Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

2011-02-20T04:39:00.001-08:00

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center took a break from its exhibition program at the end of 2007 and formally ended its activities under this name in 2010. In 2008 major renovations of the building that had hosted Platform Garanti, as well as the former Ottoman Bank Headquarters in Galata were initiated in order to combine elements of Platform's previous activities with those of Garanti Gallery and the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center. The newly formed institution SALT opened its first venue at 136 İstiklal Caddesi on April 9, 2011. The physical documents and information accumulated by Platform Garanti will be incorporated into SALT Research at SALT Galata, which opens in Fall 2011 and all digital files will in time be hosted at www.saltonline.org

Curator Talk: Stine Hebert

2010-05-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 25 at 6:30 p.m.

Istiklal Str. no:115A Beyoglu/Ist.

Stine Hebert the current curator in residence at Platform Garanti will speak about her research and upcoming projects.

Hebert is interested in exploring the conditions of artistic production and has curated a number of exhibitions revolving around this topic. She is currently working on the international anthology ”Contemporary History Writing of the Self-organised” co-edited by Anne Szefer Karlsen, director of Hordaland Art Centre (NO). As a curator at The Factory of Art and Design in Copenhagen Hebert developed new residency formats to engage with and think beyond the current frameworks for contemporary art production and she most recently launched the international institutional collaboration and pilot project Collaborative Research Residency. Hebert will talk about these projects and present her recent collaboration with PiST/// Interdisciplinary Project Space for No Soul for Sale – A Festival of

Independents which was realised at Tate Modern between May 14-16, 2010.

Stine Hebert is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds an MA in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College and an MRes in Art History from University of Copenhagen. She is part of the curatorial team for AUX – Forum for Sound Culture, a non-profit organisation she co-founded in 2004. Hebert has curated international exhibitions in Europe and the US and has contributed to various exhibition catalogues and magazines. She currently works as curator at The Factory of Art and Design and is external lecturer at the University of Copenhagen.

Image: Elmgreen & Dragset: Powerless Structures, Fig. 11 (1997)

My City Art and Public Space: May Symposium 8, 15 May 2010

2010-04-30T23:57:00.000-07:00

As part of the My City project a group of international artists, writers, curators and museum professionals whose work relates to the subject of public art will meet for the symposium "Art and Public Space: May Symposium" to be held in Istanbul. The conversation will cover concerns and ideas about temporary monuments and the value of public squares, the production of new public cultural spaces, unauthorised public interventions and public art biennials.

Art and Public Space: May Symposium, part I

Saturday, May 8

10:40-17:00

İTÜ (Istanbul Technical University)

Taşkışla Campus, Conference room no: 127

Dieter Bogner [Art Historian (PhD), exhibition curator, museum planner, author, university lecturer and collector of site specific contemporary art, Vienna], Katrina Brown [Director of The Common Guild, Glasgow], Fulya Erdemci [Director of SKOR, Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte (Foundation Art and Public Space), Amsterdam], Teresa Gleadowe [independent writer, editor and curator, London], Bilge Kalfa [imkanmekan, Istanbul], Julie Lomax [Head of Visual Arts Organisation, Arts Council England, London]

Art and Public Space: May Symposium, part II

Saturday, May 15

10:40-17:00

garajistanbul

Dave Beech [member of the artist collective Freee, freelance writer, London], Luchezar Boyadjiev [artist, Sofia], Martin Fritz [freelance curator, consultant and writer, Vienna], Lauren Ross [Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and Director of Arts Programs at Friends of the High Line, New York], Krzysztof Wodiczko [artist, Cambridge, MA], Zeynep Yasa Yaman [Art Historian, Hacettepe University, Faculty of Letters, Department of Art History, Ankara]

About My City:

Istanbul is currently celebrating its selection as European Capital of Culture 2010. To mark this important event the initiative My City was launched as part of the European Commission's Cultural Bridges Programme with the aim to establish partnerships between cultural actors in Turkey and Europe and to reciprocally raise cultural awareness.

My City brings five prominent European artists to Turkey to each develop a unique work of public art for a specific city to be inaugurated in September 2010. In addition to Istanbul, the cities include Çanakkale, Mardin, Trabzon and Konya, and together they represent the diversity of the country, both geographically and demographically. The artists are: Andreas Fogarasi, Austria (Istanbul); Clemens von Wedemeyer, Germany (Mardin); Joanna Rajkowska, Poland (Konya);Mark Wallinger, UK (Çanakkale); Mina Henriksson, Finland (Trabzon). At the same time, several of Turkey's leading artists will be given the opportunity to share their recent works at some of Europe's leading cultural venues.

Artists from Turkey participating in residency programmes in Europe are Can Altay, Centrum Sztuki Wspólczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Caner Aslan, Berliner Künstlerprogramm, Berlin;Gülsün Karamustafa / Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna; Güneş Terkol, Gasworks: Exhibitions, International Residencies & Studios, London; Işıl Eğrikavuk, Hartware MedienKunstVerein & Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Dortmund and Leyla Gediz, HIAP and Näyttelyvaihtokeskus FRAME, Helsinki.

Artists from Europe have been nominated for My City by a panel of acclaimed international curators; Andrea Schlieker (UK), curatorial adviser for My City and Curator of Folkestone Triennial, Brigitte Franzen (DE), Director, Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Mika Hannula (FI), University of Gothenburg/ freelance curator, Sebastian Cichocki(PL) Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw and Silvia Eiblmayr(AT) Co-curator Austrian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2009 and selected together with British Council and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center.

My City has been conceived by the British Council in collaboration with local partners Anadolu Kültür and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. The project is funded by the European Commission and the British Council and led by a dedicated team at the British Council in İstanbul.

DK03: Distributed Identity

2010-04-15T21:34:00.001-07:00

April 20, 2010 Tuesday, 19:00-21:00
Garanti Galeri – Platform Garanti
İstiklal Caddesi 115, Beyoğlu İstanbul

Participants
.-_-.
Tunç Topçuoğlu
Serkan Zihli

Personal identity data flows through a multiplicity of government and corporate information systems every day. Our activities are constantly being legitimized through social security numbers, chip enabled ID cards, banking/credit systems and commercial developments within the internet that involve social networks, etc. While this condition is exploited by activist artist groups such as The Yes Men who endeavor to find holes in such infrastructures, ultimately these systems enable increasing forms of social control that include visa processing and immigration governance. But, we can argue that it is still possible to perform ‘off the record’ by assuming tactics of multi-use identity, anonymity, or invisibility to allow our identities to be recomposed again and again in a variety of accessible hierarchies. The question to be raised in respect to such activities is: how do we react to the new realities generated by decentralized and distributed natures of identity?

Düğümküme Meetings is a new discussion series that aims to confront contemporary art by considering its relationship to rapidly developing technologies in the context of civil society issues.
http://dugumkume.org/dk03

Previous meetings:

DK02: Hybrid Public Space, Apr 6th – http://dugumkume.org/dk02
Can Altay, Akın İdil (Valensas Technology Solutions), Mücteba Kılıç (Genç Siviller)
video: http://dugumkume.org/dk02-video

DK01: Distributed Work, Mar 3rd – http://dugumkume.org/dk01
Karen Verschooren (Z33 Art Center), Emel Kurma (Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly), Hasan Yalçınkaya (Pilli Network)
video: http://dugumkume.org/dk01-video

Artist Talk

2010-04-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Miniature Existence, 2009

Basim Magdy

Thursday, April 8, 18:30

Istiklal Str. no:115 Beyoglu

Basim Magdy, artist in residence at Platform Garanti during April, will speak about his practice, upcoming projects and screen his recent video work "Turtles All the Way Down".

Magdy is interested in the space between reality and fiction and how it is systematically filled up by media distributed knowledge. His intention is not to investigate the authenticity of events, but rather, to consider how all of us tend to affiliate certain fictional imaginary with reality. By presenting those characters and events in unfamiliar contexts he tries to trick the viewer and play with their expectations. He uses absurdity as a tool to propose a different understanding of power structures and expose the authoritative practices implemented by the media.

Basim Magdy (1977) is an artist from Egypt. He lives and works in Cairo and Basel. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt (BFA Painting) in 2000. He has participated in various group exhibitions including As the land Expands, Al Riwaq Art Space, Bahrain (2010); Indefinite Destinations, DEPO, Istanbul (2010), Scratch, ADN Galeria, Barcelona (2009); Alive!, LUXE Gallery, New York (2009), Fake, MUSAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Leon, Spain (2008), Me Odio Y Quiero Comprar, Enrique Guerrero Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2007). He has had solo exhibitions in Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York, USA; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland and Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, Egypt.

İmage: Miniature Existence, 2009

DK02. Hybrid Public Space

2010-03-26T03:19:00.001-07:00

April 6, 2010 Tuesday, 19:00-21:00

Garanti Galeri - Platform Garanti

İstiklal Caddesi 115, Beyoğlu İstanbul

map, aram bartholl, 2006-2009

Participants

Can Altay

Akın İdil (Valensas Teknoloji Hizmetleri)

Mücteba Kılıç (Genç Siviller)

Our contemporary public space is hybrid in two ways: 1) its environment is both physical and virtual, 2) its management is public, private and community-based at the same time. With the adoption of mobile internet applications and the use of information technologies within the city infrastructure, a new digital skin has been layered over the urban materiality. We are moving away from the Enlightenment concept of public space, which once consisted of large squares and later post-modernist public space composed for example of privately owned shopping malls. As public space develops into an ever more stratified entity, what kind of new realities do we confront in these hybrid public spaces? How do we react to these changes? How do the new commons, configured by hyper-local spaces, effect social and individual creation?

Düğümküme Meetings is a new discussion series that aims to confront contemporary art by considering its relationship to rapidly developing technologies in the context of civil society issues. http://dugumkume.org/dk02

The first meeting DK01 titled 'Distributed Work' took place on February 3rd with the participation of Karen Verschooren, curator from Z33 Art Center Brussels, Emel Kurma, director of Helsinki Citizens' Assembly, and Hasan Yalçınkaya, co-founder of Pilli Network.

The video documentation can be viewed here http://dugumkume.org/dk01-video

We will be using a new consensus-voting tool during the discussions. Please use the link below to sign up and get more information.

http://kopublik.com/entities/5

01. Distributed Work

2010-02-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

Prophecy, 2007, Helmut Stallaerts. Photo Copyright: Kristof Vrancken. Installation at Z33 Art Center.

Wednesday March 3, 2010

18:30-20:30

Garanti Galeri - Platform Garanti

İstiklal Caddesi 115, Beyoğlu İstanbul

'Distributed work' can be examined in three different dimensions. Firstly, it proposes a way to work in composition, in order to create a unique product composed of others' ideas that were formed at different times. Second, it offers a platform to work collaboratively via ad-hoc and long distance relationships to create a unique product together without working at the same institution or in the same place. Third, it allows the unfinished / open condition of the product to transform through the work of participants, users, or viewers.

As communication technologies become more widespread, the condition of work becomes more complex. How do these new work conditions affect work-life balance, time flexibility, creativity, motivation, quality, and mobility?  

The speakers are Karen Verschooren, curator from Z33 Art Center Brussels, Emel Kurma, director of Helsinki Citizens' Assembly, and Hasan Yalçınkaya, co-founder of Pilli Network.

  Düğümküme Meetings is a new discussion series that aims to confront contemporary art by considering its relationship to rapidly developing technologies in the context of civil society issues.  

We will be using a consensus-voting tool during the discussions. Please use the link below to sign up and get more info: http://kopublik.com/

Nilbar Güreş: "Artist Beyond" Talk

2010-01-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

February 13, 2010 Saturday, 14:00

Platform Garanti

Garanti Han

Istiklal Cad. No:115

Beyoğlu/Ist.

One of the participants of 6th berlin biennial Nilbar Güreş will discuss her recent projects during her talk at Platform. This conversation is realized in the context of an international cooperation as part of Artists Beyond, the prelude to the 6th berlin biennial for contemporary art to be realized between June 11 and August 08, 2010. Platform has been hosting artist talks since early 2009 with artists whose works are rarely presented in Turkey.

The works of Nilbar Güreş thematise female identity and gender issues, exploring the methods of visibility in public space. Against the backdrop of changing gender roles in contemporary Turkey, Güreş produces striking visual representations. As a result her works challenge the traditional patriarchal order that has been operating since the invention of normality, (hetero) sexuality and sexual perversion in the 18th century.

Nilbar Güres completed her masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna where she has been living and working. Selected exhibitions of Güreş in 2009 include; Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna; 11th Istanbul Biennial; Gallery Anita Beckers, Frankfurt; and TANAS, Berlin.

The berlin biennial for contemporary art is organized by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Artists Beyond has been funded with support from the European Commission.

Céline Condorelli Support Structures

2009-11-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

Book Launch
Thursday, November 05, 2009, 6 pm
Platform Garanti Istanbul, at Bilsar Building
Mesrutiyet Caddesi 90

Céline Condorelli
Support Structures
A manual for what bears, sustains, props and holds up.

Sternberg Press and Platform Garanti are pleased to present Support Structures by Céline Condorelli.

With essays by: Céline Condorelli, Mark Cousins, Jaime Stapleton, Andrea Phillips, Bart de Baere, Wouter Davidts, Eyal Weizman & Rony Brauman, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jan Verwoert

With works by: Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Filippo Brunelleschi, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Flatpack 001 (Mark and Stephen Beasley), Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Gareth Jones, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Enzo Mari, Antoni Muntadas, Peter Nadin, ‘The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters’, Radim Pesko, Lilly Reich, Jane Rendell, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kurt Vonnegut, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o.

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

Support Structures is a critical enquiry into what constitutes “support,” and also documents the collaborative project “Support Structure” by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts, which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. The collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from propositions to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes.

Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.

For press inquiries and orders please contact mail@sternberg-press.com.

Produced in co-production with Support Structure:
Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade with James Langdon
Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York
October 2009, English
21 x 14.8 cm, 438 pp., 8 full-colour and 400+ two-colour ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-933128-45-0

This book was made possible through essential structural support from Platform Garanti, Istanbul, and the generous support of Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England, Essex University Gallery, London Metropolitan University, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

October 24 Saturday, 14:00

2009-10-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Spectacle
Nikos Papastergiadis

October 24 Saturday, 14:00
Garanti Galeri - Platform Garanti
İstiklal Caddesi 115A

"Throughout modern history we can see a common expression of discontent held against the existing social order in artistic, political and philosophical statements. They all proceed from the shared starting point that human potential is restricted. They may differ in relation to identifying the restrictive forces and articulating the form of human subjectivity, but they all possess the aim to overcome the perceptual and real constraints that are imposed by habits, norms and rules. Within this core aim is a vision that I am calling a cosmopolitan imaginary. It is the affirmative side of the exilic drive, which also runs throughout modern culture."

In his talk Nikos Papastergiadis will discuss the relationship between art and politics of our time by comparing the thoughts of Jacques Ranciere, who has written on the significance of avant gardist experiments with everyday life and new techniques of visual and literary representation, and those of Gerald Raunig who is fascinated with the shared aspects of artistic and activist techniques of communication as framed by a new kind of cosmopolitan political and aesthetic consciousness.

Nikos Papastergiadis was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne; Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts; lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. He has published books including Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006), Metaphor + Tension: On Collaboration and its Discontents (Artspace Publications, 2004) and The Turbulence of Migration (Polity Press, 2000),

Cultural Agencies Panel

2009-09-06T21:53:00.000-07:00

Red Thread
Thursday, September 10, 2009 / 15.30 - 17.30
Ex-Platform Garanti Building - Istiklal Caddesi 136

Presentation and panel discussion including contributions by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, Oda Projesi, Shahab Fotouhi, Shahira Issa, Gregory Sholette and William Wells. Moderated by Nina Möntmann.

The panel “Cultural Agencies” seeks to expose new forms of cultural collaboration and institution building. The participants will present projects that have either subverted the conventional infrastructure of cultural institutions for political and social agendas or have deliberately left the comfort of globally networked cultural operations or state-animated cultural infrastructure. Instead, they explore the largely ignored narratives of volatile, local, political, social and cultural contexts. Hidden to the gaze of the outsider, the apparent void is occupied by a multitude of new forms of “agency”, which are informal, semi-formal, familial, kinship based, communal, religious, or political. While lack of funding and support is ubiquitous, the absence of a formal state infrastructure has been counteracted through the combined spirit of free agency, self-help, improvisation, or an expression of simply surviving. Panel presentations will explore the contexts of Cairo, Teheran, the urban transformation of Istanbul, and the Beyond of the centre-specific, cultural bubble.

