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A step back: A brief history of the Istanbul Biennial and the context that led to this year’s decision to remain within the private spaces of Istanbul.

Shortly before the opening, the curators of the 13th Istanbul Biennial decided to remove the exhibition from the public spaces that had been earmarked for site-specific commissions. As a result, I choose to look at the biennial’s history to explore some of the issues that can effect artists and curators working with site-specificity and negotiating public and private space in Istanbul to gain a better understanding of the curator’s decision on this particular occasion. Two weeks prior to the uprisings at Gezi Park, protestors interrupted a lecture-performance delivered as part of the Public Alchemy education programme of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, with demonstrations about gentrification in Istanbul. The performance-lecture addressed the relationship between art and financial capital. The protestors were responding specifically to the biennial as a gentrification tool. This event highlighted the complexities of producing site-specific work in a city such as Istanbul; where development and gentrification are highly contested and producing work in the public sphere is difficult, when the definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces are not easily defined. The 13th Istanbul Biennial, which opened 14 September 2013, defined its curatorial framework as exploring the notion of the public domain as a political forum; however, this proved difficult in the socio-political context in which it developed and it encouraged the curators to reexamine definitions of publicness and the stakeholders in the public realm. This paper will look at the difficulty of working in a site-specific context that faces the artists, curators and various ‘publics’ involved in the Istanbul Biennial through: a) a specific work that ignited a rethinking of ‘publicness’ by this year’s curators, b) the definitions of public and private space in the Turkish context, c) definitions of site-specificity that govern artistic practice in general, d) a brief history of the Istanbul Biennial and where it sits today and why the Istanbul Biennial is in a uniquely challenging position when choosing to engage with some of the key issues facing the city through artistic practice. On 10 May 2013, Kathleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans presented a lecture-performance as part of the 13th Istanbul Biennial public programme. The subject was the commodification of their home/studio1 into a liquid financial product, the Art House Index. The main component of the event was a Skype session with financial analyst, Frank Goodman. (Heiremans) Together, the artists and analyst discussed issues relating to the commodification of the artists’ home come studio; which also functions as a real estate property – come – work of art and private space – come – public arena. This performance-lecture was chosen as a venue for protestors to highlight tensions surrounding public and private space that have been brought about by urban development in Istanbul, which have caused definitions of ‘site’ to constantly change, as public space becomes privatised and particularly as the biennial has come to be seen as a gentrification tool. A group of protesters interrupted this event to specifically target the biennial as a gentrifying agent, which is financially supported by Koç Holding2, Turkey’s largest industrial conglomerate involved in banking, oil, gas and defence. (Heiremans) At ten-minute intervals throughout the lecture-performance, each protester would stand up in the middle of the floor, wearing a t-shirt and a faux-branded banner printed with the names of gentrifying neighbourhoods in Istanbul, which they would drape over themselves. Each protester was swiftly removed by staff members of IKSV.3 Swiftly following this event, complaints related to a video recording taken by one of the protestors during the event were filed with the police, both by the protesters and the biennial staff. Shortly thereafter, a statement of apology was released by the curator of this year’s biennial curator, Fulya Erdemci stating that, ‘The protest on May 10 took place during the lecture-performance of Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans, who were intending to offer a critique of the multifaceted and complex relation between art and capital, and it disrupted the audience’s experience of the performance. The protestors were removed from the venue so that the artist duo could resume their performance’("Statement on the 13th Istanbul Biennial 'Public Capital' Event"). The protesters and general public were also invited to a follow-up forum to discuss the events that took place on the 10 May in an effort to encourage public debate about the event.4 A couple of weeks later, a larger, unrelated site of protest developed at Taksim Gezi Park in response to issues of gentrification. Demonstrators set up tents in Taksim Gezi Park in response to the uprooting of trees marking the