As a group we met for breakfast at the hotel.
At 10:00 we had our first meeting of the day with Banu Cennetoglu the Director and founder of BAS, the only artist book publishing organisation in Istanbul. Banu spoke about her motivation for setting up BAS and its place within the contemporary art scene in Istanbul. She spoke about BAS’ new series of books called BENT, meaning reservoir or container in Turkish, and her unique approach to collaboration with the artists who’s works she publishes. She also spoke about BAS’s sponsorship funding and their distribution methods.
From there we made our way to the Biennial Information Centre where we gathered general information and purchased our catalogues and guides.
For lunch we met with curator Esra Sarigedik Oktem who has recently moved back to Istanbul after a period of time working at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. We had an informal discussion about our own organisations and her working experience of the visual arts infrastructure in the Netherlands and Istanbul.
After lunch we went to the first Istanbul Biennial venue IMC Istanbul Textile Traders Market in the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul to meet with NOMAD-tv director Basak Senova. Basak spoke about NOMAD-tv’s approach to partnership working with other organisations throughout Turkey and abroad and her curatorial interests in issues around control. Her previous exhibitions include Under Ctrl, Loosing Ctrl, Ctrl_Alt_Del and Upgrade Istanbul which is a new media network of artists, professionals and academics hosted at Santralistanbul.
After our meeting with Basak, we looked around the Istanbul Biennial exhibition World Factory in the IMC Istanbul Textile Traders Market. World Factory included around 30 artists who’s works were installed in and amongst the empty shops and loosely dealt with issues around trade.
From IMC we went to Antrepo No.3 in Beyoglu next to Istanbul Modern for the largest of the Biennial exhibitions Entre-Polis which included around 42 artists. Antrepo also housed the Dream House exhibition which included about 13 artists. Antrepo is part of the Istanbul harbour facing the Bospherus and the Golden Horn. The work in this show loosely dealt with issues around geopolitical conflict, trade and global communication.
A short break for Turkish coffee at the Mosque and we headed to the Port for a ferry to the Asian side of the city to see a screening programme as part of Nightcomers. After a 30 minute taxi ride we arrived in Istanbul suburbia on a road called Kanlica Hisari Caddesi in Kanlica, Beykoz. The films were projected into a paper based screen attached to a stone wall, powered by a nearby van on the roadside. The 2 1/2 hours long screening was compiled of the public’s films selected from 760 submissions. The screening were selected by the four Turkish curators Marcus Graf, Ovul Durmusoglu, Borga Kanturk, Pelin Uran and Adnan Yildiz. The 59 screening locations across Istanbul were selected by Netherlands based artists Bik Van der Pol.
We went for dinner after a long day and all headed back to the hotel for some well earned sleep.
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7 comments:
After recently attending Manchester's Urban Screens conference, and listening to many of the surrounding debates and upcoming developments in the tricky tangle that is Urban Screens, this project represented an ad-hoc, grass roots approach to what could have been the usual glossy fest of big corporate screens and an overload of sponsors i-dents.
Projected on small A1 size, craggy edged sheets of paper, affixed to walls in not always ideal locations, Nightcomers focussed on the content rather than the context of screens, showing an array of different short films from national and international artists.
After a long windy car journey to the location and a long day the screening on an A1 piece of paper seemed a bit of an anti climax but the more I slept on it the more I liked the 'guerilla' style of these screenings that took place across 25 locations; it gave a degree of curatorial independence big screenings and large projections tend to lose as Karen mentions
The Nightcomers project did seem to have its heart in the right place, but curator Marcus Grafs assertion it was screenings by the people for the people was a bit confused I thought. I got the impression it was pretty much unengaged with the communities each screening was in; although hard to judge on one location.
I think it would have been interesting if the make shift cinemas were more regular at the locations and began to develop a relationship with the place...
Here here!
The Nightcomers programme was an ‘urban-screens’ programme of single-channel film and video submitted by members of the public ‘who have something to say’. When we arrived at the suburban district on the East side of the Golden Horn we almost walked past the 2 people sticking a piece of A2 paper on the wall of a car park. Then, onto it they shone a data projector running from a DVD player of the film programme.
