its tedious historical perspectives. When synchronizing functions such as these pull things closer together around the existing moment, contemporary art may end up performing an eternal return to the present as a temporal effect of sociological government.


In Relational Aesthetics (1998), Nicolas Bourriaud fixed the monstrosity and megalomania of the historical avant-gardes by proposing the more flexible artistic ‘micro-Utopia’.5 This was a Utopianism that didn’t resonate with Modernism’s five-year plans and personal sacrifices, but was closer to the manageable time-spaces of Foucauldian micropolitics and Hakim Bey’s idea of temporary autonomous zones. Some 20 years earlier, Roland Barthes questioned the fantasy of privileged political orders, whether micro or macro in his Sade / Fourier / Loyala (1980): ‘Can a Utopia be otherwise than domestic?’ he asked, suggesting a measure of un-freedom in the very concept.

The social sculpture of the ’90s was never really a discussion about freedom. Emancipatory thinking figured as modestly on the agenda as it had in the post-Structuralist theory that informed so much ’80s art. In the preface to his 1983 anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster proposed a ‘Postmodernism of resistance’ informed by the ‘desire to change the object and its social context’, against neo-conservative attempts at severing the cultural from the social. Ironically, however, while it re-established the political on the agenda, Foster’s notion of an ‘oppositional Postmodernism’ can be seen to have helped pave the way for what also became a retro-Modernism (including the return of Utopia). His position prefigured a tendency to conflate the aesthetic with political conservatism, thereby turning aesthetic concepts into epiphenomena. This was the case for big categories of aesthetic collateral such as spirituality and metaphysics, but also staples of form, autonomy and pleasure (for instance, what Barthes had called le plaisir du texte, or ‘the pleasure of the text’), were ditched in the social turn.

At the same time (and somewhat counter-intuitively) former keywords of artistic and social critique – conformism, alienation, negation – were likewise ejected from the vocabulary. It is difficult to escape the feeling that the highs and lows of aesthetic experience were truncated, and art lost some of what Theodor Adorno called its infinite difficulty.6 Polemically speaking, where this was the case the social turn was neither a social critique that addressed misery, exploitation and inequality, nor was it an artistic critique of risks deriving from the dominance of utilitarian thinking.7 This lack was not necessarily indicative of the art as such – after all, a video of the artist dancing can be seductive; a living unit can be a negation – but of a critical vocabulary that revolved around concreteness, a can-do attitude and art on a human scale. Aesthetic experience is compromised when aesthetic problems, and the aesthetic as a problematic, are resolved in social space.

Today, the managerial rhetoric of creativity is fading quickly with yesteryear’s economic optimism. Still, the social is hardly a cold case. The 2012 Berlin Biennial will be curated by the artist Artur Zmijewski, author of the manifesto ‘The Applied Social Arts’ (2007). Here he encourages artists to strive for ‘social impact’, arguing that ‘since the 1990s, art has been growing increasingly institutionalized [and] anodyne’. However, it remains an open question whether one can cure art with the ‘radical forms of expression’ Zmijewski recommends, seeing that the social was a constitutive theme in the decade that, in his own analysis, turned the screw of institutionalization.

As the social persists as a theme in artistic practice and art history, as well as in the ‘social practice’ programmes of art schools, it seems urgent to articulate the limit of art’s integration into society. Perhaps it is time to re-conceptualize the aesthetic as a mode of thinking in order to articulate difference, new outsides and the transcendental, understood as the condition of historical practices and that which lies at the edge of social relations. The present cannot only be changed from its inside. To regain its futurity it must be reconfigured from afar, too.

1 Tom Morton talked about ‘the long 1990s’ in his review of the 8th Lyon Biennial in issue 95 of frieze (November–December 2005)
2 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells, book manuscript, p.3 (to be published by Verso in 2012)
3 See Michael Senellart (ed.), Michel Foucault: The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79, 2008, Macmillan, chapter six
4 Email conversation between the author and Lisette Smits, 13 September 2011
5 In addition to Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and Peter Weibel’s Kontextkunst (Context Art, 1993), Nina Möntmann published Kunst als sozialer Raum (Art as Social Space, 2002), Sarah Lowndes published Social Sculpture: The Rise of the Glasgow Art Scene (2003), Craig Saper talked about ‘sociopoetic art’ (in Networked Art, 2001), and I wrote about ‘social aesthetics’ (in an eponymous essay in issue one of Afterall, 1999)
6 For Adorno, ‘Art is indeed infinitely difficult in that it must transcend its concept in order to fulfil it.’ (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970, p. 103)
7 Eve Chiapello distinguishes between social critique and artistic critique in ‘Die Kritik der Künstler am Management’, in Angewandte Sozialforschung (Applied Social Research), 2006, vol. 24, no. 1–2, pp. 19–24