A project by Cultural Agencies/ Kültürel Aracılar is a non-profit initiative curated by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz and Oda Projesi. Hosted by Platform Garanti/ Garanti Galeri in collaboration with Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, Städelschule Frankfurt.
The project has been made possible through the generous support of the German Allianz Kulturstiftung and RHYZOM - a collaborative network for local cultural production and trans-local dissemination funded by the European Commission.

2009-09-06T21:25:00.001-07:00

Towelflag

2009-08-27T00:04:00.000-07:00

Friday, August 28 2009, 6:30 pm
Former Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center
Istiklal Cad. No: 136, Beyoglu

Towelflag is a temporary intervention in the public space of Istanbul. A 60-meter piece of white towel fabric hangs from two pre-existing flagpoles on the façade of the former Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center headquarters. From the flagpoles located on the third floor, the white flags drop and enter through the first floor windows, crossing rooms and corridors until they meet in the toilet where hanging from a towel rack they can be used as a hand towel.

Towelflag will be exhibited on the façade of the building, currently undergoing renovation, and located on the pedestrian Istiklal Avenue, one of the most populous streets in Istanbul (said to have nearly six million people walking through it on weekends). Amidst blasting loud vendors, neon lights and all the visual and acoustical overwhelming cacophony of this street, Towelflag stands as a fairly quiet and partially hidden work, accessible in its entirety only to the building’s security guard, the one person able to use the flag as a towel.

Spanish born, Berlin based Jasmina Llobet & Luis Fernández Pons are an artist collective working together since 2002 across the fields of installation, object sculpture and art in public space. They are currently artists in residence at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center.

Towelflag has been realized with the generous support by Can Xalant, Mataró and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul

My City  European Residencies [MCER]

2009-07-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

 
MCER, is a one-off programme to be realized between 2010 and 2011 for enabling visual artists from Turkey to develop their work in six prominent host institutions across Europe through residencies.

It forms part of My City, a new cultural initiative funded through the European Commission’s Cultural Bridges Programme, designed and run by the British Council in Turkey. The programme’s aim is to establish partnerships between artists and institutions in Turkey and Europe.

The My City programme has two strands: MCER and a programme of activities in Turkey around the theme of art in public space, including seminars, conferences and new commissions. Starting in 2009, five artists from Europe will be invited to Turkey to develop a unique work of public art for a specific city in Turkey. The selected cities are Canakkale, Istanbul, Konya, Mardin and Trabzon. Each of these cities has a unique story to tell and this project will give the artists the opportunity to take part in residencies and show their work at some of Europe’s leading cultural venues. The names of all participants will be announced during the International Istanbul Biennale in September.

My City has been conceived by the British Council together with Anadolu Kultur and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. The project is funded by the European Commission and the British Council.
 
Goal   The project goal is to enable visual artists to develop and reflect upon their work in a different European environment and culture. The residency also generates opportunities for making or extending contacts and for exploring and/or developing a new context as well as producing new work.

Who Can Apply?

My City European Residencies [MCER] grants are intended for visual artists. However, artists who are part of a collective or a multi-disciplinary team are also welcome to apply to the MCER.

In addition to work-related criteria, there are a number of conditions applicants must satisfy in order to qualify for a grant. All applicants must be resident in Turkey, and if they are not nationals of Turkey, they must have a valid residence permit. A good command of English and other relevant languages of the place of residence are required.

For precise details of the conditions, applicants are referred to the explanation accompanying the application form. If you require more information please contact: platform@garanti.com.tr.

Selection Process

MCER Applications will be reviewed by a committee of six professionals, including but not limited to curators, who have the experience in international residencies. There will be one representative each from Platform Garanti and the British Council.

The committee will prepare a short-list of three candidates for each institution for which the application was made. The final selection will be made by the European host institutions in consultation with the committee.

Host Institutions

Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw , Poland is the premier interdisciplinary contemporary art centre in Poland and one of the most vibrant art centres in Central and Eastern Europe. The CCA has been supporting, documenting and presenting art since 1989. The audience consists of professionals, artists, students but also people unacquainted with art on an everyday basis.

The a-i-r programme, created in 2002 in the frame of the CCA international activity, is an extension and a complement of the ongoing dialogue between artists from around the world. The small scale of the a-i-r laboratory has allowed for an individual approach to each visiting artist by working in close dialogue with a curator. The CCA is interested in both site-specific projects and further work on projects initiated before arrival. The institution encourages an exchange between artists from different cultures and the local milieu. Publications (artist books, posters, catalogues) created during the residency stays at a-i-r laboratory are of great importance.

Presentations of the visiting artists’ works are incorporated into the CCA’s programme of events in the form of lectures, screenings, discussions, exhibitions and performances. Artists are encouraged to work in public space.

Workrooms are designed both for artists using traditional techniques and for those employing new media. There is a bedroom, a kitchen, a studio and a film workshop equipped with a camera, microports, lighting and editing computers at the disposal of the residents. Furthermore, a-i-r laboratory residents can benefit from the CCA’s technical background, library, reading room and videotheque.

Gasworks: Exhibitions, International Residencies & Studios, London , UK
Founded in 1994, Gasworks is an art organization located in a three-story Victorian building in South London, between Vauxhall and Oval underground stations. It houses 12 artists’ studios – of which nine are rented by London based artists and three are dedicated to residencies – and offers a programme of exhibitions and events, artists’ residencies, international fellowships and educational projects.

Gasworks focuses on visual arts practice in its broadest sense, working discursively with UK-based and international artists to facilitate the development of their work. Gasworks’ programme is committed to providing a responsive context and to disseminating critical practices to a wider audience. Gasworks is part of the Triangle Arts Trust, an international network of artists and organisations.

As part of the My City programme, one Turkish or Turkey-based artist will be selected for a residency and a solo exhibition at Gasworks in Spring 2010. The residency will take place between 1 April and 30 June 2010, offering the selected artist a studio at Gasworks, accommodation and living expenses. The exhibition will open at the end of the residency, on 25 June 2010 and remain open for seven weeks, until 15 August 2010.

The artist will receive pastoral and curatorial support from both the residencies coordinator and exhibitions curator throughout the period of residency at Gasworks. The exhibition will be the result of a dialogue between the artist and the two curators and is expected to start prior to the residency period.

DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service, Berlin Dates 3 months in the first half of 2010
The Berliner Künstlerprogramm was found in 1963 by the Ford Foundation as an artist-in-residence programme. In 1965 it was taken over by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). As part of the My City programme, the Berliner Künstlerprogramm is offering a three month residency in Berlin in the first half of 2010.

The aim of this programme is to promote an exchange of experience among artists and to foster their involvement with current cultural issues in other countries. Through numerous internal meetings and projects which are carried out in the DAAD Gallery or in cooperation with other cultural institutions, the Berliner Künstlerprogramm aims to establish contacts with local artists and personalities involved in Germany’s cultural life.

With their expertise, the visual arts team of the Künstlerprogramm will support the selected guest artist to realize a project developed during his/her stay in Berlin (for example a new piece, an exhibition, a public work, a publication etc.). In Berlin, the guest artist will have the opportunity to continue his/her work undisturbed and to participate actively in the city’s cultural life.

Visual artists who live and work in Turkey are encouraged to apply. They should be at the beginning of their career or not yet be widely internationally known. The invitation is issued in conjunction with a grant that allows for an adequate standard of living. It also includes a furnished apartment and a production budget. Artists who accept the invitation take up permanent residence in Berlin for the duration of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm grant.

Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna , Austria
The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna has been a leading European training centre for artists for more than 300 years. The Academy offers a renowned team of professors in the arts and cultural studies department, including Pawel Althamer, Sabeth Buchmann, Martin Beck, Monica Bonvicini, Diedrich Diederichsen, Harun Farocki, Marina Grizinic, Matthias Herrmann, Tom Holert, Dorit Margreiter, Marion van Osten, Daniel Richter, Constanze Ruhm, Amelie von Wulffen, Heimo Zobernig and others. Theory and practice are regarded as necessary for the transdisciplinarity that is a common agenda in the arts and theoretical research. Disciplines such as painting, photography, sculpture, video, digital media, sound, film, conceptual art, performance, art in public space, gender studies, postcolonial studies, philosophy and aesthetic theory, art history are, among others, to be found at the Academy.

As part of the My City programme, this residency provides accommodation in the heart of Vienna, next to the Museumquartier (MQ) and the Academy. The apartment (89m²) has two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. The resident will have access to the labs and studios, ranging from drawing, printing and painting to photography, sound, video, digital media, performance and as well as the libraries. The Academy is interested in applicants with a strong international track record.

FRAME, Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Helsinki 
FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange provides services and acts as an expert body in international exchanges relating to the visual arts. FRAME, established in 1992, works within the Finnish Fine Arts Academy Foundation and is primarily funded by the Finnish Ministry of Culture.

FRAME currently collaborates with HIAP (Helsinki International Artist-in-residence Programme) for artists’ residencies. HIAP offers a residency on Suomenlinna island from for a period still to be negotiated from Spring 2010 onwards.

Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) Dortmund & Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, Germany
As part of the MyCity programme, one Turkish or Turkey-based artist will be selected for a residency at Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund in spring 2010. The residency will take place between 1 April and 30 June 2010, offering the selected artist a studio at Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund, accommodation and living expenses. The residency takes place in the context of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010.

Hartware MedienKunstVerein and Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund are inviting visual artists exploring the artistic, creative and critical potentials of digital and electronic media to apply for the residency. However, media art is not understood as a technical genre. Rather, it is the topical and conceptual discussion of our contemporary world based increasingly on media and technological structures that makes for the contemporaneity of media art.

Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV)
Founded in 1996 in Dortmund, Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) serves as a platform for the production, presentation, mediation and contextualisation of contemporary and experimental media art. Since 1996 HMKV has realized over 70 exhibitions, film and video programs, workshops, lectures, symposia, performance programs and conferences at various venues in Dortmund (currently in the PHOENIX Halle, a spectacular 1895 factory hall measuring 2.200 square meters belonging to the giant former steel production plant of hoenix-West) as well as in other cities in Germany and abroad. Among the 40 exhibitions of the last thirteen years there were seminal projects such as „Reservate der Sehnsucht“ (1998), games. Computer games by artists“ (2003), „History Will Repeat Itself“ (2007/2008) and „Anna Kournikova ... Art in the Age of Intellectual Property“ (2008). Through its strong commitment to the field of media art over the past decade HMKV has developed into a unique institution in Germany. HMKV’s exhibitions are characterised by their broad definition of media art and by positioning media art in the context of contemporary art. HMKV’s activities have received international recognition. In 2007 and 2008 HMKV has been nominated for the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Award for Art Associations. HMKV hosts since 2000 the grant program of the State of North Rhine Westphalia (NRW) for media artists (f) from NRW. Since 2006 HMKV functions as the branch office of Medienwerk NRW which will host the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA) RUHR 2010.

Künstlerhaus Dortmund
Since 1983 the artists' organization Künstlerhaus Dortmund has been a non-profit space for contemporary and experimental arts. It is a place for all kinds of contemporary visual arts: Painting, sculpture, graphic as well as photography, film, video, installation and new
media. This spectrum can be found in the working fields of the members as well as in the group exhibitions, organized by the members exclusively for artists who are not members of the Künstlerhaus. By focusing on contemporary and experimental art, especially young, not
yet established artists are supported. In this way, the Künstlerhaus enriches the cultural scene of the city of Dortmund - consisting of museums and galleries with their economic interests, featuring mainly solo exhibitions - in a unique way. The Künstlerhaus creates free space for arts, offers optimal working conditions for artists from Germany and abroad and attempts to reach the interested public through direct and personal mediation. The Künstlerhaus frequently serves as a workstation for international guests to realize new and site-specific work. The interdisciplinary orientation of the Künstlerhaus Dortmund creates a constantly growing network of contacts to various national and international cultural institutions. Since 1993, the association "MeX" for experimental music is a continuous guest in the basement for intermedia and experimental sound projects. In addition, the Künstlerhaus cultivates the contact to the Hartware MedienKunstVerein, also located in Dortmund.  

The Columns held Us Up

2009-06-12T00:53:00.000-07:00

July 8 - August 1, 2009

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, Can Altay, Burt Barr, Daniel Bozhkov, Celine Condorelli, Jeremiah Day, Cevdet Erek, Corey McCorkle, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Wael Shawky, and the invited (cordially uninvited) curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen with Ben Kinmont, Lisa Oppenheim, Adam Pendleton, Julika Rudelius, Alexandre Singh and Jordan Wolfson

Reception: Tuesday, July 7,2009, 7-9pm (Performance by Jeremiah Day at 7:30pm)

Artists Space
38 Greene Street Fl 3
New York, NY 100131
+1.212.226.3970
Tuesday > Saturday, 12:00 - 18:00

Platform Garanti is pleased to announce The Columns held Us Up, a collaboration with Artists Space, New York comprised of an informal exhibition and series of events curated by Vasif Kortun and November Paynter.

At the end of 2007. Istanbul's Platform Garanti paused its exhibition program to undergo a major structural and organizational transformation into an interdisciplinary institution developed in partnership with Garanti Galeri. Still awaiting the renovation's completion, Platform's offices, residency, and archive have continued to function in a temporary location. With this in mind, Artists Space has invited Platform to program its gallery for the duration of July 2009 (framed much like a one-month artist residency) as an opportunity to realize a series of physical activities in the interim period between the closing of Platform's previous space and the launch of their new organization.

Platform will create a program that continues to reflect its fundamental approach to collaboration, focus on local art situations, and facilitation of residencies and discussion, all within the walls of Artists Space, with whom these institutional characteristics are strongly shared. Works by New York based artists that Platform has previously partnered with, as well as works by a roster of international artists who have spent time on their residency program in Istanbul, will be presented.

The columns held us up is a confluence of intertwining relationships and shared interests, based on the strength of thoughts and ideas to uphold or pillar a situation in the absence of structural parameters. Here, Platform takes into consideration those artists who have supported it during its eight years of development. A number of the selected works in the exhibition stem from intensive research of layered, everyday systems that accumulate to propose intricate narratives. For example, a collaborative multimedia installation by Can Altay and Jeremiah Day investigates Istanbul via the chain of production of stuffed mussels, the city's well-known street delicacy, while an itinerant work by Daniel Bozhkov hosts a site for storytellers that traces the journey of a family jewel, engraved with an Ottoman Persian poem, and the reflections on and translations of its meaning formed along the way. Other works have been chosen because they are, in themselves, systems or products of support, such as Celine Condorelli's structural intervention based on the study portrayed in the 1475 painting St. Jerome in his Study by Italian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina. Further works in the exhibition that embrace these ideas include the videos Telematch Suburb by Wael Shawky and Self Portrait by Burt Barr; a series of photographs titled Hayvanat Bahfesi by Corey McCorkle; the slide installation Wonderland by Christodoulos Panayiotou, and the installation Kara-kum by the late Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin.

Additional activities build on past interests and concerns: Celine Condorelli's functioning intervention will host a book collection point, where institutions and artists can donate books that will travel to Platform's library in Istanbul at the close of the exhibition* (a project first presented as Collection Point at the Frieze Art Fair in 2006); a period of on-site work and research by artist Cevdet Erek; and the invited (cordially uninvited), a series of collaborative events and performances organized by past Platform resident Krist Gruijthuijsen that will take place in Artists Space's surrounding Soho neighborhood July 14-18.

In collaboration with Platform Garanti, this exhibition has been organized by Meredith Johnson and Amy Owen.

*Book donations for Platform Garanti's library can be dropped off or sent to Artists Space during the months of June and July 2009.
For further information please contact info@artistsspace.org.

The columns held us up is generously supported, in part, by The Dedalus Foundation and the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam.

About Artists Space:
One of the first alternative spaces in New York, Artists Space was founded in 1972 to support contemporary artists working in the visual arts, video and electronic media, performance, architecture and design. The mission of Artists Space is to support artistic experimentation and dialog in contemporary culture.