commencement of a building project. The government’s attempt to remove demonstrators brought yet more demonstrators. This happened despite the fact that according to Turkish definitions of ‘public’ space, demonstrators may be banned; these ongoing demonstrations therefore implied a changing definition of public space in the public consciousness and have led to a reclamation of site. These demonstrations highlighted on a larger scale, the complex relations between public and private space in Istanbul; whereas the protest during the lecture-performance highlighted the biennial as not simply as a tool for bringing contemporary art to the city and providing a platform for Turkish artists, but also as a gentrifying agent. Vermeir & Heiremans’s-performance was part of the Istanbul Biennial’s public programme aimed at ‘examin[ing] the ways in which publicness can be reclaimed as an artistic and political tool in the context of global financial imperialism and local social fracture.’ ("13th Istanbul Biennial Public Programme: Public Alchemy") To better understand what the protesters were objecting to, it is helpful to explore the issues relating to urban space and ‘publicness’ in Istanbul and how artists employing principles of site-specificity have dealt with these issues within the context of the Istanbul Biennial. In Turkish culture, the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ provide rich subjects for debate. Architectural historian, Uğur Tanyeli, has addressed issues of public and private space specifically in respect to Turkish culture. According to Tanyeli, private spaces express intimacy, secrecy and a place concealed from others or also loneliness; and in contrast, the public space expresses what appeals to all and is accessible to all. The term public in the Turkish language is generally used to define a place where the state applies regulations to the individuals, which represents power and ideology and the public will is valid: controlling dress and behavior, allowing the covering of heads, or banning demonstrations.(Becoming Istanbul : An Encyclopedia / Pelin Derviş, BüLent Tanju, UğUr Tanyeli 235) These distinctions between public and private spaces provide complex and rich material for artists engaged in site-specific practice within this context (and specifically, the Istanbul Biennial). Traditional definitions of site-specificity set forth in Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another argue that in advanced art practices of the past thirty years the operative definition of the site has been transformed from a grounded, fixed, actual place – to a discursive vector – ungrounded, fluid, virtual.(Kwon 29-30) Her book provides an overview of how site-specific practice evolved historically: from autonomous artworks as the ‘site’ of the work in the 1960s and 70s; to the institution as the site of critique, and therefore work; then to the discursive site which embraces non-art and social issues; followed by a discursive site where the artist is instigator and therefore, operates as site. In her definition of artist as site, Kwon refers to Hal Foster’s essay “The Artist as Ethnographer” in which he provides an overview of the shift towards a quasi-anthropological practice in contemporary art, in which the subject matter is cultural identity. Foster points out that ‘tabooed in postmodernist art, values like authenticity, originality, and singularity can return as properties of sites that artists are asked to embellish. There is nothing wrong with this return per se, but sponsors may regard these properties precisely as sited values to develop.’(Foster) This issue has developed in the urban spaces of Istanbul, where artists are being engaged by the biennial to make works in urban sites that are being ‘reactivated’ for the purposes of the biennial and subsequently gentrified. This year, as a result of the protests during the Vermeir & Heiremans performance-lecture and the subsequent protests that took place at Taksim Gezi Park, curator Fulya Erdemci decided to remove the biennial from public spaces and to contain the biennial to sites which would not play into this ‘authentication’ of site by artists. Erdemci stated the following on her selection of venues for this biennial, ‘When we questioned what it meant to realize art projects with the permissions of the same authorities that do not allow the free expression of its citizens, we understood that the context was going through a radical shift that would side line the raison d’être of realising these projects. Accomplishing these projects that articulate the question of public domain in urban public spaces under these circumstances might contradict their essence and purpose; we are thus convinced that ‘not realizing’ them is a more meaningful statement than having them materialize under such conditions.’