Lars Bang Larsen

teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, and at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland, and works with Maria Lind on the exhibition project The New Model at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden. His book, Art is Norm, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2012.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

new year's gift from curiosity to survive

The sound recording of "Responding to Responding to the New Moon"  between Anselm Franke and Adnan Yildiz that took place on 18/12/2011 at Kumpelnest Berlin:

http://soundcloud.com/respondingtothenewmoon/kumpelnest_18-12-2011

Monday, December 19, 2011

övül durmusoglu and asli cetinkaya on 'responding to the new moon' @ m-est.org






Galerie Tanja Wagner is hosting the exhibition titled Yeni Aya Cevaben/ Responding to the New Moon/ Antworten auf den Neumonds: Prologue curated by Övül Durmuşoğlu.
Övül has recently moved to Berlin after having lived in Malmö, Vienna, New York and Stuttgart for her educational and project commitments.  The reason for her coming to Berlin was initially to organize and install the Berlin step of Another Country- Eine andere Welt in ifa Berlin, a collaborative project of the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), Stuttgart and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart  which she produced with a Rave Scholarship..
The exhibition Yeni Aya Cevaben/Responding to the New Moon/ Antworten auf den Neumonds: Prologue includes works by Hasan Aksaygın, Natalie Czech (in coll.with Ashkan Sepahvand and Mara Genschel), Nilbar Güreş, Runo Lagomarsino, Johannes Paul Raether, Anca Munteanu Rimnic and Pilvi Takala. During a short visit to the exhibition, performance, collaborative acts and a certain unlocking humor seemed to be some of the common threads running through the works. In order to help me relate to the curatorial framework and motivations, Övül has kindly sent her replies to a number of comments and questions.—Aslı Çetinkaya

responding to responding to the new moon, a curatorial conversation between anselm franke and adnan yildiz moderated by övül durmusoglu



Weekend Special #2: Responding to Responding to the New Moon
An open talk about our contemporary relationships with the old nature

Meeting at Galerie Tanja Wagner 19:00 followed by bar discussion at Kumpelnest 3000 19:30

The second step of Weekend Special program in the framework of  Yeni Aya Cevaben/Responding to the New Moon/ Antworten auf den Neumond: Prologue hosts a curatorial conversation between Anselm Franke (Taipei Biennial 2012) and Adnan Yildiz (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart) moderated by Övül Durmusoglu (Independent curator, Berlin/Istanbul) under the title “Responding to Responding to the New Moon”. As a response to Durmusoglu's invitation, Yildiz has invited Franke to respond to the exhibition conceptualizing the unexpected as a creative force. The conversation partners will analyze familiar curatorial attitudes in this respect, especially Franke's past and continuing projects, with a focus on the conflictual zone between the geological reality that surrounds human thinking and the ontological orders of experiencing the limits as a mortal entity with the belief of an eternal universe. How critical practices deal with the unexpected nature of creativity in this context will be the common conceptual ground during the conversation. 


Responding to Responding to the New Moon was a dense meditation mainly guided by Anselm Franke cutting across different references, reflecting his particular modernist way of thinking on modernity and its issues in the framing of contemporary art. During 2 hours of good conversation in the amazing bar of Kumpelnest, hosted by Reinhardt, we also learned what Anselm Franke and Adnan Yildiz have in common; both prefer Freud over Jung.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Yeni Aya Cevaben/Responding to the New Moon/Antworten auf den Neumond: Prologue, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin 11/11/11



Yeni Aya Cevaben/Responding to the New Moon/Antworten auf den Neumond: Prologue

Hasan Aksaygin, Natalie Czech (in collaboration with Ashkan Sepahvand and Mara Genschell), Nilbar Güreş, Runo Lagomarsino, Johannes Paul Raether, Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Pilvi Takala

curated by Övül Durmusoglu

These days almost feel like an eclipse that is all about perception and changing our mind to meet the moment. A sort of new moon that marks an open invitation to find new terrains beyond repetitive mind circles. The student uprisings in England for free education rights, the major oil leak in Mexican Gulf, the resistance that grew around Stuttgart 21, the insisting demand of people against dictatorships in North Africa and Middle East, the nuclear disaster trigerred by tsunami in Japan and the occupation movement that spread around from Wall Street not to forget the people voicing up their complaints against the system's misgivings in Greece and Spain have all arrived in a raw , to call for a flexible attitude reacting to the unexpected, emphasizing how creative the unexpected may be.