Accented

2009-05-28T07:48:00.000-07:00

Presentation of the Interregional Residency Programme
British Council’s Creative Collaborations programme.
The presentation is followed by a reception.

Saturday, May 30 at 17:00
DEPO / Tütün Deposu
Lüleci Hendek Cad. 12 , Tophane

Platform Garanti is pleased to announce the launch of Accented, an interregional residency program. Accented Residency is part of the British Council’s Creative Collaboration programme. The overall aim of the Creative Collaborations programme is to enrich the cultural life of Europe and its surrounding country and to build trust and understanding across communities by generating dialogue and debate.

Accented offers a total of 20 curators, artists, and writers the opportunity to undertake six to eight-week residencies at the participating institutions over the course of 2009 and 2010.

Participating institutions are Delfina Foundation, London and Spike Island Bristol (UK); Vector Association, (Iasi, Romania); Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, Lebanon) and Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt); and Platform Garanti Istanbul, Turkey.

The program is open to applicants from Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Gulf Region, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Macedonia, Morocco, Palestine, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, numerous exhibitions have been organized by West European institutions with a focus on East Europe. After 9/11, these gave way to projects featuring the Southeastern Mediterranean region. While one can understand the desire for inclusion, the research around post-traumatic conditions, and/or different approaches to the "Muslim" world, the meeting points of the cultural producers have been external to the regions they practice in. The complex impediments facing the production; the concrete hindrances to travel; the lack of public support; the ineffectual organizational structures, have lead artists traditionally to convene in Western Europe. However, cultural and political similarities, as well as centuries of shared histories ask for lateral relations to be empowered. British Council’s Creative Collaborations program places importance on these issues aiding the development of regional bonds.

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin: Global Mockery

2009-05-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

maison Folie de Wazemmes - Lille - April 30 - July 7, 2009

Organized by Platform Garanti Contemporary Art in the context of Lille3000 for Europe XXL, "Global Mockery" is the first large-scale exhibition of works by artist Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin after his passing away in December 2007.

Presented on the two floors of the maison Folie de Wazemmes, “Global Mockery” includes important works from Alptekin's oeuvre such as the 1992 version of Heterotopia, the installation Winter Depression, the sculptural work Karakum and stop-motion videos from the Incident-s series previously shown in the Turkish Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennial.

Many of the works in the exhibition, such as the over-sized cheap oil cloth Karakum (Black Sand) bag, pay witness to Alptekin's acute interest in the human condition after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the resulting enormous human traffic, as well as the migration of authorless images that followed it. This work embodies an intercultural travel log through its transformation of the Camel cigarette logo into the adornment of a cheap bag, a reference to the part of the world where the exotic potpourri of Central Asian and Middle Eastern imagery that brands the Camel cigarette packet was originally taken from. In dialogue with the migratory references in Karakum, Heterotopia presents a plane of anonymously rendered images and objets trouvés of history and contemporaneity, juxtaposed and set in friendly tension alongside one another.

After pursuing graduate studies in aesthetics, the philosophy of art and sociology at the Sorbonne, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin remained in Paris as a photographer for Sipa Press in the 1980s. Steeped in European philosophy, semiotics and post-structuralist ideas emerging in France during this time, Alptekin returned to Turkey at the end of the decade, where he taught the philosophy of art.

In 1990, Alptekin began to make art, fusing associative images and objects in bric-a-brac installations. Befitting a philosopher turned artist, his oeuvre is not unified stylistically, but by an ambitious set of themes.

Alptekin took part in numerous international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial in 1995 and 2005, the Bienal de São Paulo in 1998, the 2002 Cetinje Biennale in Montenegro, the Tirana Biennial in 2003 and 2005 and Manifesta 5 in 2004. Along with numerous international residencies, Alptekin won a UNESCO prize for his work in the Cetinje Biennale, and the M. Mulliqi Prize at the 3rd International Exhibition at Kosovo Art Gallery, Prishtina, in 2005. As a curator, Alptekin organized exhibitions and events in Istanbul, Tirana, Havana and Helsinki, including cultural activities during Istanbul’s 1996 Habitat II NGO-City Summit.

Between 2000 and 2004, Alptekin headed the Sea Elephant Travel Agency (SETA), a non-profit, artist-run collaborative space in Istanbul that sponsored artists’ residencies and seminars. Sea Elephant served as an umbrella for Alptekin’s numerous international, collaborative ventures, including “B-fact: Black Sea, Baltic Sea, Barents Sea,” a platform for Balkans art, and “BRG: Bunker Research Group,” an ongoing collaboration between Scandinavian and Turkish artists initiated during the 2003 Tirana Biennale.

Alptekin represented Turkey in the Arsenale at the 2007 Venice Biennale with the installation Don’t Complain (2007), where he screened 14 different videos made from hundreds of assorted snapshots taken on his travels around the world that he called “Incidents” five wooden huts. Don’t Complain brought together disparate geographies through the images, connecting places as far apart as Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.

Platform Garanti houses the archive and library of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. The institution is also engaged in a comprehensive study of the artist's career and life.

Ciro Najle: The Tectonic Machine

2009-05-02T23:40:00.000-07:00

May 7, Thursday, 17:30

ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla-Taksim) Hall 109

The "Transdisciplines" lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery-Platform Garanti continues with Ciro Najle. Najle will introduce the concept of tectonic machine as a model of architectural production, and will present a few samples and offshoots of its operativity.

Ciro Najle Director of GDB (General Design Bureau), architectural office and multidisciplinary laboratory of research in Buenos Aires, Design Critic at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and Visiting Professor at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria in Valparaiso. He has taught at architectural schools worldwide, including Architectural Association, Cornell University, Columbia University, the Berlage Institute, and the University of Buenos Aires. He was awarded Young Architect of the Year Second Prize in London in 2001. Coeditor of "Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape," he is currently working on the upcoming book "Material Discipline."

Gijs van Oenen : Architecture, Security and Interpassivity

2009-03-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

April 2, Thursday, 17:30 
ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla-Taksim) Lecture Hall 109

The 10th of the "Transdisciplines" lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery-Platform Garanti continues with Gijs van Oenen. The lecture entitled Architecture, Security and Interpassivity will take place at ITU Faculty of Architecture on Thursday, April 2nd.

Security is one of the most pressing concerns of contemporary societies. Gijs van Oenen discusses how and why this concern has become almost obsessive for us. Until the early 1980s, there was relatively little concern for security. Only external threats to society, in particular nuclear fall-out, raised security issues. With the advent of ‘risk society’ in the middle 80s, however, security rapidly became a social and political keyword. This change of objective was motivated by the increased fear of crime and particularly by the awareness of economic, social and technological ‘risks’. Society now had to be ‘controlled’. Strict control by government, however, does not fit easily with contemporary notions of emancipatory citizenship, democratic participation, and interactive politics. The defensive measures called for by the desire for increased security rather seem to indicate an absence of viable citizenship. This paradox can be explained by the shift from interactive to interpassive citizenship, and politics. Overburdened by the responsibilities implied by emancipatory citizenship, citizens tend to ‘outsource’ part of their responsibilties to external institutions, arrangements, and designs. Next to political and legal intervention, supervision and control is increasingly being exercised through new forms of environmental design, that may physically or electronically guide or restrain us whenever we threaten to transgress the norms of society. This will be the new shape of the ‘society of control’.

Gijs van Oenen is senior lecturer in practical philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He was born in 1959, and studied political science at the University of Amsterdam. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy of law from the University of Amsterdam in 1994. Next to the Erasmus University, he has been affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, Webster University Leiden, and the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design. He heads the research program Interpassive metal fatigue sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

The lecture by Gijs van Oenen is generously supported by the Consulate General of the Netherlands.

Peter Cook : Robots in the Woods

2009-02-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

March 7, Saturday, 14:00 
garajistanbul 
Tomtom Mahallesi, Yeni Çarşı Caddesi, 
Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sokağı, No: 11a Galatasaray 

"Transdisciplines" lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti continues with Peter Cook. The lecture entitled Robots in the Woods will take place at garajistanbul on Saturday, March 7th.

The lecture of Peter Cook will prompt the themes of hybridisation, metamorphosis, and ambiguities as dynamic sources in his latest works. The Comfo-Veg Club project of Cook provokes the amazing imaginative metamorphosis of vegetation spaces lying between the robotic gadgetry and the melting spatial elements, by redefining architectural imageries. It invokes how architecture would intersect with digital technology in more organic, amorphous and ambiguous ways, rather than the conventional digital works came into being in architecture as strict, definite geometrical elements. Similarly, his “friendly alien” project of Kunsthaus in Graz shockingly awakens the continuous attentiveness of architectural senses. His latest project by his London-based CRAB Studio, “Department of Law and Central Administration of Vienna Economics University” which is planned to start next year, evokes the exciting dynamism of sliding spaces on floatable routes.

Sir Peter Cook (RA, AADipl, RIBA, BDA, FRCA, FRSA, ARB) is a British architect, experimentalist, educator, academician, and architectural theoretician. He recently received a knighthood in 2007 by The Queen of England, for services to architecture. He was awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (as founder of Archigram) in 2004. He studied architecture at Bournemouth College of Art from 1953-58, and at Architectural Association in London from 1958-60. Peter Cook was Year Master, Unit Master and Tutor at Architectural Association from 1964 to1990; and was the Chair of Architecture of the Bartlett School at UCL from 1990 to 2006. He has been the Chief Assessor of the Viennese architecture schools since 2004. He has been Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, Emeritus Professor at University College London and the Life Professor at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste (Staedelschule) in Frankfurt-Main. His contributions to architecture vary from being a Royal Academician to the “commandeur de l’ordre des arts et letters” of the French Republic; and to being a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. Prof. Cook has published eight books and received many international awards including the Jean Tschumi Medal of the UIA and Annie Spink Medal for Education by RIBA. His principal architectural collaborations have been with Archigram Group 1963-1975, with Prof. Christine Hawley 1976-1998, with Prof. Colin Fournier 1998-2004. He has been the director of CRAB (Cook-Robotham Architecture Bureau, London) since 2004. His latest projects include the winning competitions for the “Kunsthaus” in Graz, Austria; the “Theatre” in Verbana, Italy; and “Department of Law and Central Administration Vienna Economics University” in Vienna, Austria.

The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

The lecture by Peter Cook is generously supported by the British Council.

Building Knowledge

2009-02-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

Nikolaus Hirsch
"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 8:  
Saturday, 28th February, 5:30 p.m
garajistanbul 
Tomtom Mahallesi, Yeni Çarşı Caddesi, 
Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sokağı, No: 11a Galatasaray 

In his lecture Garanti Galeri and Platform Garanti [GGPG] Nikolaus Hirsch contributes to the discussion on pavilions in light of some of his recent projects. Referring to "Exquisite Corpse", his growing institutional model for the European Kunsthalle (recently being exhibited at Showroom London, 2008), and the "Cybermohalla Hub" (Manifesta 7 and Delhi), he questions the relationship between stable and unstable spatial configurations.

Nikolaus Hirsch is a Frankfurt-based architect and professor at Städelschule who has held academic positions at the Architectural Association in London, at the Institute of Applied Theater Studies at Giessen University, and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His work includes the award-winning Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, and numerous exhibition structures such as "Making Things Public" at the ZKM (curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel) and "Indian Highway" (Serpentine Gallery, 2008). Hirsch´s ongoing research in institutional models has resulted in projects such as the Bockenheimer Depot Theater (with William Forsythe), Unitednationsplaza in Berlin (with Anton Vidokle), European Kunsthalle, Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi and currently a studio structure for Rirkrit Tiravanija´s "The Land".

His work has been shown in "Neue Welt" (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2001), "Utopia Station" at the Venice Biennial 2003, "Can Buildings Curate" (Architectural Association London / Storefront Gallery, New York, 2005), Thomas Bayrle´s "40 Years Chinese Rock 'n Roll" (MMK Frankfurt, 2006), "Horn Please" (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2007), and Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Nikolaus Hirsch has curated „ErsatzStadt: Representations of the Urban" at Volksbühne Berlin and is a member of the „Curating Architecture" program at Goldsmiths College in London. Recently he has published „On Boundaries" (Sternberg Press), a collection of essays and interviews that focuses on the relationship between architectural, artistic and curatorial models.

"Red Thread" Talks and Conversations - 3

2009-02-14T04:28:00.000-08:00

11th International İstanbul Biennial
"Continental Drift: The Politics of Perception"
Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost

February 17th, Tuesday, 18.30.

Garanti Han 115A
Garamti Galeri and Platform Garanti, 5th Floor

For the first time since the 1970s, an economic crisis has upset the geopolitical balance of power, suggesting possible changes in the model of worldwide development. How can artists participate in this potential transformation? How can they warn against the worst of the likely outcomes, while imagining different ways of life, new tomorrows?

Walk around Istanbul -or New York, or Delhi, or Shanghai- with wide-open eyes and camera clicking: you will learn a tremendous amount about the insertion of the city into transnational networks, but almost nothing about the national or regional economy, the cultural conditions driving political-party formation, the long-term shifts in mentalities and attitudes. The circulation patterns of contemporary society foster a structural blindness. Recent attempts to integrate the social sciences with artistic practices are essential to the perception of change at all the scales (global, continental, national, territorial, intimate). But every analysis comes laden with its own viewpoint, its own interests and prejudices. What interests us are experimental groups able to participate or even generate social events, while developing critical questions on the form, process, meaning and ends of their activity. Placing ideas to the test of experience and public debate, these groups may be able to open their own eyes and produce more widely sharable visions.

For the past four years, Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost have collaborated with the 16 Beaver Group in New York on the autonomous seminar "Continental Drift", bringing together artists, social theorists and activists to look at the influence of geopolitical change on daily life. The most recent seminar was carried out in Zagreb, Croatia, in collaboration with the WHW curatorial collective.

For further information see:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com
http://publicamateur.wordpress.com

On Support: 'Support Structures'

2009-02-09T21:49:00.000-08:00

Celine Condorelli, James Langdon

Friday February 13, 2009, 6.30 p.m.
Ottoman Bank Museum Conference Hall,
Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy

This is the last talk of the ‘on support’ lecture series, which has been working as a draft towards a publication of ‘Support Structures’. In this talk Graphic designer James Langdon will discuss with Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade how design can be considered as a form of support. By navigating through some of the material in process of being made into a book, they will integrate the investigation in notions of support within the realms of art, architecture and other spatial practices; and make a first, public proposal for what a curated bibliography of support might look like.

'Support Structures' is a publication project for the creation of the missing bibliography of support structures. A long-term engagement with notions of support highlights an almost complete absence of literature or theory on the subject, and therefore the imperative need to support its creation. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of ‘support structures’, alongside the 10-phase ‘Support Structure’ project with Gavin Wade, Celine Condorelli has been inviting specialists from different fields to elaborate frameworks and work on texts which will form the theoretical backbone of the publication.

Celine Condorelli works with art and architecture. She is one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, UK. Recent exhibitions include 'Park Nights', Serpentine (2008), 'Far-West', Arnolfini (2008), ‘Hidden Curriculum’, Casco, Utrecht (2007), GIL Biennial, Ghuang Zhou, Shanghai, Beijing, (2007), 4'33'', Magazin 4 Bregenzer Kunstverein, (2007), 'Revisits', Linz, Graz (2007/2008) 'theatre pieces', Tate Triennial (2006), 'Alterity Display', O'Hana gallery, london 2004). Recent projects include developing Support Structure phase 1-10, with Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, at Chisenhale Gallery, The Economist, ICA, V&A, London, Portsmouth, Greenham Common, Essex University, Birmingham Eastside (2003-2009), and previously taxi_onomy with artist Beatrice Gibson, at 'Subcontingency', Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Turin, 'Public Structures', GuangZhou Triennial, and 'the thin line' PEAM and Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (2005-2007). Celine Condorelli is phd candidate in Research Architecture, Goldsmith London.

James Langdon studied as an artist and now works as a designer of books and printed matter with artists and arts organisations. Recent and current collaborations include artists books and catalogues with Ruth Claxton, Harrison and Wood, Steven Shearer and Victor Man; and the ‘exhibition in a book’, Has Man a Function in Universe?, curated by Gavin Wade, published by Book Works and including artists Mark Titchner, Shezad Dawood and Neil Chapman amongst others. James is also one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Birmingham, UK.