("13th Istanbul Biennial Venues Are Announced") In Istanbul, these historic definitions of site-specificity are at odds with an urban space that lacks clear definition and obvious stakeholders. This gives site-specific work in Istanbul more complex parameters than the ‘sites’ defined by Kwon and Foster, as issues of private and public space become key terms when discussing ‘site’. In an encyclopedic guide to Istanbul created by architects and architectural historians, the authors identified that Istanbul hosts various urban cultures and reflects contemporary street-level and urban problems in a sprawling, multiple way, thus presenting the Istanbul Biennial with a multitude of materials. (Becoming Istanbul : An Encyclopedia / Pelin Derviş, BüLent Tanju, UğUr Tanyeli 56) The 13th Istanbul Biennial, in response to the changing definitions of public space in Istanbul, retreated to private spaces to allow artists to produce works that will not enable gentrification and to allow for the ‘public’ to continue to use the public space to develop a space of freedom. In order to understand this decision, it is helpful to have a better understanding of the history of the biennial. The Istanbul Biennial for art was inaugurated in 1987, at a time when Istanbul was determined to demonstrate a willingness to reform and enliven the cultural atmosphere that was still burdened with the legacy of the coup d’état of 1980. (Kosova) Furthermore, Europe was taking over from America as a Western hegemonic power and Western modernism and the prospect of EU membership became more attractive to Turkey. (Projects in the Absence of Signpost) The desires to modernize and to facilitate its internal cultural development along with its international status were factors that undoubtedly shaped the first Istanbul Biennials. From 1987 to 1992, Turkish curators had been responsible for curating the biennial. Beginning in 1995, international curators were invited to come to Istanbul to curate the biennial. The following biennials did not engage with ‘on the ground’ issues such as gentrification and the changing cultural landscape; rather they interpreted Istanbul as a site of passion, beauty and otherness and art works were often selected to support this thesis. This culminated in the 1997 biennial curated by Rosa Martinez, which was criticized for as being used as a tool promote the city as a tourist attraction, rather than to engage with the ongoing social, cultural and urban problems the city was experiencing.(Kosova) However, it did also receive praise from local curators and critics for its concept and the selection of artists. The 7th and 8th Biennials, curated by Yuko Husegawa and Dan Cameron respectively, each followed important historical moments. The 7th biennial opened several days following the September 11 attacks and therefore was not conceived with this climate in mind. However, the 8th biennial (curated by an American curator) was researched and conceived after the attacks and opened six months after the start of the Iraq War. Çaglar Keyder, a sociologist specializing in Middle Eastern and Turkish history, argues that the September 11 attacks marked a turning point for Turkey. As Europe subscribed to the American hegemonic position of the ‘west under attack,’ Turkey began to form relationships with the Middle East and Russia, and was able to finally look at wider horizons and abandon its desire to become ‘Western’ through its membership in the EU.(Projects in the Absence of Signpost) Entitled simply Istanbul, the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005) was the first to follow this dissolved relationship with Western powers. Alongside this, came a re-examining of the urban environment by relocating it to the modern part of the city and finding vacant sites. According to the curators of the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Vasif Kortun & Charles Esche, previous editions of the biennial had engaged either former national sites waiting to be opened to the experience economy, or opted for the Byzantine past in the historical peninsula.(Kortun) This biennial marked a turn to an examination of local issues; at the same time that Turkey was re-examining its own identity within a global context. This biennial highlighted one of the ongoing problematics of the biennial and its relationship to urban space – the direct use of the biennial as a gentrifying mechanism. Kortun and Esche selected vacant sites in an attempt to disassociate the biennial from these urban gentrification projects; these were often former factories that reflected upon the development of the city in the 1950s. However, at some point in their planning process, it became evident that these sites were privatizing faster than the process of their exhibition and this became a subject of importance in their biennial.(Kortun) In a further step away from Western ties and reexamination of the local context, the artists selected for this biennial were mostly emerging artists from Turkey and the surrounding Balkan and Middle Eastern countries. This curatorial focus on urban space and issues of gentrification specific to Istanbul encouraged artists to take this issue as subject. For this 2005 biennial, artist Solmaz Shahbazi, produced a documentary about Istanbul’s gated communities. For this work, Shahbazi, produced a two-channel video, with one channel expressing a tenant’s contentment with her new life in a gated community. The other channel screened critical interviews with experts from the fields of sociology and urban planning about gated communities.