Narrowing and sharpening our focus, the creativity of the unexpected can be connected to many exciting current artistic practices that respond to the new moon. Sources and methods vary but what stays in the center is the open ended relationship these artists develop with material, space and performance, never losing touch with emotions, sensations and personal experiences. Through suggesting or realizing radical performative methodologies of material and process, they propose different parallel narratives of now and then that come with freestyle juggling that allows for innovation, leaps of logic, learning from others and adapting to new information. They point into unknown fields of imagination and allow free movement among the variations of our time-space, our present.

In her timeless classic On Violence, Hannah Arendt starts her analysis with the uncontrollable nature of the event. She argues that the present can never be guessed by skillful political foreseers who, in the name of protecting integrity, try to frame it with doctrines shaped by the past. There is always something unforeseeable, unexpected in the nature of the event that challenges our pre-planned ways of thinking and makes any reading fixated by the past invalid. Arendt phrases this phenomenon as the creativity of the unexpected. In an artistic context, the creativity of the unexpected is one of the driving forces for the fluidity of contemporary art discourse searching for what is contemporary: A fluidity shaped by what happens at the moment, constructing unexpected juxtapositions and correlations of issues, materials and sensations.

'Responding to the New Moon' is the first step of a series of projects that will process a trigerring concept question 'new materiality' to research current artistic approaches towards formulating their new vocabularies in experience. It will mark the gallery initially as an exhibition space and a research field and will extend it via a supporting program in different locations.

www.tanjawagner.com



Bugünlerde ana ilişkin algımızı değiştiren tutulmalar tecrübe ediyoruz. Birbirini tekrar eden fikir döngülerinin ötesinde yeni alanlar bulmamıza açık davetiye çıkaran bir nevi yeni ay olarak da adlandırabiliriz bu durumu. İngiltere'de öğrencilerin serbest eğitim hakkı için başlattığı ayaklanmalar, Meksika Körfezi'nde önlemi alınamayan büyük petrol sızıntısı, Stuttgart 21 etrafında birleşen ve büyüyen direniş, Kuzey Afrika ve Ortadoğu'da varolan diktatoryel rejimleri değiştirmek isteyen halkların ısrarı, Japonya'da tsunaminin tetiklediği nükleer felaket, Wall Street'te başlayıp hızla yayılan ilhak eylemleri, Yunanistan ve İspanya'da sistemin verdiği zararlara karşı sesini yükseltenleri de unutmayalım, birbirinin ardısıra bizi beklenmedik olana karşı daha esnek davranmaya çağırarak gerçekleşmeye devam ediyorlar. Beklenmedik olanın ne kadar yaratıcı olabileceğini vurgulayarak.

Odağımızı daha da netleştirirsek, beklenmedik olanın yaratıcılığını içinde bulunduğumuz yeni aya cevaben gelişen birçok yeni heyecan verici sanat pratiğine bağlayabiliriz. Kaynaklar ve yöntemler değişse de merkezde kalan bu sanatçıların malzeme, mekan ve performansla, duygu, hissiyat ve kişisel deneyimlerden kopmadan kurduğu açık ilişki. Şöyle de denilebilir; sözü geçen yeni pratikler malzeme ve sürece ilişkin radikal performatif metodolojiler icra ederek veya bunlara işaret ederken; yeniliğe, mantık sıçramalarına, başkalarından öğrenmeye ve yeni bilgilere uyumlanmaya olanak veren serbest stil hokkabazlıklar yaparak bugüne ve ötesine ilişkin farklı paralel anlatılar öneriyorlar. Hayalgücünün bilinmeyen alanlarına işaret ederek bulunduğumuz zaman-mekanın çeşitlemelerinin arasında serbestçe hareket etmemize olanak sağlıyorlar.

Hannah Arendt klasiği Şiddet Üzerine' de analizine olayın kontrol edilemez doğasını vurgulayarak başlar. Bugünün bütünlüğü korumak adına geçmiş öğretilere dayandırdıkları tahminler üreten birtakım politik öngörücüler tarafından okunamayacağını belirtir. Olayın doğasında varolan öngörülemezlik ve beklenmediklik her zaman önceden planlanmış düşünme biçimlerini geçersiz kılar. Arendt bu olguyu beklenmedik olanın yaratıcılığı olarak dillendirir. Sanatsal bir bağlamda beklenmedik olanın yaratıcılığı, güncel olanı arayan güncel sanat söylemine akışkanlığını veren itici güçlerden biri olarak adlandırılabilir: Anda olanla şekillenen; meseleler, malzemeler ve hissiyatlar arasında beklenmedik yanyanalıklar ve ilişkiler kuran bir akışkanlık.

'Yeni Aya Cevaben' yeni maddecilik kavram sorusunu bir tetikleyici olarak ortaya atarak bugünkü sanat yaklaşımlarının kendi deneyimleri üzerinden kendi söz dağarcıklarını bizzat geliştirip geliştiremeyeceğini araştırmayı hedefleyen projelerden ilki. Sergi galeriyi öncelikle bir sergi mekanı ve araştırma alanı olarak işaretleyecek. Farklı mekanlarda gerçekleştireceği etkinlik programıyla da bu araştırma alanını genişletecek.