Gavin Wade is an artist-curator, Publisher of Strategic Questions and Director of Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Curated projects include This Is The Gallery And The Gallery Is Many Things, Eastside Projects (2008); Strategic Questions Venice, 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); Thin Cities, Piccadilly Line Centenary, Platform for Art, London Underground (2006-8); Public Structures, Guang Zhou Triennial, China (2005); ArtSheffield05: Spectator T, cross city Biennial (2005). Other projects include Support Structure Phase 1-10, with architect Celine Condorelli, various locations (2003-2009); and Kiosk5:KiteKiosk (mit Simon & Tom Bloor and Nils Norman) Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone (2008). His books include Has Man A Function In Universe, Bookworks (2008); The Interruptors: A Non-Simultaneous Novel, Article Press (2005); STRIKE (adjusted by Liam Gillick), Alberta Press London (2002); and Curating In The 21st Century, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2000).

Charles Waldheim:  Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape

2009-02-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 7:  
February 7, Saturday, 14:00 
Garaj Istanbul 
Tomtom Mahallesi, Yeni Çarşı Caddesi, 
Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sokağı, No: 11a Galatasaray 

The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

"Transdisciplines" lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti continues with Charles Waldheim. The lecture on Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape will take place at Garaj Istanbul on Saturday, Febrary 7th.

The lecture will begin with a brief historical overview of the relative alienation of the design disciplines in the wake of the cultural politics of the 60s and early 70s. This includes a discussion of the parallel alienation and serial separation from schools of design or architecture the disciplines of landscape architecture and urban planning. Citing Harvard, Penn, and Toronto among others, the introduction suggests that the recent renewal of landscape architecture’s status as a design medium within leading design schools has coincided precisely with the rapprochement between planning programs and schools of architecture and design. Further the introduction argues that this symmetrical re-engagement, rather than simple coincidence, derives from shifts within the built environment itself and the disciplines that describe it. This reading promises a moment of tangency between the concerns and questions of landscape architecture and planning practice, one in which both disciplines promise to benefit from renewed commitments to subjects of mutually shared historical interest.

The first half of Waldheim’s talk includes a series of short historical cases, each describing the role of landscape in the formation of the region as a subject of city and regional planning practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. Among these are a brief overview of recent scholarship on the dominant lineage of regionally informed planning projects as proposed by Geddes, Mumford, MacKaye, and culminating in McHarg. The projects and texts of Ludwig Hilberseimer are presented as an alternative to that tradition, an alternative in which economic readings underpin an ecological approach to industrial decentralization. The first half closes with an overview of the reception of McHargian principles in the 60s and early 70s and the shift of landscape architecture to a medium of regional and urban planning, as well as a summary of the perceived failures of the McHargian project to address the challenges of the contemporary metropolis.

The second half of the talk surveys the recent re-emergence of landscape as a medium of urban design, and the impact of that shift on the disciplinary commitments and professional precedents of urban planning. Among these, the talk describes the renewed interest in landscape as a medium of design agency and the role of landscape as a cultural form. Equally, the talk will identify the role of ecology in that renewal of landscape design, and rehearses various claims that have been made on behalf of landscape ecology as an agent of contemporary urban development. The main body of the talk closes with a survey of several recent projects in North America that propose landscape and ecological process as drivers of design process, and employ planning practices that are necessarily informed by ecological subjects, the sites they imply, and the constituencies they represent.

The lecture concludes with a provisional sketch of potential models for contemporary planning practice informed by contemporary understandings of landscape and ecology as media of urban design. The conclusion cites the work of a small number of contemporary designers working at the intersection of planning and landscape design, referencing their various positions as they inform contemporary conceptions of urban development and design.

Charles Waldheim, FAAR, is Director of the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Waldheim’s work examines the relationships between landscape and contemporary urbanism. He coined the term “landscape urbanism” to describe the recent emergence of landscape as a medium of urban order for the contemporary city. Waldheim is a licensed architect and principal of Urban Agency, a multi-disciplinary consultancy in design and urbanism. Waldheim / Urban Agency engage with public agencies, private clients, design professionals, and multi-disciplinary teams on a range of projects at the intersection of contemporary urbanism and landscape.

How to Care?

2009-01-26T02:24:00.000-08:00

On Support Lecture Series

Jan Verwoert: How to care?

Friday, January 30, 2009, 6.30 pm

Ottoman Bank Museum Conference Hall,
Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy

In this talk Jan Verwoert will explore how care can be the most particular form of support, the one which makes us return to the question of political ethics: "How can we know what is to be done to make a better life possible for ourselves and others, now and in the future?" To think through the link between indebtedness and empowerment we might recall the story of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in which she describes how and why she became a writer. Standing outside a Leningrad prison in 1930 where her son was a political prisoner, a woman whose son was also imprisoned, addressed Akhmatova with the question: "Can you speak of this?" She realized that she had to respond yes— indeed she could—and in this moment found herself both indebted and empowered.

To practice a politics of dedication and recognize indebtedness to the other as the condition of your own ability to perform means to acknowledge the importance of care. You perform because you care for
someone or something. This care gives you the strength to act, not least because to not act is out of the question when someone or something you really care for or about requires that you should act. To address this we are faced with a two-fold challenge:
1. to understand the conditions of our agency in order to enable us to define them according to our own terms; and
2. to imagine another logic of agency, an ethos, which could help us defy the social pressure to perform and eschew the promise of the regimented options of consumption.

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a member of the advisory board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been a guest professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2005 he has been a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Verwoert is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for Afterall, Metropolis M, Springerin, and artists' catalogues. He is author of Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (One Work) (2006) published by MIT Press/Afterall Books. Verwoert is fascinated by art that is hedonist, romantic, personal, emotional, melodramatic, or humorous; art that articulates desire, deals with the rites of identification or fandom, and explores all that is glamorous, trivial, weird, or perverse about pop culture.

'On Support' is organized by Celine Condorelli and hosted by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and is supported by the British Council.

Jan Verwoert's Conference is supported by the Goethe Institute, Istanbul.

Building Democracy

2009-01-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

On Support Lectures
Friday, January 23, 2009, 6.30
Andrea Phillips
Ottoman Bank Museum Conference Hall,
Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy

"The word democracy was not forged by some experts concerned with identifying objective criteria by which to classify forms of government and types of society. On the contrary, it was invented as a term to “indistinguish” things, to show that the power of an assembly of equal men could be nothing but the confusion of a formless and squawking horde, that this latter was to the social order what chaos was to the natural order. To understand democracy is to hear the struggle that is at stake in the word"
Jacques Rancière: Hatred of Democracy, 2007, p.93

Andrea Phillips will expose how most formations of public space – political, cultural, institutional – can be critiqued for the way in which they impose types of action upon their subject. The word democracy, we must remember, implies not only intentions of freedom through open discourse, but also the basic inequalities any democratic process invariably starts from. Accordingly, conceptions of public space are on the one hand based on the democratic idea of free movement and free speech, and on the other, hinged upon the falsification or suppression of these very values.

This talk will focus on the important relationship between public space and democracy, and how it both is articulated by how we behave in the urban environment, and conditions how we move and act within it. The question is weather socially-engaged cultural practices are able to support the formation of public space, and what the nature of such an engagement might be.

Andrea Phillips is Reader in Fine Art, Department of Art, and Director, Curating Architecture, Goldsmiths University. Her research interests focus on contemporary art, architecture and current socio-political thought; as well as movement, mobility and fluidity in contemporary art and political philosophy. Her current research project is a series of seminars and workshops on Curating Architecture which explore the connections between practices of curating – gathering, displaying, distributing, caring for cultural product in its broadest definition – and the practices of architecture (thinking about, constructing, distributing the built environment). Curating Architecture starts from the premise that the routines of artists and architects may share many conceptual and theoretical concerns, particularly in debates around the politics of space, but that contradictions each discipline’s claims are reinforced through their often paradoxical display in the public sphere.

‘On support’ takes its lead from the larger project and ongoing collaboration between Architect Celine Condorelli and Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, ‘Support Structure’, which looks at the systems and structures conditioning how we inhabit our environment.

"On Support’ is supported by the British Council.
Additional support has been provided by the Goethe Institute Istanbul.

Artist Talk / Jacopo Miliani

2009-01-14T23:55:00.000-08:00

Friday, January 16, 6:30 p.m.

Jacopo Miliani, current resident at Platform Garanti supported by the Association for the Circuit of the Young Italian Artists (GAI) since November 2008 will speak about his work and his engagement with the residency program.

Using a broad range of different references, Jacopo Miliani's work focuses on the relation between image and representation and their role in the contemporary debate. His research involves the reuse and distortion of images from the art world and cinema and it focuses on topics such as magic, popular culture and collective imagination.

Museum as Kraftwerk: From Cedric Price to the Serpentine Pavilion

2009-01-08T05:56:00.000-08:00

“Transdisciplines” Lecture Series - 6:
Hans Ulrich Obrist

January 10, Saturday, 14:00
Garaj Istanbul
Tomtom Mahallesi, Yeni Çarşı Caddesi,
Kaymakam Reşat Bey Sokağı, No: 11a Galatasaray
The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

The “Transdisciplines” lecture series organised by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti continues with a presentation by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The lecture "Museum as Kraftwerk" will take place at 14:00 at Garaj Istanbul on Saturday, January 10th.

The lecture will unfold a story of institutions from Alexander Dorner's idea of the museum as "kraftwerk”, via Cedric Price's “Fun Palace”, to end with the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion series conceived by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones, in 2000, which provides a peerless model for commissioning architecture with its 24-Hour Intellectual Marathons hosted and initiated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in May 1968. He joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects in April 2006. Prior to this post he was Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 2000, as well as curator of the Museum in Progress, Vienna, from 1993-2000. He has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally since 1991, including Take Me, (I’m Yours), Cities on the Move, Live/Life, Nuit Blanche, 1st Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 1, and more recently Uncertain States of America, 1st Moscow Triennale, 2nd Guangzhou Triennale and the Lyon Biennale. In 2007, Hans Ulrich Obrist co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival. In the same year, the Van Alen Institute awarded Obrist the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007-2008.

The lecture by Hans Ulrich Obrist is generously supported by the British Council.

Artist Talk: Jeremiah Day

2009-01-04T22:58:00.000-08:00

Contact Improvisation / News Animations

The work of Steve Paxton and Simone Forti

Wednesday, January 7 at 6:30 p.m.

Postmodern dance emerged in a unique moment of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange in American arts – composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich mingled with sculptors like Richard Serra, and visual artists like Robert Morris and Walter de Maria worked in dance. This unstable moment produced new forms and models in all of the arts, but the underlying shared assumption that there would be some new relationship to the public was ultimately proved wrong – we still go to theaters and white cube galleries. With the brief exception of Earthworks, really only one art form was able to break away from "the art world" – Steve Paxton's invention Contact Improvisation.

In this informal presentation, Jeremiah Day will show videos of Contact Improvisation and discuss Steve Paxton's artistic evolution. Also, he will present the work of Paxton's peer Simone Forti. Forti's work differed from the rest of her minimalist peers in that she ultimately returned to the problem of "subject matter." Day will show a few examples of her "News Animations" which offer a unique model for engaging politics in art.

Platform Garanti
Contemporary Art Center
Istiklal Cad. No: 115A, Beyoglu
Istanbul, 34430, Turkey

Posted by Located... at 12:46 AM 0 co

The Bosphorus of My Mind /Christoph Keller

2009-01-02T00:02:00.001-08:00

Artist Talk
Jan 2, 18:30

Garanti Galeri
Istiklal Cad. No:115A
Beyoglu, Istanbul

Christoph Keller, the Berlin Senate resident in Istanbul for the last 6 month will speak about his art practice.

Architecture and Imagination

2008-12-26T00:55:00.000-08:00

*
On Support Lectures
Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 6.30
Wouter Davidts
Ottoman Bank Museum Conference Hall,
Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy

In 1977, museum director Ian Finlay remarked that “museum thinking has nearly always begun with the building.” Whenever people imagine a new institution, the proposal tends from a very early stage to crystallize as an architectural concept. Today, Finlay’s words appear more than visionary, if not outright prophetic. In the past three decades, just about every art institution has at least once renovated, rebuilt, extended or added to its existing architectural premises. Architecture, so reads the general belief, enables institutions to break new ground, not merely in the literal sense. The countless plans for renovations, additions and extensions are invariably coupled with the ambition to ‘tackle’ the institution as well, on both a micro and macro level. Architecture is taken up as the medium par excellence to rethink and remodel both the hosting establishment as well as the global concept of art institutions – whether they are a private or public museum, a Kunsthalle or an art gallery.

After three decades of excessive building of new art institutions all over the globe, it is worth asking if the resulting architectural extravaganza has indeed offered some thought-provoking institutional structures in exchange. While architecture – as both a medium and a mode of cultural production – seems to be constantly at play and at stake when people envision a future institution, it remains hazy to what extent the ensuing buildings have delivered truly imaginative solutions to frame and support cultural production and reflection. Is the exuberant crop of new art institutions the paramount illustration of architecture’s possible role and significance in stimulating the institutional imagination, or are we to look elsewhere?

In his lecture, Davidts will discuss the exhibition Beginners & Begetters, which he curated for the Contemporary Arts Centre Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium in the summer of 2007. The show presented a historical mapping of the manifold, often visionary initiatives and projects that museum directors, city officials, art supporters and architects dreamed up for the lacking official infrastructure for art institutions in Flanders in the post-war era. By retracing and documenting these unrealized and mostly unknown projects of the recent past, the exhibition aimed to elicit a discussion on the role and significance of architecture in the initiation, framing and support of new and future art institutions. It investigated how and when architecture – within a specific cultural field that was short of official support and engagement – was nevertheless used as a both conceptual and matter-of-fact means to dream up new institutions, to think of new sites and spaces for cultural production and reflection.

‘On support’ takes its lead from the larger project and ongoing collaboration between Architect Celine Condorelli and Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, ‘Support Structure’, which looks at the systems and structures conditioning how we inhabit our environment.

"On Support’ is supported in part by the British Council.
Additional support has been provided by the Goethe Institute Istanbul.

*

Book Launch SIT Manresa

2008-12-24T05:22:00.000-08:00

Thursday, December 25, 18:30
Garanti Galeri
Sitesize (2008): ‘SIT Manresa,
Territorial Interpretation Service’

The SIT Manresa project, the origin of this book's title, is also the connecting thread and starting point of this editorial project. The texts included consist of collaborations and synergies between people working in different fields which perfectly complement cultural and artistic work concerned with territory: geography, landscape, citizen participation, knowledge management, pedagogy, cultural management... Each of them, from their different perspectives, shares the sense of an urgent need for a coordinated and committed work of social and cultural rearmament.

SIT (Territorial Interpretation Service ) is a service which offers itself as a platform for the production and exchange of local territorial knowledge with the objective of evaluating present and future territorial transformation. A collective public hearing on the issue of territory which has to necessarily link up with the planning of territory and social cohesion.

Sitesize is a collaborative projects platform concerning the contemporary metropolis. Since 2002 it has developed specific creation and mediation projects in the Barcelona metropolitan area. Their areas of interest centre on autonomous cultural production practices and the search for new territorial and landscape geographies.

Contributors:
Francesc Muñoz, Joan Nogué, Itziar González, Xavier Oliveras, Montse Romaní, Montserrat Cortadellas, Javier Rodrigo, Iván Orellana, Ramon Parramon and Sitesize.

On Support

2008-12-10T03:31:00.000-08:00

A Lecture Series taking place on evenings between December 2008 and February 2009, organised by Celine Condorelli and hosted by Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center and Garanti Gallery.

Friday, December 19, 2008, 6.30 p.m.
Celine Condorelli
‘What is Support’

Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 6.30 p.m.
Wouter Davidts:
On Support: ‘Architecture and Imagination’

Friday, January 23, 2009, 6.30 p.m.
Andrea Phillips
On Support: ‘Building Democracy’

Friday, January 30, 2009, 6.30 p.m.
Jan Verwoert
On Support: ‘Methodologies’
Ottoman Bank Museum Conference hall at Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy.

Friday February 13, 2009, 6.30 p.m.
Celine Condorelli, James Langdon, Gavin Wade
On Support: ‘Support Structures’

The Lectures, in English, take place at the Ottoman Bank Museum Conference hall at Bankalar Caddesi, 11, Karaköy.