I found the low-fi, almost sculptural presentation of this screening, which was more on a par with a happening, immediately refreshing. Gone were the oversized, big-budget, corporate sponsored urban screens, (perhaps) to be expected at an international art Biennial and so sought after in other parts of Europe.. The presentation of the films pinpointed Hou Hanru’s ‘hit and run’ vision for the Nightcomers beautifully, with its political reference to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s when people posted images and text on street corners demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the totalitarian regime. Single-channel artists’ film showreels, as useful as they are for platforming artists’ work, are not always the most appropriate or sensitive method for showing work. Perhaps the least effective aspect to Nightcomers was the open submission call for films, which was open to non-artists as well as artists. Unfortunately, because it was branded as an art Biennial activity, the vast majority of submissions came from artists.
Hou Hanru’s original vision for the Nightcomers programme was to attract much higher visitor figures than the Biennial exhibitions themselves. As this Nightcomers location was not only on the periphery of a car park but also on the periphery of the city, there were not many viewers, but at least it gave people in suburbia a chance... There may have been a slight chasm between Hou Hanru’s original vision and some of Bik van der Pol’s 59 selected screening locations but I admired the bravery and tenacity of this approach. It should be pointed out however, that this screening location was just one of the 59 locations chosen and other locations ranged from parks to the busiest shopping street in Istanbul.
I think the Nightcomers screening divided group opinion, and while I do support the almost guerilla principles of the programme, my own personal opinion was that it wasn't pre-planned as such and the project was perhaps post-rationalised?
With my own technical and community background, the main issue I had was, that if the content was in fact king, location choice and sound quality really should have been much better.
I think what I will take away from Nightcomers is a concept that with some tweaking could be really effective. Support material, improved AV and an awareness of the community around I think would have added to what was in principle a nice idea. It shouldn't matter if the venue was a street corner or a busy shopping district, quality control measures would have helped avoid the anti-climax I experienced. A missed opportunity? PF
The World Textile Factory I found the most interesting venue but i think on the whole the responses to the site itself seemed pretty poor and lo scale; the scope for taking Hanrou's vision here seemed massive so it felt like a missed opportunity.
Overall I enjoyed the work although some of the installs were pretty badly put together quality control wise..
Meeting Basak was particularly useful to me and SoundNetwork
I had emailed her through a colleague, before coming and then realising we were already due to meet!!
Some of her work follows a similar mode to the way I work so it was really interesting and useful to hear about her work and the way it was linked into general artist networks and the local art community.
Was a brilliant café and would have been an amazing site for an artist residency; and quite a contrast compared with the kind of space for artists provided for by Platform...
Could imagine trying to engage with the people and systems in there would be really fascinating...
SoundNetwork hope to keep in touch with Basak and nomad-tv
See the photoblog for tuesday (courtesy of Greg)
here
Wow....I can't believe how much we fitted in that day!
I loved meeting Banu from BAS. I think it was here that I first realised how driven everyone seems to be out there and just how successful they are without much funding (no arts council for instance). The books were great, not books about artists or documenting in anyway...the book was a piece in itself, each one very different.
I also think that the IMC was a GREAT venue with by far the most potential...but it did seem somewhat of a let down. The standard of work wasn't great and i also felt that lots more of the space could have been used. I'd love to be let loose there myself to create something really interesting.
As for the 'urban screens', i feel torn. I was really disappointed when we first arrived, expecting something far more polished and viewed by many more people. But then I totally agree with Clarissa that it was very refreshing for it to be so lo fi and as a result i have probably talked far more fondly of nightcomers on return to the UK.
Re: Nightcomers
I’m in agreement with much of the opinion expressed so far, particularly Ross and Patrick, that the event that we saw was anti-climatic – partly let down be the low quality of the production and partly, as Clarissa mentioned due to the open submission process of choosing the videos. To me it was also disappointment in terms of the lofty ambitions of the organisers whose aims were to create a “video dazi bao”. Visually it had some connection to the dazibaos of the Cultural Revolution in China with a simple torn A1 sheet to display the work. However after looking at some of the results for an image search for dazibao it wasn’t hard for me to see Nightcomers as a missed opportunity both in its visual impact and its interaction/participant with the public.
Search results:
http://usuarios.lycos.es/pete_baumann/dazibao.jpg
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7092/images/441392a-i1.0.jpg
http://cache3.gettyimages.com/xc/51951653.jpg?v=1&c=NewsMaker&k=2&d=AE5E3E7DB8E31417EBB506BA21A4208B284831B75F48EF45
http://tinyurl.com/yqssck
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