Istanbul, Turkey — IN the lobby of Istanbul's gleaming new modern art museum hang four plaques recording congratulations from Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder along with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That European leaders should acknowledge a faraway museum inauguration was no accident. The opening was speeded up, from March 2005 to December 2004, to coincide with a historic European Union summit in Brussels that agreed to open membership negotiations with Turkey.
It was a striking instance of art's commerce with politics, amped up by geography. Istanbul is now as large as any European city, yet Turkey borders on Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Istanbul Modern's chief curator, Rosa Martinez, calls the museum's opening "a strong aesthetic, social and political statement" about Turkey's will "to live together with the other European countries." Indeed, the plan to build a contemporary museum in the city's heart had stalled for years until Erdogan's government cleared the way, according to museum board chair Oya Eczacibasi.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday December 23, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 36 words Type of Material: Correction
Istanbul Biennial -- An article in the Dec. 11 Calendar section about an international art exhibition included Palestine in a list of nations from which artists had contributed works. It should have said the Palestinian territories.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday January 01, 2006 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Istanbul Biennial -- A Dec. 11 article on an international art exhibition incorrectly included Palestine in a list of nations from which artists had contributed works. It should have said the Palestinian territories.
Can art in Istanbul remain immune to political pressure or even criticize the status quo? Or will this art be co-opted by political and economic forces?
Only 35% of Europeans support Turkish membership in the EU, according to a poll released by the EU in August. Underlying political concerns is a deep-seated cultural anxiety: Is Turkey, a comparatively poor and mostly Muslim nation, European enough to join the club?
In 2002, former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing contended that admitting Turkey would mean no less than "the end of Europe." Enter the Istanbul Modern, with its collection of Turkish and international art housed in an enormous two-story restored warehouse on the Bosporus, facing Asia and Topkapi Palace -- not unlike the Tate Modern on the Thames, facing St. Paul's Cathedral. As if to answer Giscard, Blair's plaque reads: "As we look ahead at the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union, it is increasingly important that the world learns more of what Turkey and Turkish people have to offer us."
Eschewing art as tourism
ART and politics took center stage this fall with the ninth Istanbul Biennial, an international art exhibition funded by the same organization that founded the new museum, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. The art fair, which opened in mid-September, coincided with the initial round of EU membership talks with Turkey and strengthened the country's European profile, suggesting that Istanbul is the next stop on the biennial train after Venice -- whose own biennial was co-curated this year by the Modern's Martinez.
Politics informed this year's Istanbul Biennial all the more for focusing on the city itself. Curator Charles Esche, 43, a Briton who directs the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and his Turkish co-curator, Vasif Kortun, 46, said that in years past, curators came to Istanbul and were wowed by the amazing Byzantine and Ottoman sites. As a result, they would display art from around the globe in historic settings, with Japanese videos, for example, shown inside 6th century Hagia Sophia. This practice, Esche said, meant overlooking present-day Istanbul and amounted to "a refusal of history."
"Art becomes tourism in exotic sites," he said, "which tourists come to see."
By contrast, Esche and Kortun elected to embed their installations in the contemporary working city, at several venues in Beyoglu, Istanbul's commercial and entertainment center.
If the job of biennials is to gather art from near and far, then Istanbul, an enormous patchwork of East and West, amounts to a very long-running one itself. From the time the Emperor Constantine made the city his capital in AD 330 through the Ottoman Empire, governments commissioned artists throughout the civilized world to adorn their city. So Kortun's and Esche's innovation of offering residencies to biennial artists in fact followed tradition.
From a few weeks to several months, artists came to produce, as Kortun put it, "works about Istanbul, for Istanbul." Fifty-three artists and art groups participated, some from Western Europe or the New World, but most from the old Ottoman Empire or environs: Croatia, Albania, Kazakhstan, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Romania.
Esche and Kortun were seeking not depictions of the city's truth (could it be found) but rather artists' responses to Istanbul, an effort to refract the city's myriad aspects through many lenses.
"We wanted to avoid generic internationalism -- which amounts to globalism as decoration," Esche said. "You need to be specific: Our artists come from cities, not countries; Ramallah, not Jordan."