A discussion on the notion of 'support' is seen as fundamental to the development of cultural practice, art, and architecture, and will take place in Istanbul between December 2008 and February 2009, in relation to the new vision of Platform Garanti and Garanti Gallery and the institution's future implementation.

Celine Condorelli was invited to participate in the residency programme at Platform Garanti, to advance her research on this topic and to develop a project within the current considerations of the institution. The resulting series of lectures titled 'On Support' introduces critics, artists, architects, curators and thinkers who are invited to think through the notions of 'support' and 'discipline'. These individuals will contribute to the project by spending short periods in Istanbul in association with Condorelli's research and supported by the British Council; together, they will be elaborating frameworks and working on texts around the subjects of 'supplements' and 'support'. Their contributions, texts and ideas will feed into the project as a whole and form part of the publication ‘Support Structures’, developed with the involvement of Platform Garanti and to be published by Sternberg Press in 2009.

The research is co-extensive within the ongoing discussions about what kind of institution Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center and Garanti Gallery is aiming to develop via their new collaboration. Hence, the longer term potential for the material generated by the project will be a collection of texts and thoughts that are used to form a curatorial and conceptual framework to realise an exhibition within the new institution.

‘On support’ is a research project that uses 'support' as a proposition to tackle issues of articulation, representation and blindness (social, historical or fictional). Support is here to be understood as a practice based on generosity, which invites readings and inhabitations of relationships between power structures, social realities and institutional forms. Support occurs in the interstices of cultural structures or society, in its ad-hoc formations and encounters, which makes it sometimes hard to recognise, as it takes up a position of interfacing and organisation, which inevitably recedes in the background; it is a practice of weakness and negotiation and a work of articulation. This project addresses important questions for the art and architecture community, on forms of display, organisation, appropriation, dependency and temporariness; it defines spatial practice as a form of political imagination.

‘On support’ takes its lead from the larger project and ongoing collaboration between Architect Celine Condorelli and Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, ‘Support Structure’, which looks at the systems and structures conditioning how we inhabit our environment.

"On Support’ is supported in part by the British Council.
Additional support has been provided by the Goethe Institute Istanbul.

Outskirts: Reflection on current artistic practices found outside the centre

2008-11-26T02:27:00.000-08:00

Directed by Cabello/Carceller.
November 27 - 29, 2008
Centro Cultural Montehermoso
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain

A growing part of new modes of art production, presentation and distribution seem to be coming from the fringes. They approach the main discourse but they do not inhabit it. Can we consider this kind of marginalization voluntary? Or is it the result of the still uncompromising nature of a centre that is reluctant to be broken up? Perhaps the problem lies in our apparent inability to think without a reference point, without the existence of this discursive “centre point”. Proposals are increasing in number and their ability to generate creative replies is proving to be endless, but their capacity to influence majority audiences is still limited and is located tangentially to the traditional modes of legitimising artistic proposals. This means they run the risk of exhaustion. Should we eternally re-write ourselves in opposition to a centre? If the proposals stay, where are the limits?

This course gives different agents from the international art scene the possibility of analysing their stances and reflecting on whether it is pertinent to maintain fringe view-points and how this marginalization should be articulated. They will have to imagine what an ideal situation would be like or towards what end they think joint efforts should be made.

BLOCK I: THE STRUCTURAL OUTSKIRTS: ALTERNATIVES TO CERTAIN CANONICAL BEHAVIOUR.
November 27th:
10:30, Presentation of the seminar (Cabello/Carceller)
11:00, Dmitry Vilensky
12:30, Leire Vergara
16:00, Daniel G. Andujar
17:30, Round table with Dmitry Vilensky, Leire Vergara and Daniel G. Andújar. Moderators: Ana Cabbello and Helena Carceller.

BLOCK 2. THE CENTRE BLURS, NEW LIMINAR CONTEXTS.
November 28th
11:00, Vasif Kortun
12:30, Barbara Borcic
16:00, Carlos Garaicoa
17:30, Round table with Vasif Kortun, Barbara Borcic and Carlos Garaicoa. Moderator: Beatriz Herráez.

BLOCK 3. REDEFINIG RELATIONSHIPS.: COMPLEX MAPS.
November 29th
11:00, Eva González-Sancho
12:30, Nuria Enguita Mayo
16:00, Asier Mendizabal
17:30, Round table with Eva González-Sancho,Nuria Enguita Mayo and Asier Mendizabal. Moderators: Cabello/Carceller.

Download PDF Program here

Politiche: thinking through art

2008-11-24T06:25:00.000-08:00

Public conference and exhibition

Curated by : 26cc

Politiche – thinking through art will be a two-days meeting with eight invited European not-for-profit organizations.

The meeting wants to open a reflection space over which can be the characteristics and contents of a network of such organizations, involving various and different contexts such as Prague, Bratislava, Berlin, Istanbul, Ljubljana and Skopje.

In a state of things that currently allows and encourages cooperation and exchange between different contexts and places, we feel the need to set a landmark over what already happens, and to try to understand how these dynamics can be redesigned and refocused within a logic of shared practices among different subjects within the art world, including no-profit and independent art spaces as ours, that are mostly operating in the field of research and diffusion of arts.

The meeting will be structured in a private meeting among the participating organizations, a public conference and an exhibition, Multilogue, made up of projects realized by 26cc, Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Center in Galerija P74, Platform Garanti, Press to Exit, SPACE, Sparwasser HQ and Tranzit and built up over visual traces and documentations that will be accumulated in 26cc's spaces.

The topics, contributions and ideas which will come out during the meeting will be published online on UnDo.net - the event's community partner - and will be useful to trace an agenda of the meeting as well as to document its activities.

Public conference with presentations by:
Binna Choi – Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht
Tadej Pogacar – Center in Galerija P74, Lubiana
Oyku Ozsoy – Platform Garanti, Istanbul
Yane Calovski – Press to Exit, Skopje
Ivana Madariova – SPACE, Bratislava
Lise Nellemann – Sparwasser HQ, Berlino
Vjera Borozan – Tranzit, Praga

The 3rd Asian Art Museum Directors' Forum

2008-11-22T06:21:00.000-08:00

The 3rd Asian Art Museum Directors' Forum
The National Art Center, Tokyo
November 20, 2008
Session 2

Moderator
Akira Tatehata, Director General, the National Museum of Art, Osaka

Museums on the cusp of post-neoliberalism: A purview of West Asia and the Gulf Regions
Vasıf Kortun, Director Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

Exchange and Collaboration with Fukuoka Asian Art Museum
Koichi Yasunaga, Advisor, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum

Guangzhou Triennials and Globalization of Culture
Huangsheng Wang, Director, Guangdong Museum of Art

Enriching Collaborations in a Changing World
Caroline Turner, Senior Research Fellow,Research School of Humanities,the Australian National University

Tokyo Wonder Site Panel

2008-11-22T05:53:00.000-08:00

Platform Garanti partnered in the residency program of Tokyo Wonder Site with the artist Deniz Gül from Turkey. Vasif Kortun spoke at a panel at the end of the program.

On the Agenda of the Arts:
What game shall we play today?
Cultural diversity and the activities of New Art Centers

Sunday November 16, 2008, Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya,

Manuel Gogos (Germany)
Anke Hoffmann (Germany)
Yusaku Imamura (Japan)
Vasif Kortun (Turkey)
Bradley McCallum (U.S.A.)
Joji Yuasa (Japan)

Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
Tokyo Wonder Site & The Goethe Institute, Japan

“Transdisciplines” Lecture Series -5: George Legrady

2008-10-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization
November 12, Wednesday, 19:30

 Yıldız Technical University, Yıldız Campus, Auditorium The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation. “Transdisciplines” lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti continues with George Legrady. The lecture on Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization will take place at 19:30, in the YTU Auditorium on Wednesday 12th November. It is organized with the collaboration of Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Art and Design, Interactive Media Design Program.

The presentation will trace the intersection of data organization and visualization in a number of the artist's projects such as "Pockets Full of Memories" inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, and "Making Visible the Invisible" a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library, and the Cell Tango (Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive) visual archive exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. These projects consist of visualizations generated by custom designed software that dynamically organize data.

“To activate information is to build knowledge. The aggregate processing of dynamically generated data, with resultant output through visualizations allow for a form of artistic experimentation that engages methodologies commonly associated with Computer Science, Social Sciences, Statistics and Information Sciences. The Experimental Visualization Lab of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara explores this question through research and production in data visualization. Since 2005, they have been parsing and visualizing a steady stream of data generated hourly, consisting of the titles of books, films, music, and miscellaneous items checked out by patrons at the Seattle Central Library. They feel fortunate in having access to this flow of data as it makes visible a community’s aggregate interests without bias, in essence allowing the data to “speak for itself.”
George Legrady

George Legrady: Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology Doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara. He is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990s such as the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2007) and more recently data visualizations at the Seattle Public Library, with NASA, and the CEB corporation. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences. His digital interactive installations have been exhibited internationally.

Open Studio Day at Istanbul Residency Program

2008-10-16T04:32:00.000-07:00

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Open Studio Day at Istanbul Residency Program
Participating residents are:
Can Altay
Tunç Ali Çam
Celine Condorelli
Jan Freuchen
Schirin Kretschmann
Judith Raum
Nis Rømer

Program Details

Politics of Visibility/ Poetics of the Political...

2008-07-24T03:25:00.000-07:00

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor

Politics of Visibility/ Poetics of the Political
Re-thinking the relationship between art and politics

Tuesday, July 29
18:30 - 20:00

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center
Istiklal Cad. No: 115A, Beyoglu
3rd Floor

Platform Garanti CAC is hosting the lecture series The Conﬁguration of the Subjectivity: Aesthetics and Politics in collaboration with the Cura Bodrum Residency Program. The first lecturer Helena Chávez Mac Gregor will give a talk entitled Politics of Visibility/ Poetics of the Political in which she will raise the question 'How to play between politics and the poetical?' In her talk she will investigate how politics and art establish different configurations and possibilities of action and reaction, and the aesthetic relationship between politics and art.

Helena Chávez Mac Gregor (México, 1979) studied Philosophy in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and won the 2004 Norman Sverlin prize with her thesis The art experience: Walter Benjamin and the art of distrust. She has a Master’s degree in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Theory from the Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona where she made research in the field of aesthetical and political possibilities engaged in the thought of Jacques Derrida. She has participated in numerous seminars and has worked with Suely Rolnik, Brian Holmes, Benjamin Buchloh and Cuauhtémoc Medina. She is currently working on her PhD in Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a project on the possibilities of experience in the re-thinking of aesthetics and politics as forms for the configuration of subjectivity. She writes for art magazines including Curare and Código (México), Lanzallamas (Chile) and CasaZine (The Netherlands).

Cura Bodrum Residency (August 2008)
A group of cultural producers from diverse academic and geographic backgrounds are invited to Golturkbuku, for the first addition of Cura Bodrum Residency, 2008. During the month of August, they will live together and reflect on the contemporary landscape. Some of the issues that will be discussed are : the privatization of public space in relation to tourism, potentials of site-specific intervention and propositions for cultural, ecological and economic sustainibillity. The program will be supported by public talks, workshops and screenings of experimental documentaries and art videos.

2008-07-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

architecture without architecture

2008-07-03T02:20:00.000-07:00

A conversation Kim Förster & Pelin Tan
Saturday, 5th July 2008 / at 4:30 pm
Platform Garanti
4th Floor

Kim Förster, the co-editor of the political architectural journal An Architektur and Pelin Tan, the co-editor of “Muhtelif” contemporary art magazine and StudioKahem "innocent act" architecture magazine will talk about architecture and cultural critique.

Kim Förster lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied American Studies as well as Human Geography at Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany. Förster is a PhD candidate at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the ETH Zurich, where he also teaches and researches as an assistant at a chair for Architectural Theory. His thesis is on a sociology and history of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York (1967-1984). Since 2002 he is co-editing the political architectural journal An Architektur.

Pelin Tan lives and works in Istanbul. She studied Sociology in Ankara University and Art History in Istanbul Technical University (ITU). She is a PhD candidate and research assistant at the Institute of Social Sciences, History of Art, Architecture Faculty of ITU. Her thesis is on the concept of "locality" of art practices in spatial context. Tan is the co-editor of Muhtelif contemporary art magazine, StudioKahem "innocent act" architecture magazine (October, 2007) and the book "Public Space and Contemporary Art" published by Bilgi Univesity in 2007. She will be a guest proffessor in Nüernberg University at Architecture postgraduate program in winter 2008.

Candid Stories

2008-05-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

Can Altay
Osman Bozkurt
Esra Ersen
Hatice Güleryüz
Gülsün Karamustafa
Sefer Memişoğlu
Ahmet Öğüt

May 21 - June 13, 2008

Insa Art Space, in collaboration with Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center of Turkey, presents a screening program, Candid Stories curated by Öyku Ozsoy.

The program is composed of the works of seven Turkish video artists, focusing on how they relate with the city of Istanbul and how the forms of those relationships vary. While Park Jooyeon's Summer Light, IAS' previously screened work, and the publication Passer-by comprehend the standpoint of the artist experiencing and reminiscing Istanbul as a stranger to the city, these works contain the view of the local artists who, inevitably and incessantly, communicate with Istanbul as a part of their everyday life. Candid Stories and Park Jooyeon's work confront and communicate with each other, therefore creating a dialog. Moreover, a dialog between Istanbul and Seoul, two cities undergoing similar urban problems, is formed. These works which observe the social issues concerning Istanbul, arouse those of Seoul into introspection. IAS and Platform Garanti has consistently interchanged since Frame Builders, 2006.

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series – 4: Fiona Raby

2008-03-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times
March 25, Tuesday, 17:30
ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla) hall 109
The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

"Transdisciplines", a lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti in collaboration with Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture continues. The fourth event hosts Fiona Raby, with the lecture “Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times”.

"Designers have an unthinking optimism about the future. They automatically assume what they design is neutral and implicitly good. There is a deeply embedded ideology that the role of design and architecture is 'to make the world a better place'. But how do the designers acknowledge their contradictions, their inconsistencies and celebrate a humanness which, if they admit it, is deeply flawed?"

Dunne&Raby: Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby use products and services as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technologies. Many of their projects are collaborative, working with industrial research labs, academia and cultural institutions.

They have produced several projects in the context of their works. "Placebo" gathers a collection of electronic objects exploring mental well-being in relation to domestic electromagnetic fields (2001). "Consuming Monsters: Big, Perfect, Infectious" explores roles for design in the debate about different biotechnological futures (2002-) including "Evidence Dolls" (commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in 2005). "Designs for Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times" celebrates human beings as contradictory, complex and psychologically flawed. Their latest project "Do you want to replace the existing 'normal'?"(2008) moves this thinking into the world of product design. It is currently included in the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition at MoMA New York, along with "Technological Dreams Series: no 1 Robot" (commissioned by Z33, 2007).

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 2: Marie-Ange Brayer

2008-02-19T03:51:00.000-08:00

The architectural model, a phylogenetic machine
February 28, Thursday, 17:30
ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla) hall 109
The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

"Transdisciplines", a lecture series organized by Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti in collaboration with Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture continues. The second event is supported by Institut Français d'Istanbul and hosts Marie-Ange Brayer with the lecture "The architectural model, a phylogenetic machine".

Architectural models convey an ambivalent status, divided between process and form, conceptualization and referent. For centuries, the status of the architectural model remained a subject of theories about representation. But the use of computer assisted design technologies
since the beginning of the 1990s has brought about a radical paradigm shift for this modeling instrument, becoming now, more than ever, a vector of experimentation. The model is no longer an object of representation, but an "active agent" in a genetic process, marked by transformability and adaptability, so as to allow for dynamic architectural systems. In this sense, the architecture model can appear as a phylogenetic machine.