Thursday, November 3, 2011

'Sanatsal Diyalog'da Ikinci Sayfa Acildi / 03.11.2011 Radikal Kultur Sanat

Almanya’da tutarlılıkla sürdürdüğü farklı söylem çizgisiyle kendine özel bir yer edinmiş Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2011 yılıyla birlikte sanatsal yönetimi için tercihini Türkiye’nin önemli genç kuşak küratörlerinden Adnan Yıldız’dan yana yaparak gündemimize girdi. Açılış sergisi ‘Echt?’te yer alan Ahmet Öğüt’ten sonra, ‘Sanatsal Diyalog’ serisinin ilk kısmında Şener Özmen ve Nevin Aladağ’a birlikte solo sergi alanı açan kurum, bugünlerde serinin ikinci kısmını bu yıl Rampa Galeri’de açtığı solo sergisiyle adından söz ettiren Nilbar Güreş ve İngiliz sanatçı David Blandy’yle gerçekleştiriyor.

 ‘Sanatsal Diyalog 2’de ise Nilbar Güreş’in ‘Self-Defloration’ı (Kendi Kızlığını Kendi Bozmak) ve David Blandy’nin ‘Child of Atom’u sanatçıların üretim anlayışlarını ve süreçlerini, yeni işlerini de ön plana çıkararak mekâna yerleşen sergiler olarak dikkat çekiyor. ‘Self-Defloration’, Güreş’in bugüne kadar Avrupa’daki en kapsamlı solo sergisi. Adı sanatçının üretiminde önemli bir dönüşüme işaret eden ‘Self Defloration’ işinden geliyor. Sergi, 2006’dan 2011’e sanatçının işleri üzerinden kendine ilişkin kurduğu toplumsal cinsiyet formatlarının nasıl farklı şekillerde kurulabileceğini araştıran çok katmanlı anlatıyı eksen alıyor. ‘Undressing’ (2006) ve ‘Bilinmeyen Sporlar, Eviçi Egzersizleri’ (2009) videolarına kamusallaştırıldığı için yıkılmak üzere olan bir mahallede kadınların farklı bir arada yaşama ütopyaları sahneledikleri ‘Çırçır’ serisi (2010) ve taze çizim kolajlar eşlik ediyor. Güreş’in önemli kişisel referansları ve temel malzemesi olan kumaşı kullandığı ilk işlerinin de yer aldığı sergi, hem çizim kolajlarda, fotoğraflarda ve videolarda farklı noktalarda karşımıza çıkan jestleri ve temaları daha süreçsel olarak yeniden görmemizi sağlıyor hem de malzemeyi ele alış biçiminin nasıl evrildiğine dikkat çekiyor.

Serginin sürprizi
Yerleştirmesine emek harcanmış bu serginin özellikle Nilbar Güreş hayranları için sürpriziyse ilk kez gösterilen ‘Kurt ve Kuzu’ (2011). Güreş, daha önceki işlerinde oyunculuğu bir jest olarak kurgularken bu kez daha derin bir içgüdüyü takip ederek oyunun kendisine yönelmiş. Gece vakti bir ormanda yüzüne kurt maskesi takmış bir erkek çocuk, kuzu maskesi takmış bir kız çocuğunu kovalayarak oynarken iki çocuk da bu arketip oyunu oynamaktan mesut kıkırdayarak hayvan seslerini tekrar ediyor. Bu oyun Güreş tarafından bir film setinin arkaplanındaymışız ya da bir rüyanın içindeymişiz gibi yeniden soyutlanarak hayal dünyamıza servis ediliyor.

Bu noktada Güreş’in kendi dünyasından gelen gözlem referanslarıyla şekillenen anlatı stratejileri, David Blandy’nin çizgi romanlardan Tarantino, Wenders ve Lynch referanslarına kendi büyüme hikâyesini yeniden anlatılaştırırken takip ettiği popüler imgelemden dönüşen izlekle ilginç bir karşılaşma da yaşıyor. Her iki sanatçı da bu karşılaşmadan kendi üretimleri için nasıl sorular üretecek? Kısa vadeli cevaplar vermeye acele etmemek gerek. Zira Künstlerhaus Stuttgart için ‘Sanatsal Diyalog’ gibi bir formatı ortaya atan Yıldız, bu karşılaşma alanlarını bizzat tasarlayarak pratiğine ilişkin daha uzun soluklu, sürece kıymet veren sorularla ilgilendiğini gösteriyor. Sergi, 13 Kasım’a kadar görülebilir.