(Shahbazi) This video is an effective example of the artist functioning as ethnographer5; taking the site of rapid urbanization and, specifically, two particular neighbourhoods in Istanbul as her subject matter to provide a critical documentation of the transformations taking place in the shifting ‘public’ to ‘private’ urban spaces of the city. The 10th Biennial (2007) curated by Hou Hanru entitled Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War also sought to relocate the sites of the biennial exhibitions. This biennial focused on the use of urban transformation and space by neo-liberal global strategies including the AKM (Atatürk Cultural Centre) and the IMÇ (Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market), which were to be demolished and transformed by local administrations as exhibition spaces. These buildings and the social heritage they represent, and their modernist proposals were opened to public discussions along with the interventions of contemporary artists. The use of many exhibition and project spaces in various areas of Istanbul during the biennial drew attention to the recently much-debated public sphere definition of the city in transformation.(Becoming Istanbul : An Encyclopedia / Pelin Derviş, BüLent Tanju, UğUr Tanyeli 57-58) One work which highlighted the complexities of making site-specific work in the public sphere in Istanbul was Rainer Ganahl’s ‘Silenced Voices’ a 4.5 hour long video. This video presents a survey of topography of the murder sites of 21 ‘silenced’ journalists killed throughout Istanbul. Ganahl revisted these sites, marking with chalk on the street in Turkish and English their names, professions and dates of their murder. He then cycled between these makeshift memorial sites, providing an overview of Istanbul’s topography. For Ganahl, given the specific task, this cityscape is not about an orientalizing, touristic panaroma of Istanbul but to connect and memorialize the murders of these journalists with this bicycle ride. ‘In return I was also offered personal account of the events. Some people remembered the tragedy, were even present and saw the victims.’ (Ganahl) The ‘sites’ of these murdered journalists are indicative of the complex relationship to ‘public’ as defined by Tanyeli as a site where the state applies regulations to individuals, which represents power and ideology and the public will is valid. It is symptomatic that when operating in this ‘public’ space, Ganahl was taken into questioning by the police for simply writing in chalk on the pavement. This work successfully engaged with sites and with public space, however, Ganahl was called into questioning elaborating the impossibility of producing a site-specific work within the public space that deals with issues that are contentious. Ganahl produced a video work and map that was displayed within Antrepo. The confinement of this work to an ‘art space’ highlights the complexities of producing site-specific work in the public realm in Istanbul. The 11th Istanbul Biennial was curated by WHW, four ex-Zagreb University curators: Ana Dević, Ivet Curlin, Sabina Sabolović and aimed to ‘recapitualate the vast upheaveals which have followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only 15 of 70 participating artists claimed a Western status.’ (The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds) It retained the use of some of the buildings employed by Hanru, but its approach to the issues of urban space in Istanbul was not as proactive as the curators had been during the 9th and 10th Biennials and signaled a step away from the use of ‘public’ space. This biennial also marked the beginning of protests by a network of anonymous local collectives directed at the biennial, but with a playful tone6 which was credited at the time as ‘petulance of the so-called “orthodox left”.’ (Wilson-Goldie). The 12th Istanbul Biennial took a further step back from issues of urban transformation and instead took the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres as its starting point. Participating artist Ahmet Ömüt remarked, ‘As for the exhibition design, although it is functional in many ways, I can't escape the impression that I am walking through a sophisticated art fair setting. Also, Istanbul is not the right city in which to ignore public space.’(Senova) In response to the ideological content of this biennial, a group called the Conceptual Art Laboratory, reprinted (and slipped into the Biennial promotional materials) a letter written by Vehbi Koç, founder of the family fortune which sponsors the biennial, which provided detailed and undesirable information about his relationship to the 1980 coup d’état. The recent 13th Istanbul Biennial, entitled Mom, Am I a Barbarian? was preceded by a ten month public programme entitled Public Alchemy during which artists Vermeir & Heiremans presented their lecture-performance about the commodification of public/private space for the event entitled ‘Public Address.’ The programme was intended to: ‘examine speaking and listening in the city, the rights to have a voice, the role of music and poetry in the establishment of different voices, and the crucial role that the media can play in creating public forums. For instance, in the context of calls for an ‘opening up’ of media rights in China, debates about free speech in the media in Turkey, and the rights of private citizens against media intrusion in the UK, what constitutes free speech today? What role do so-called social media play in the development of new forms of public voice?’ ("13th Istanbul Biennial Public Programme: Public Alchemy"). The protesters who interrupted this performance used this opportunity to voice their dissatisfaction with the biennial as a gentrifying agent, used to transform Istanbul’s urban space. In Becoming Istanbul, an encyclopaedic guide to Istanbul, it was postulated that ‘A spatial research of Istanbul biennials would reveal in most, the urban transformation of Istanbul and the strange, indescribable situations in this transformation process. In this context another aspect of the Istanbul Biennial is the fact that it has entered an exact reverse route contradicting the claim that biennials mainly provide acceleration to the city’s cultural catalyst, serve its festivalization, contribute to the branding of the city and become instrumentalized in urban transformations.’ (Becoming Istanbul : An Encyclopedia / Pelin Derviş, BüLent Tanju, UğUr Tanyeli 57) The 13th edition of the biennial highlights these complexities, as the aims of operating within the public sphere in Istanbul, led to its decision to shift the venues to ‘private’ art spaces to avoid interfering with the transformative effects of the Taksim Gezi Park demonstrations already affecting the public realm. This decision that was particularly controversial within Istanbul. Instead, the 13th Istanbul Biennial was confined to art institutions including ARTER, SALT Beyoğlu and artists’ initiative 5533, with all venues free of charge and an aim of creating a ‘publicness’ in line with the original conceptual framework of the exhibition. The curator’s decision to abandon the ‘public’ spaces selected as biennial sites during this 13th edition to explore issues of ‘publicness’ indicates that urban transformation in Istanbul is a sensitive ongoing and unpredictable project. It appears that one of the challenges facing the biennial is how to create site-specific work that engages with the public spaces and how to avoid, as Ömüt stated, creating a biennial that resembles an art fair and disengages from the public space; particularly as there is a great deal of ‘material’ within the public spaces of Istanbul for artists to engage with. This is an interesting moment for the Istanbul Biennial, and with a focus on ‘publicness’ versus public space. By confining the biennial to the private spaces and making them free and accessible to all, it offered access to a higher percentage of members of the public; however, it also did not afford artists the opportunity to produce site-specific work that engages with the rich and complex issues of the public spaces in Istanbul, at a time when such spaces were activated by the complex issues and discourse brought about by the Taksim Gezi Park protests. Bibliography "13th Istanbul Biennial Public Programme: Public Alchemy." 25 January 2013 2013. Web. 22 August 2013. "13th Istanbul Biennial Venues Are Announced." 16 August 2013 2013. Web. 22 August 2013. Becoming Istanbul : An Encyclopedia / Pelin Derviş, BüLent Tanju, UğUr Tanyeli. Eds. Derviş, Pelin, et al. Istanbul: Istanbul : Garanti Gallery, c2008., 2008. Print. The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Karlsruhe, Germany and Cambridge, MA: ZKM, Center for Art and Media and MIT Press 2013. Print. Projects in the Absence of Signpost. 20104 November 2010. "Statement on the 13th Istanbul Biennial 'Public Capital' Event." 9 June 2013 2013. Web. 12 September 2013. Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer." The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. 171-204. Print. Ganahl, Rainer. "Silenced Voices - Bicycling Istanbul's Topography of 21 Murdered Journalists." 2007. Web. 24 August 2013. Heiremans, Kathleen Vermeir & Ronny. "Art House Index, a Lecture Performance." Web. 22 August 2013. Kortun, Charles Esche and Vasif. "The World Is Yours." Art, City and Politics in an Expanding World: Writings from the 9th International Istanbul Biennial. Istanbul, Turkey: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2005. 24-30. Print. Kosova, Erden. "9th Istanbul Biennial." Frieze November-December 2005. Print. Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, Massachusets: MIT Press, 2002. Print. Senova, Basak. "Ahmet Ogut in Conversation with Basak Senova." Ibraaz 2011. Web. 23 August 2013. Shahbazi, Solmaz. "Perfectly Suited for You." The Video Archive. 2005. Web. 24 August 2013. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen. "Public Relations: Istanbul." Diary. Artforum 22 May 2013 2013. Web. 23 August 2013.

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