Since 1996, Marie-Ange Brayer has been the director of the Centre Regional Contemporary Art Collection [FRAC, Centre] in Orléans, France, where the collection is channeled towards the linkage between art and research architecture. The FRAC centre has been putting together a collection to do with architecture in its utopian and experimental dimension, from the 1950s until the present day. She has organized many exhibitions based on this collection (about twenty a year) both in France and abroad (London, Beijing, Budapest, Siena, New York, Tokyo, London, Taipei, to mention the most recent). In 1999 and 2000, together with Frédéric Migayrou, she co-curated the Orléans International Architectural Conference, ARCHILAB, which brings together younger international practitioners involved in the latest forms of architecture, in its most forward-looking dimension. In 2001 and 2002 she co-curated ARCHILAB with Béatrice Simonot. In 2002, Marie-Ange Brayer and Béatrice Simonot were co-curators of the French Pavilion at the 8th International Architectural Biennale in Venice. As an art and architectural critic, Marie-Ange Brayer has published many articles in magazines and catalogues. She is currently working on a PhD at the EHESS [School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences] in Paris, retracing the legal status of the architectural model since the Renaissance, by way of a history of representation ("A model object, the architectural maquette"). In 2008 she will be co-curator of the exhibition « Youniverse », 3rd International Biennal of Contemporary Art of Sevilla, curated by Peter Weibel.

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 1: Marcos Novak

2008-02-04T03:46:00.000-08:00

February 11, Monday, 17:30
ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla) hall 109
The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.

Garanti Gallery and Platform Garanti are organising a series of lectures which will continue throughout the year 2008. In collaboration with Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture, the lectures aim at displaying various examples of transdisciplinary contemplation and production. In this framework, the invited lecturers will bring into discussion subjects ranging from human needs to biotechnology, from architecture’s cultural role to its relations with other disciplines, from Morphogenesis to Field Theory.

Marcos Novak will be the first lecturer of the series. Marcos Novak will refer to various themes like "Novel spaces” and "Transvergence” and will share his studies on the production of new ideas, works, species, and disciplines with the audience.

Marcos Novak is a transarchitect: an architect, artist, composer, and theorist. His projects, theoretical essays, and interviews have been translated into many languages. Drawing upon architecture, music, and computation, and introducing numerous additional influences from art, science, and technology, his work intentionally defies categorization. He is universally recognized as the pioneer of architecture in cyberspace with his use of algorithmic techniques to design actual, virtual and hybrid intelligent environments. He originated several widely recognized concepts, such as "transvergence", "transarchitectures", "transmodernity", "liquid architectures", "navigable music", "habitable cinema", "archimusic", "eversion", "allogenesis". His current research involves nano- and bio- technologies, and explores the hypothesis that we are in a cultural phase characterized by the "Production of the Alien," paralleling the Renaissance "Production of Man". Professor Novak is currently based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is affiliated with CNSI (the California NanoSystems Institute), MAT (Media Art and Technology), and Art Studio.

Die Letzen Dinge [Last Things]

2008-01-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

January 26 – March 23, 2008

Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster
Domplatz 10

Nevin Aladağ
Başir Borlakov
İnci Eviner
Leyla Gediz
ha za vu zu
Emre Hüner
Ali Kazma
Hale Tenger

Opening: Friday, 25 January, 7pm.
performance: ha za vu zu

Artist Talks: Saturday, 26 January at 2pm.

Organized by: Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center will organize an exhibition titled Die Letzen Dinge at Westfäelischer Kunstverein Münster.

This collaboration between Platform Garanti and Westfäelischer Kunstverein was not imagined as a familiar exchange and circulation project based on the presentation of the works of artists from one city to another city. Two different exhibitions reflecting on and discussing different approaches to the same theme were planned. The Westfäelischer Kunstverein exhibition will take place in Istanbul in fall 2008.

Even though theology resorts to concepts like death, judgment day, heaven and hell in regard to the eventual fate of humanity and/or the world, the ultimate underlying question is basically existence and/or nonexistence. The exhibition Die Letzen Dinge is a reflection on individual takes on existence and finitude.

Artists group ha za vu zu’s glittering and broken disco ball is an object that has witnessed a sad and violent end. Emre Hüner’s video shown originally in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial depicts an apocalyptical picture around abandoned industrial sites, waste pools and buildings in the center and the periphery of the city. İnci Eviner’s piercing photographs with eerie compositions insistently retrieve lost panoramas, what is secluded and concealed. Eviner’s creatures eluding rational descriptions linger between life and death. In Bashir Borlakov’s photograph, the man, who levitates off the ground holding onto two geese in the vast Caucasus Mountains seems to be reenacting a local myth about liberation, salvation and ascending to heaven. With a precise and medical stance, Ömer Ali Kazma’s videos stare without a blink, at life and death.

In Hale Tenger’s video titled ‘Beirut’, the flitting curtains on the identical windows of a huge building seem to suggest that what is apparent can hide ineffable violence and as the shifts from gloomy to frightening. In one of Leyla Gediz’s paintings included in the show, the artist’s reflection appears on the face of a beautiful young woman who had committed suicide. In her other painting, we gaze at the back of a middle-aged man wearing an overcoat that doesn’t seem to fit well, in an obscure, creepy ambiguity. Amidst these works that trace the very different aspects and limits of our existence, Nevin Aladağ’s “kissing” planes reflects on the poetics of the arrested moment.

While its space on İstiklal Street is being expanded and renovated to house a new institution bringing together Platform and Garanti Galeri; since September 2007 Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center continues to perform its public functions like the library, the archive and the Istanbul Residency Program in its temporary space and in 2008 the institution will organize exhibitions abroad. After the exhibition Last Things, in summer 2008 Platform is going to participate in the Santa Fe Biennial with 15 other distinguished institutions from the world.

The project is supported by Kunststiftung NRW & Goethe-Institut

Subtracting of Zeroes / Mladen Stilinović

2007-08-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

September 6 - November 3

Mladen Stilinović lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia, and has been exhibiting since 1975. Researching the interactions between visual and verbal signs and intervening on inexpensive and found material, his projects have assumed a variety of forms: installations, collages, artist books, video, and performance.

In the recent years, Stilinović participated in exhibitions at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Essl Collection in Vienna, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Tate Modern, Apex Art, New York, the 2003 Venice Biennial, 2006 Sydney Biennial, and Documenta XII.

The exhibition will pivot around the issue of economy with reference to the previous use of Platform's building as a bank in the 1980s. A selection from Stilinović's production of over 70 artist books, from the 1970s to today, will be exhibited in the mezzanine.

Platform has produced a publication in collaboration with Van AbbeMuseum focusing on Stilinović's practice with artist books. The exhibition will be reconfigured in the beginning of 2008 for Van AbbeMuseum in Eindhoven.

Subtracting of Zeroes is realized with the support of the American Center Foundation.

Click on the images for high quality downloads.

September 8, Jalal Toufic Lecture

2007-08-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster:

This lecture provides an overview of my concept of the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster. To detect this withdrawal, whether symptomatically or otherwise, one is well advised to look for it in messianic movements as well as in artistic and literary works: “With regard to the surpassing disaster, art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. ‘You have seen nothing in Hiroshima’ [Duras/Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour]. Does this entail that one should not record? No. One should record this ‘nothing,’ which only after the resurrection can be available.” We will examine if and how one can record this “nothing,” as well as how to contribute to the resurrection of the withdrawn tradition—without this resurrection tradition becomes a counterfeit of itself.
Jalal Toufic

Jalal Toufic's Concise Biography
Jalal Toufic is a thinker, writer, and artist. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), and ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005). His videos and mixed-media works have been presented in such venues as Artists Space, New York; ICA, London; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel.
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September 11, Aneta Szylak Lecture

2007-08-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

Aneta Szylak

Aneta Szylak, curator and art theorist, co-founder and currently director of Wyspa Institute of Art - the intellectual environment for contemporary visual culture - in the former Gdansk Shipyard premises in Poland and Vice-President of the Wyspa Progress Foundation. Early in her career, she became interested in participatory practices, which resulted in her commitment today to performativity, contextuality and open, dynamic forms in exhibition- and institution-making. Her long-term involvement in the groundbreaking, alternative and politically involved Gdansk art scene bore fruit in her interest in collective forms of work. In 1998, Ms Szylak founded the Laznia (Bathhouse) Centre for Contemporary Art and was its Director until spring 2001. Her exhibitions were characterised by a strong response towards the cultural, political, social, architectural and institutional context and included in 2006: Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space and Artur Zmijewski: Selected Works at Wyspa and a group show You won’t feel a thing: On Panic, Obsession, Rituality and Anaesthesia in Kunsthaus Dresden. Earlier work includes: Dockwatchers [2005, Wyspa], Palimpsest Museum [2004, I Lodz Biennale], Health & Safety [2004, Wyspa], Architectures of Gender [2003, SculptureCenter, New York], All You Need is Love [2000, CCA Laznia]. Her writings have been published in Aprior Magazine, n.paradoxa, Art Journal, ArtKrush. Art Margins. She co-edited a book The Site of Idea. The Idea of Site [1995] covering the first 10 years of the Gdansk alternative art scene. In 2005, she was given the Jerzy Stajuda Award “for independent and uncompromising curatorial practice”. She has lectured at many art institutions and universities, including New School University, Queens College and New York University, both in NYC. She taught Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow) and worked as a guest professor at the Akademie der Bildende Kunste in Mainz, Germany. Currently she is writing her PhD thesis, entitled “The Palimpsest” at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Visual Cultures Department [Curatorial/Knowledge Research PhD]. She is also co-curating with Hiwa K. a series of workshops and an exhibition Estrangement [2007-2009] dealing with cultural translation and dissemination of knowledge between Europe and the Middle East through visual means and the fostering of discourse of cultural competenc

SITE SANTA FE BIENNIAL IN 2008

2007-08-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

PLATFORM GARANTI IS ONE OF THE SITE SANTA FE GLOBAL PARTNERS FOR SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL EXHIBITION IN 2008

Laura Steward Heon, Director of SITE Santa Fe and Lance Fung, SITE’s 2008 Biennial curator announced the international partners for the Seventh International Biennial exhibition scheduled to run from June 22 through October 26, 2008.

Fung aims to redefine the paradigm of a biennial through international collaboration by establishing a unique global partnership with a variety of non-profit visual arts organizations that share SITE’s same enthusiasm and commitment to mission. As of press time, he has selected 15 geographically and culturally diverse institutions to participate in the 2008 Biennial. Each partnering organization will propose three artists whose work best represents that institution’s ideological framework and curatorial philosophy. From this group, Mr. Fung will select one artist from each institution to participate in his biennial exhibition. These chosen artists will come to Santa Fe and create a new commissioned work for the Biennial.

Fung commented: 'I want to do more than just another big group exhibition - I want to redefine the biennial through collaboration and offer a new approach in keeping with the history of SITE's Biennials. I want to find other like-minded organizations worldwide that share the same energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to mission that SITE has. My goals are to raise awareness of SITE itself, showcase the flavor of each collaborator, inspire learning, and bring people together for a broad sea-change in visual arts programming.

The international partners for the 2008 SITE Santa Fe Biennial are: Gertrude Street, Melbourne, Victoria; The Power Plant, Toronto; Centre for International Cultural Exchange, Ministry of Culture, P.R.C. Beijing; Ullens Center for the Arts, Beijing' Townhouse, Cairo; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milan; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Centro de Arte Santa Mónica (CASM), Barcelona; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (IAIA), Santa Fe

The Photographers

2007-06-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

The Photographers
Laurence Bonvin & Juul Hondius
June 23, 2007 - August 11, 2007

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present The Photographers, an exhibition by the Swiss artist Laurence Bonvin and the Dutch artist Juul Hondius.

Prior to the realization of the exhibition, both Bonvin and Hondius spent a considerable amount of time in Istanbul in 2005 and 2006. The exhibition is a result of the extensive research about urban spaces in transformation, changing demographics, and mental maps of the city.

There is a remarkable interest in photography as a predominant medium in the field of contemporary art in Turkey. With this exhibition, Platform approaches this interest with two distinct positions: Hondius' photography takes on a place though a series of complex procedures without over-signifying the place itself. It is a form of distilling a city to a set of monumental images that are in large part mis-en-scénes. Rather than transferring the real, he starts with a photographic fiction that has a purchase on plausibility. Bonvin's photographs, similar to Hondius', betray the desire of arresting the image in a local, preconceived way. In fact, Bonvin's photographs of plush, newly-built gated communities on the outskirts of the city have the potential to be anywhere for an scrutinizing eye. Mostly of depopulated, tranquil spaces, the photographs look like near-perfect sets, unlikely to be actual.

The exhibition is a welcome relief to the subject of Istanbul that has been suffering from over-representation, photo-documentary formats, journalistic impulses, and the fast image.

Laurence Bonvin is a photography-based artist living and working in Geneva. A two-time receipient of the Swiss Art Award, her work has been exhibited at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Fri-Art, Fribourg, Aarhus Copenhagen and many other other institutions.

Juul Hondius is an Amsterdam based artist and a former resident of Platform Garanti CAC. His work has been exhibited recently at the Tate Liverpool Museum, The Chicago Art Institute, Chicago, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and Busan Biennale 2004, South Korea.

The exhibition has been realized with the support of Pro Helvetia, Fonds Municipal d'Art Contemporain de la ville de Genève, The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, and the Mondriaan Foundation.

Excerpt from an Interview of Laurence Bonvin with Fatoş Üstek

F.A. I would like to start our interview with making our readers informed about your education and how you started to produce photography.

L.B. My first experience with photography was watching the pictures that my father had produced while he was traveling the world as a sportsman. For me, as a kid, the elsewhere they were picturing was really influential...
The full interview can be found here

A Discussion with Bert Theis

2007-06-23T04:25:00.000-07:00

June 26, 18:30, Platform Garanti

Bert Theis was born in Luxembourg and currently lives and works in Milan, Italy. As an artist, his work has been shown internationally in art galleries, fairs, public parks, town squares, and even in crowded subways. Theis challenges the typical artist-viewer relationship by creating works in which the viewer's personal utilization of the artwork takes precedence over the conceptual structure of the piece itself. Having now taken on a more organizational role through his work with the Isola Art Center and OUT [the Office for Urban Transformation], Theis continues to explore contemporary art and its contribution to daily life and creative stimulation.

Bert Theis will participate with ISOLA and OUT in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial.

A Walking Discussion with Bert Theis

Global Cities at Tate Modern

2007-06-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

20 June-27 August 2007
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

Platform's curator November Paynter is one of the curators for the revised project that stared with the 10th International Venice Architecture Biennale.

Global Cities, a major free exhibition examining recent changes in ten global cities - Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Tokyo - will be presented in a spectacular installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern from 20 June-27 August 2007. Organised by Tate in association with the la Biennale di Venezia, the exhibition is sponsored by Land Securities in association with Savills and Derwent London.

The show will feature newly commissioned work by leading international artists and architects
Nigel Coates, Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher, Fritz Haeg, OMA*AMO/Rem Koolhaas, Nils Norman and Richard Wentworth inspired by the social, cultural and physical dimensions of London. To complement the other city data are more than twenty works by artists and architects Atelier Bow Wow, Hüseyin Alptekin, Francis Alys, Laurence Bonvin, Osman Bozkurt, Hala Elkoussy, Kendell Geers, Dryden Goodwin, Andreas Gursky, Naoya Hatakeyama, Francesco Jodice, Eva Koch, Maha Maamoun, Neutral, Nils Norman, Scott Peterman, Melanie Smith, Dean Sameshima, Guy Tillim, Paromita Vohra and Yang Zhenzhong.

Global Cities has been developed from the show that was the centrepiece of the 10th International Venice Architecture Biennale where it attracted over 130,000 visitors, making it the most popular Architecture Biennale to date. The exhibition at Tate Modern will use London as a concrete point of reference and comparison with the other nine cities. The exhibition’s Turbine Hall installation has been specially designed by Pentagram.

The exhibition addresses major issues facing some of the most influential urban centres around the world: from migration to mobility, from social integration to sustainable growth. It explores five themes: size, speed, density, form and diversity and draws upon comparative socio-economic and geographic data assembled by researchers at the London School of Economics.

To complement these data, the exhibition at Tate incorporates a wide range of existing visual art works in the media of video and photography that present subjective interpretations of urban conditions in each of the ten cities. The artists’ and architects’ commissions, which are being produced especially for the exhibition in the Turbine Hall, will respond to the local context of London and in some cases of Southwark.

A Discussion with Bert Theis

2007-06-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

June 26, 18:30

Bert Theis was born in Luxembourg and currently lives and works in Milan, Italy. As an artist, his work has been shown internationally in art galleries, fairs, public parks, town squares, and even in crowded subways. Theis challenges the typical artist-viewer relationship by creating works in which the viewer's personal utilization of the artwork takes precedence over the conceptual structure of the piece itself.

Having now taken on a more organizational role through his work with the Isola Art and Community Center and OUT: the Office for Urban Transformation, Theis continues to explore contemporary art and its contribution to daily life and creative stimulation.

Bert Theis will participate with ISOLA and OUT in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. Isola Art and Community Center is a project founded in 2002 by a group of international and national critics, curators and artists, with the objective of working with the neighborhood associations for the defense of public spaces and the creation of the Art Center.

A Walking Discussion with Bert Theis

Bosphorus Beat in Art + Auction Magazine

2007-06-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

A survey article by Abigail R. Esman was published in the June 2007 issue of Art + Auction. The excerpt reads "With the Istanbul Biennale turning ten in September, there’s no better time to explore this surprisingly vibrant art scene, where collectors, museums and public art thrive despite social and political tensions." Following is the section that pertains to Platform Garanti. Listed also are the corrections to the text. "The Bosphorus Beat" Abigail R. Esman ... Opposite Yapi Kredi is Platform, the city's first alternative space. Platform was established in 2001 by Proje4L's founding director and co-curator of the 2005 biennial, Vasif Kortun, and is sponsored by the Garanti Bank. (For reasons involving competition, tradition, good business and goodwill, banks have become major supporters of the art institutions, including galleries, following the model set by Yapi Kredi's Kazim Taskent.) More a foundation then an exhibition space, Platform, according to an official statement, functions as "a meeting point for contemporary artists, curators and critics" through its encyclopedic archive of contemporary Turkish art, music and film . It also provides residencies for artists from Europe, the Balkans, Kazakhstan and the Middle East. "Our mission," says Kortun, who was the first director (1994-97) of the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in upstate New York, is "to being questions, not answers," to contemporary art. "That doesn't make us a safe place," he adds, noting that police removed a work by one resident recently, claiming that it ridiculed them. (There have been no religious protests against any of the art in Istanbul.) Corrections: "The Bosphorus Beat" "Platform contains an archive of work by more than 100 artists from Turkey, the most comprehensive library of art publications in the city." "...Our residency programme is currently supported by Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Basque, Norwegian, Swiss, Greek, French, British and Finnish national and regional funding bodies. With the support of a special three-year grant donated by the American Center Foundation, we were able to invite three artists from South East Europe, the South East Mediterranean and West Asia between 2004-2006. A grant from the Open Society Institute now offers artists from the Caucasus region the opportunity to spend two months in Istanbul this year and as one of the partners of the newly established Backyard residency programme, a project under the SEE Mobility Project (Artists' Residences in South East Europe,), supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers we have invited four artists from the countries of South East who will spend time in on IRP between September 2006 and June 2007." from our website Further Amendments: Regarding the problem with the police, one case occurred during a street performance by the artist named Luk Sips. Sips had put himself behind bars in a make-shift cell on the Istiklal Street. The other case was Ahmet Öğüt's screening on Yama a new public art space hosted by a digital board that sits atop the Marmara Pera Hotel in Istanbul. The work was eventually removed by the organizer because of heavy pressure from the security officials.

Book Launch In Venice

2007-05-27T12:50:00.001-07:00

Please click on the Image for the e-invitation

Atelier Bow-Wow

2007-05-17T01:08:00.000-07:00

May 17, 18:30
Atelier Bow-Wow
Momoyo Kajima

Why the Open Library?

2007-05-11T01:33:00.000-07:00

Vasif Kortun will discuss the Open Library Project

May 16, 18:30

Open Library
Vasif Kortun

Istiklal Avenue, where Platform is located, was recreated in the 1860s, during a kind of semi-colonial period of the late Ottoman Empire between the Crimean war and the second constitutiuonal era of 1909. It was the only wide and straight street in the city. Coinciding roughly with the Haussmanization of Paris, it was the first street where a notion of anonyma could be experienced. During this time, there were more than sixty exhibitions on the street, some taking place in the smaller storefronts. As many of the cities that lost their port-city status, depopulated during two world wars, and industrialized in times of national economy, it became a different city altogether until the recent global economic change.

Since the mid-1990s many business changed hands with increasing speed. The micro-economy of shoemakers, tailors, barbershops and corner stores were pushed out and replaced by bars, chains and cafés, and flagship stores of international companies. Modest art centers were also edged out and replaced by glamorous commercial galleries and cultural centers. Although it is still a place where the experience economy is practiced in a more colorful way than in a zero-friction zone shopping mall, the future remains uncertain.

When visitors come to Platform, they do not pass through metal detectors, are not under the gaze of surveillance euipment, and are not confronted with the suspicious gaze of armed security personnel. Nor are they treated to an environment that implies cultural supremacy. Platform has always been aware of where it is located.

Open Library was a revisitation of Platform's exhibition space in the form of a library. One of the most evident goals of the project was to produce a moment of pause from the frenetic stream of passers-by through the largely consumption oriented experience of the pedestrianised Istiklal Avenue, and to break the verticality of that stream.

By setting up an uncanny threshold between the street and the normally white-walled gallery, Platform’s functions were blurred. The current status could be perceived as a library or as an idiosyncratic exhibition. To set up a library in a high-rent ground floor space could be seen by many as a waste of an opportunity to make big money. A gallery could have been acceptable for culture stock, but a library?

The Istanbul based multidisciplinary design studio Superpool conceptualized this question of a “neither-nor space” by setting up an auditorum with seats on one side facing a very long “stage” with books arranged as a backdrop. This proposal with two singular elements, shelving one side, and bleachers on the other, produced public interactions of a third kind, between watching and reading, walking and resting.

Not only Istanbul's libraries are in general far and few between, they are not exactly public spaces because they do not actively encourage access. They are not zones of rest, and daydreaming, but archaic dwellings for disgruntled students, and for the occasional afficianaodo and researcher. They are invisible, and lack the symbolisms of what they should be.

The notion of a library in an exhibition space was to familiarize an unsuspecting public who visited the space, often without any expectation, either to see an exhibition or in extension of window gazing. What would frustrate some expectations was that there was here a lot to watch, except for people who are picking up a book, or reading, or dosing off. Nothing could be taken home even although all the contents belonged theoertically to all. It would be a public experience where nothing of object value could be exchanged. To a lesser degree, it was about reshuffling the gallery experience. Unlike cinema, where the whole audience experiences intimacy on publicum but without a body, the experience of the exhibition is that one watches and is also being potentially watched by another, and the institution gazes over those who are watching the work, and those are watching those watching the work In the “Open Library” —an oxymoronic title that indidates merely a hope— one could simply watch nothing more than “closed” knowledge, an absurdly beatiful experience.

The open library would metaphorically “close” in the evenings. Curtains were drawn over the whole span of shelves. The curtain would become a screen on which many public public programs, ranging from screenings to presentations took place. Public programs literally began when the public library closed. The Open Library also hosted mini curated libraries along with disscussions to transform the project into an active public space.

After six years of exhibition practise, despite a few projects that bordered on limits of exhibition practise, the institutuion grew tired of the space, the space became increasingly fatigued, and the audiences –we would suspect-- became tired of the institution. The pure rhtym that exhibition practise demands, has a desensitizing effect and begins to fulfill a need that is so blatantly based on expectancies of a range of the possible. This transaction between the audience and space gets increasingly regulated by the codes of normalization. In the six years of the institution's history however, two international chain coffee shops popped up on either side of the building, new shops came, many older spaces closed down, and the whole profile of the street began to change. Platform was faced with the question: should we be staying the same as if all remains the same and we are not under the daily terror of experience economy? Institutions are not labels that have to be maintained ad infinitum. They have to make themselves unavoidable.

Furthermore, in the six years, Platform's library expanded exponentially, the archives were solidifed and a residency program was started. The added functions to the building contributed to the icreasing severance of the institution's functions from each other as the library and research conponent became increadingsly invisible to general audiences, iresultiong in an institution that is half-visible. Hence, a critical aspect of the project was to communicate and display Platform’s unrelenting archives, which combine many acquisitions with thousands of donations from friendly institutions, artists, critics and curators.

Platform was invited as one of two not-for-profit spaces to participate in Frieze Projects in 2006. Our project ‘collecting point’ was a drop off point for art publications, periodicals and other materials that were displayed for reference at the Frieze Art Fair. Platform's concept was to turn the economy of the art fair around to set up a stand that did not exchange goods for cash, but, on the contrary, to simply exchange a promise for publications. These publications that were made available for further research at Platform were also an additional incentive for the project.

It is critical to understand that institutuonal discourse is invariably linked to the politics of space and Platform's experiment was one in hospitality.

artist’s book: an alternative space?

2007-05-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

May 1, 18:30

Banu Cennetoğlu, Philippine Hoegen Aslı Çavuşoğlu and Emre Hüner at Platform

May 1st

… Another important characteristic of the artist’s book is that it does not have a clear place in the history of art and remains ambiguous in terms of how it should be perceived.
By not following any established rules, it is free and undefined in its production and distribution and therefore has retained its alternative nature.

BAS is an artist –run space initiated in 2006 by Banu Cennetoğlu. BAS collects and produces artists’ books and printed matter.

Bent is a series of artists’ books from Turkey and collaboration between BAS and Philippine Hoegen. Between May ’06 and February ’07 eight books were produced by three artists; Masist Gül, Aslı Çavuşoğlu and Emre Hüner.

Vahram Aghasyan: Yerevan In Transition

2007-04-26T01:10:00.000-07:00

Friday, April 27, 2007, 18:30

The modernistic project was left unfinished in Armenia; it half failed, half remained unfinished.

Vahram Aghasyan's conversation will focus on observations of the failed architecture of Soviet Armenia. It will discuss the transition processes and city building in post Soviet Yerevan taking into account the planning, and the historical, figurative and geopolitical aspects of the construction of the Northern Avenue.

Vahram Aghasyan in a resident of the Istanbul Residency Program at Platform as part of West Asia and Caucuses Program funded in part by the Open Society Institute.

Open Table: Ramazan Bayrakoğlu

2007-04-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

April 24, 2007: 18:30
Open Table: Ramazan Bayrakoğlu with Murat Özdemir, Hakan Kırdar and Barış Tanyıldızı.

Open Table is a series of conversations with artists. Each artist is asked to invite guests to the table to discuss his or her work. Open Table is a guest of the Open Library.

April 10 Canan Şenol with Serkan Özkaya, Vahit Tuna and Kamil Senol
March 27 Leyla Gediz with Evrim Altuğ, Erinç Seymen and Meliz Ağazat

Open table is a project conceived by the artist Mürüvvet Türkyılmaz.

Oda Projesi presents: The cloak room FM

2007-04-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

April 20, 13:00 - 18:00

Oda Projesi will realize a limited range radio broadcast from the Open Library's cloak room. There will be live interviews as well as archival material. The "quiet" broadcast will revolve around issues of the library.

Bik Van der Pol: books, magazines and systems of distribution

2007-04-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

Bik Van der Pol presents printed-matter-projects they are involved in: the Traveling Magazine Table, a project initiated by Nomads & Residents; Past Imperfect Issue 3 and 4, book projects of Bik Van der Pol in collaboration with Casco in Utrecht; Insa Art Space in Seoul; and Fly Me To The Moon, a project consisting of an exhibition, a tour, a publication and a billboard poster placed in the so-called 'mupi's' throughout Amsterdam.

At the end of the evening Banu Cennetoglu will present The List, a recent public space project she realized in Amsterdam. The List, a document that contains the names of 7182 refugees who died within or on the borders of Europe, was displayed as a poster campaign in 110 mupi’s - outdoor advertising sign - throughout the city of Amsterdam for the duration of two weeks, March 14 - March 28, 2007.

April 13, 18:30, Natasa Petresin Video Program I

2007-04-13T02:47:00.000-07:00

DISTORTED FABRIC
Curated by Nataša Petrešin
First organized at De Appel, Amsterdam, January 2007

Distorted Fabric traces the production of the plausible in the contemporary art through the videos of various artists and installation by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige which warp our sense and knowledge of reality and render it questionable, odd and alienated. They operate with the categories of the logic of facts and logic of fiction as with two extremes on the same line of experience and thought that can be blurred, not as with two separate entities of experience, copying and mimicking one another. They confront the spectators at first with a subtle confusion, generated by the artistic methods of fabrication of the real, fictionalization of the visual documents or of imposture and decomposition of the first-person-singular narrative. The alienation rendered by the confusion, furthermore, invokes the Brechtian epic theatre of making his audience realise that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of some events that should be watched with critical detachment. As Brecht wrote, "alienation is necessary to all (critical) understanding. When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up." The works in the video screening could be described as being between the subjective documentaries, docu-fictions or autofictive narrations. In a way the works presented are, as Hannah Arendt would call them, "forms of action", since they function as statements that try to change the common belief in the material authenticity of the images and information that construct our daily reality.

VIDEO PROGRAM FOR ISTANBUL:
April 13, 18:30

FICTIONALIZED DOCUMENTS
DURATION: 84’

Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige: El film el mafkoud (The lost film), 2003 (42’)
Daya Cahen: The Stalin that was played by me, 2006 (15’)
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group: We Can Make Rain but No One Came To Ask, 2005 (17’)
Sebastián Díaz Morales: Lucharemos hasta anular la ley, 2005 (10’)

April 14, 18:30, Natasa Petresin Video Program II and III

2007-04-13T02:39:00.000-07:00

DISTORTED FABRIC
Curated by Nataša Petrešin
First organized at De Appel, Amsterdam, January 2007

Distorted Fabric traces the production of the plausible in the contemporary art through the videos of various artists and installation by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige which warp our sense and knowledge of reality and render it questionable, odd and alienated. They operate with the categories of the logic of facts and logic of fiction as with two extremes on the same line of experience and thought that can be blurred, not as with two separate entities of experience, copying and mimicking one another. They confront the spectators at first with a subtle confusion, generated by the artistic methods of fabrication of the real, fictionalization of the visual documents or of imposture and decomposition of the first-person-singular narrative. The alienation rendered by the confusion, furthermore, invokes the Brechtian epic theatre of making his audience realise that what it sees on the stage is merely an account of some events that should be watched with critical detachment. As Brecht wrote, "alienation is necessary to all (critical) understanding. When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up." The works in the video screening could be described as being between the subjective documentaries, docu-fictions or autofictive narrations. In a way the works presented are, as Hannah Arendt would call them, "forms of action", since they function as statements that try to change the common belief in the material authenticity of the images and information that construct our daily reality.

VIDEO PROGRAM II and III FOR ISTANBUL:

2. FABRICATION OF REALITY
DURATION: 28'

Driton Hajredini: Somewhere in Prishtina, 2003 (3’37’’)
Ahmet Öğüt: Cut It Out, 2004 (1’46’’)
SilentCell Network: Looping Hooman Sharifi, 2004 (2’44’’)
Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Judith Hopf: Villa Watch (15’)
Eglė Budvytytė: Secta, 2006 (5’56’’)

3. IMPOSTURE
DURATION: 39'

Jakup Ferri: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist, 2003 (3’58’’)
Keren Cytter: The Date Series. 21/5/04, 2004 (5’24’’)
Clemens von Wedemeyer & Maya Schweizer: Rien du tout, 2006 (30’)

Open Library

2007-03-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

March 20 - June 9
Open Library is a rethinking of Platform's well-visited exhibition space in the form of a library. The project creates a moment of pause for the frenetic stream of people passing by via the consumption oriented experience of the pedestrianised Istiklal Caddesi. By setting up an unexpected threshold between the street outside and the normally white-walled gallery, Platform’s function becomes blurred and its current status can be perceived as a library or as idiosyncratic exhibition. The design of the space builds on this inquiry by constructing a bleacher-type seating, similar to that found in sports halls, along one wall of the gallery, facing an extensive run of bookshelves on the other. In Istanbul street-level libraries are few and far between, and the concept of the library as a place of warming up, extended curiosity, daydreaming, dozing off and random perusal is reduced to a condition of compulsory and tedious research.

Open Library will host weekly curated mini-libraries, readings, discussions, screenings, conversations and other programmes to transform the space into a lively public sphere. In addition, the project will communicate and display Platform’s unrelenting archives, which combine many acquisitions with thousands of donations from friendly institutions, artists, critics and curators.

Open Library was designed by Istanbul-based architecture practice superpool in collaboration with quinze & milan.

Please find here Azra Tüzünoglu's text on Open Library. A shorther version of this text was published in Art Papers. Vasif Kortun's text on the project can be found here.

April 5, 18:30, Dirk Herzog Screenings

2007-03-19T02:45:00.000-07:00

Pelmeni or Bliny (2005), DVD, 22 min.,
commissioned by 7th Sharjah Biennial
The first biennial for contemporary art took place in Venice in 1895. Over the past decade there has been a proper boom of such intercontinental art events on a global scale. Havana, Sao Paulo, Johannesburg, Dakar, Istanbul, Gwangju, Yokohama or Seoul, nowadays biennials are to be found worldwide. It seems to be good form to put local contexts in the service of a globalized modernity. Some people describe biennials as stimulants for neoliberal economies, as the globalization of globalization. Others try to look at them as competitive artistic events, just like the olympic games, and mourn about the loss of artistic subtlety. But all participants seem to profit. The gain of image is enormous, for the organizers as well as for the participants. On January the 28th 2005, Moscow claims one of the sought after places on the map of the International Art Inc. and opens its first biennial of contemporary art. Pelmeni or Bliny is documenting this event, asks for the ingredients of such a spectacle and examines the scale of decisions in such a win-win situation.

Multidudes, 2007
Multidudes is a portrait of an art project, its organizers, and its surroundings. this video was shot during and shortly after the inaugural weekend of unitednationsplaza in the end of october 2006 in Berlin. With Boris Groys, Anton Vidokle, Martha Rossler, Liam Gillick, Tirdad Zolghadr, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Anselm Franke, Vasif Kortun, Maria Lind.
" a couple of days ago before finishing the video portrait of unitednationsplaza i read the correction site of a german newspaper called taz, in which they regularly pick out one type-error and correct it. this day they corrected the word "multidude". they used it the day before in an article about negri and hardt. they where explaining that it is not supposed to be "multidude" but "multitude". they described the word "multitude" as being one of the most popular words in left discourse nowadays, defining a network of singularities doing immaterial work, a collective in which differences are not evened, nor played off against each other. concerning this, they admited maybe to have thought of cronyism too much or watched too often The Big Lebowski, thinking about the dude and dude-ism, which lead to write "multidude" instead of "multitude".
as i found this a quite fitting title for the video i sent it to anton vidokle for the press release of the madrid trial at arco 07 where the video was premiered. a couple of days later i got the press release for arco via e-flux. the title of "multidudes" was changed back into "multitudes" again...."
Dirk Herzog is an artist based in Berlin, Germany.

Existing art in a non-existing state?

2007-03-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

Alenka Gregorič Conversation
12 April, 18:30

The conversation will begin with an introduction about the Ljubljana contemporary art institutions and their role in the local and international art scene. Gregorič will give a short presentation of Škuc Gallery where she has been working as artistic director since 2003 followed up by a historical view of the connections between art institutions in (ex)Yugoslavia in the 1980s. The collapse of the state in the 1980s divided the art scene because old and new physical and psychological borders were set up. Nowadays, the contemporary art situation in the ex-Yugoslavia region seems to have reestablished the close connections that had existed the past on an institutional level as well as from the perspective of artistic expression. There is a kind of shared language in the works of artists in the last few years that has much to do with self-irony, and humor and criticism towards the leading world art system, particularly evidenced in the works of Mladen Stilinović, Sislej Xhafa, Art Fun Club, and Jakup Ferri.

Maarten Hajer Conference

2007-03-16T03:11:00.000-07:00

Etching the City: Public Domain for Fragmented Cities

23 March, 18:30

With the support of the Consulate General of the Netherlands

Maarten Hajer is one of the best-known urban planners in the Netherlands, now holds the Chair in Public Policy at the University of Amsterdam. His landmark work, The Politics of Environmental Discourse (Clarendon Press, 1995), was followed by Living with Nature – Environmental Discourse as Cultural Politics (Oxford University Press, 1999). His new book, co-written with Arnold Reijndorp, is In Search of New Public Domain (Nai Publishers, 2002).

The New Urban Landscapes

Chantal Mouffe

2007-03-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Chantal Mouffe was a guest of Platform with her lecture
Democratic politics and agonistic public spaces. Realized with the support of British Council

Frame Builders [a book from IAS, Seoul/Korea]

2007-03-04T08:26:00.000-08:00

Platform Garanti is featured in the document book of Frame Builders, a project made in May 2006 in conjunction with the relocation and renovation of the IAS [INSA ART SPACE]. This project was developed to pursue two agendas: a type of local public art institutions in demand and the factors to be considered in making a right directional choice; its communicative process in which a conceptual framework of institutional identity is visualized and disseminated to the public. As a project consisting of workshop and exhibition, “Frame Builders” provided a platform not only for IAS to re-investigate their own ideas and strategies to foster a stronger identity, but for local art public to examine current institutional critique.

Contents

- The Project “Frame Builders” and Re-framing the Project Past

- Framing a New Mind and a New Public _ Heejin Kim

Part 1. Textual Matrix: Workshop, Lectures & Artists’ Talks

DAAD Buro Berlin, daadgalerie (Berlin, Germany) _ Friedrich Meschede

Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius, Lithuania) _ Kestutis Kuizinas

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul, Turkey) _ November Paynter

Eyebeam (New York, USA) _ Perry Lowe

Part 2. Visual Identity: Exhibition

Vuk Cosic, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Skart, Belgrade, Serbia

Sulki & Min, Seoul, South Korea

M/M(Paris), Paris, France

Choi Jeong-Hwa, Seoul, South Korea

Platform at Global Art Forum

2007-03-03T09:04:00.000-08:00

Global Art Forum
The Forum, hosted by the DIFC Gulf Art Fair, brought an international group of over forty artists, curators, dealers, museum directors, critics and academics together for three days to focus on issues affecting art and the arts community, with the consideration of the Middle East as a driving force. Bringing an open forum to an Art Fair is a complex balancing act, as the commercial aspects of an art market often challenge the positions of artists, curators and exhibition makers. The DIFC Global Art Forum hopes to reconcile these diverse perspectives and map out the constellation of ideas and opinions defining art today and in the future. The central themes of this year's Forum were, The Next Ten Years of Contemporary Art in the Middle East and Cities and Culture.

Artists and their work
Wim Delvoye, Artist, Brussels, Belgium - with Vasif Kortun, Director Platform Garanti, Istanbul, Turkey

Middle East Focus
10:30 - 12:00 The Next Ten Years of Contemporary Art in the Middle East - Presentations and Panel Discussion
Saleh Barakat, Art Expert, Beirut, Lebanon; Camilla Cañellas, Writer, Critic, Curator, Barcelona, Spain; Bassam El-Baroni, Art Critic Curator, Egypt
Hassan Khan, Editor, Bidoun, Cairo, Egypt; Jack Persekian - Director Sharjah Biennial, Curator, Founder and Director of Anadiel Gallery and Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem; Tirdad Zolghadr, Curator, Zurich, Switzerland; Moderator: Vasif Kortun, Director, Platform Garanti, Istanbul, Turkey

Open stage for the Middle East and South Asia
5.00 - 5.30 - Presentation: Platform Garanti, Turkey

Public Event at Platform Garanti

2007-03-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

March 1, 2007,

Introductory talk by curators Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr
“Istanbul: a Case Study” by Erden Kosova
“Solo Show” a performance by Natascha Sadr Haghighian “The Life and Times of Johann Joachim Winckelmann”
an art historical foray by Frederic Jacquemin.
Canned beer, salted peanuts to a visual backdrop
including Stewart Home’s The Golem (2004), and René Vienet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie

2007-01-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie
Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art

23 January 2007 - 3 March 2007

Annika Eriksson
Chris Evans
Dirk Fleischmann
Liam Gillick
Marion Von Osten
Natascha Sadr Haghighian
San Keller

To what extent does class play a role in the production and dissemination of contemporary art?

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie is an exhibition and research project touring internationally from 2006 to 2008, which aims to investigate how socioeconomic background still defines one’s career, and to what extent career choice and development reflects or consolidates the initial social hierarchies in question. In light of recent changes in working conditions within and without the art world, a fundamental query here is whether traditional analytical tools that discuss the role of class and social hierarchy are still of use today.

Initiated at Gasworks, London, last October, this series of exhibitions is the starting point for a two-year collaboration. Over 2007, the project is to move to Stockholm and Cairo, then back to London, during which a continuing, methodical collaboration between practitioners of various fields will be developed. Most of the artworks on display were shown in an initial form at Gasworks, October 2006, and will be developed over the coming presentations. Additional artists in the London exhibition included Sylvie Fleury, Hassan Khan, and Erkan Özgen & Sener Özmen. The project as a whole will be documented in an extensive publication due to be released in 2008.

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie launched in July with a special broadcast by Dirk Fleischmann as part of Radio Gallery on Resonance FM. Radio Gallery was curated by Anna Colin. The exhibition was at Gasworks between November 10, 2006 – January 14, 2007. Following Istanbul, it will move to venues in Stockholm and Cairo.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a curator, critic and film-maker based in Zurich. Recent curatorial projects include Ethnic Marketing, at the Kunsthalle Geneva, and the 7th International Sharjah Biennial. He is further active as a member of the Shahrzad Art & Design Collective, and is a contributing editor of Bidoun magazine.

Nav Haq is curator at Gasworks. He is presently a guest editor at Book Works, and has also recently been appointed curator of the 3rd Contour Biennial for Video Art, Belgium. He has also contributed to magazines such as Art Review, Bidoun and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Review by Grayson Perry is here.

Public Event at Platform Garanti March 1, 2pm:
Introductory talk by curators Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr
“Istanbul: a Case Study” by Erden Kosova
“Solo Show” a performance by Natascha Sadr Haghighian
“The Life and Times of Johann Joachim Winckelmann” an art historical foray by Frederic Jacquemin
Canned beer, salted peanuts and spirited discussion to a visual backdrop including Stewart Home’s The Golem (2004), and René Vienet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973)

Works:
Annika Eriksson / Fevzi Cakmak, we are not who you think we are, 2006-ongoing, paintings
In her studies of the symbolics of artworld and corporate hierarchies, Eriksson tends to involve everyone in the process, from the protagonists of the creative classes to the cleaning staff. In these works, Eriksson is eager to tread the fine line between populism and collaboration, engaging in neither, offering what she calls mere “suggestions” for the participants. For the opening of the Gasworks exhibition in London, November 2006, Eriksson invited several dozen individuals who had never attended a private view before. For Istanbul, Eriksson has decided to engage with Fevzi Cakmak, the security employee at the Platform Garanti Gallery, having learned that he holds a vocal interest in art and displays his own selection of paintings in a back corridor. Cakmak is given the opportunity to assemble a selection of his choice, and is submitted to the same specifications - thematic and artistic - as the others in the show. He has chosen to include pieces from the collection of Garanti Bank, the patron of the Platform exhibition space. The title of Eriksson’s London intervention, we are not who you think we are, will be used for all subsequent Lapdogs projects.

Chris Evans, The Freedom of Negative Expression, 2006-ongoing, film trailer on video, film script.
In much of his work, Evans forges difficult relationships between arts production and its supposed others, from aristocratic patrons to CEOs to funding board bureaucrats. Mostly it is the stilted result of translating political and aesthetic ideals across these socio-cultural spheres that forms the basis of the artwork. The piece on display is based on a fictionalised conversation between Evans and a key figure of the 1960s British Constructivists, known for her uncompromising views on the establishment’s misuse of the arts to consolidate the capitalist status quo. Both a film and a sculpture are being developed from this material, and will be fully realised as the Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie project progresses. Shown at Platform Garanti is a trailer for the upcoming film featuring an airbrush painting of the sculpture (a maquette of which was initially displayed at Gasworks London, November 2006), plus the film script.

Liam Gillick, “Run to the Nearest Town”, 2007, vinyl lettering
In the artist’s own words, this piece plays on the bourgeois setting of the provincial town in its relationship to the manners of the centre. Rather than the fraught, hierarchical traits of the city, embryonic bourgeois values implied the social bonds of the smaller town, which has also been the setting for many early modernist sites of resistance (Bauhaus, Black Mountain College) but also mass revolutions (which rarely start from the city, but come together in regional centres to march on the city: Cuba, Mexico, China, Vietnam). Thus the invocation to run to the nearest town is both the assumption of the bourgeois aspirant and the necessity of the revolutionary moment. The patterning on the wall opposite, meanwhile, represents a combination of formalism and textile related models, arts and crafts references, but also a rationalist tradition of bar charts and the rise of business science.

San Keller, Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie?, 2006-ongoing, C-prints
Keller is an artist who works mainly with performance, very often tracing the power relations between artist, critic, curator and audience with amusing, malicious interventions. Keller began the project on display by documenting the manner in which parents of Zurich- and London-based artists displayed their offspring’s work in their living rooms. He has continued this project in Istanbul, and shall further pursue it in Stockholm and Cairo. For the present leg of the project, due to unfortunate circumstances beyond his control, Keller has mandated his longtime collaborator Martin Ballmer to take the photographs for him.

San Keller, Nothing’s Perfect, 2005, gold-tipped wooden baton
Over recent years, Keller has increasingly been focusing on the rituals and pecking orders of the artworld itself, showing particular interest in the - usually conveniently mediated - powerplay between critic and artist. “Nothing’s Perfect” consists of a gold-tipped wooden baton reproducing the stick used by Christian Dior on his atelier tours. Dior used the baton to point out flaws in the work of his employees. Keller’s rendition is meant for critics touring exhibitions, a role that, in the context of Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, has been accepted by Platform director Vasif Kortun. On every afternoon of the exhibition, Kortun shall briefly tour the premises with the baton, pointing out shortcomings in both the work and its display.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Solo Show, 2006-ongoing, performance
Sadr Haghighian is an artist who works with video, performance and online modes of presentation. In her new performance, she revisits the age-old practice of hiring anonymous assistants to realise artworks, often demanding extensive, creative work on their behalf. This revitalised tradition raises complex questions of authorship and ethics within the artistic food chain. Suddenly, artists who work on their own, without any assistants and technicians, look old-fashioned and romantic by comparison. Sadr Haghighian will address these issues during a performance at the symposium on Tuesday, March 1 (cf. above).

Marion von Osten, “I Am Like That Anyway”, 2006-2007, plinths,
Marion von Osten is an artist known for her long engagements with feminist theory, the culturalisation of economy and the governance of mobility. Her empirical, curatorial and theoretical analyses of working patterns within the cultural industry were key contributions to the debate on post-Fordist conditions of production. For Lapdogs of the Bourgoisie von Osten proposed a Tableau Vivant of a recent H&M campaign featuring the pop star Madonna and her crew posing on plinths in front of a white wall with the Gasworks and the Platform Garanti team. Presented as a non-hierarchical community reminiscent of corporate self-presentations, but also of art historical icons, the original campaign as well as the installation is touching on the relation between art, consumption and corporate culture, as on the history of the representation of inequality and the normalising function of art and creative labour. In preperation of each show von Osten is discussing the image and its analogies with the staff of the involved art institutions and asks for it's local relevance.
Platform Discussion:
1. The Crew
2. Works by the Crew
3. Shopping
Gasworks Discussion
Book

Dirk Fleischmann, The Stop Show, 2003-ongoing, performance / Michele Di Menna, Wild Child, 2005, DVD, 3’ 48’’
Concerning the video of Michele Di Menna … Using kiosks, lectures, even chicken farms as his format, Dirk Fleischmann takes the patient achievement of a maximum reward from a minimum of means as motive and subject matter. For this exhibition, Fleischmann staged his ongoing project The Stop Show on Resonance FM London in July. The ultimate equal opportunity game show, it demands contestants count out a ten second time span as accurately as possible. Taking The Stop Show’s idea of a level playing field to its logical curatorial conclusion, the winner of this contest was invited to participate in the Gasworks exhibition. Frankfurt-based Michele Di Menna took the prize.

- - - -
Exhibition Review
Bidoun Issue 11, Summer 2007
ISTANBUL/ ‘Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie: Class Hegemony in Contemporary Art’
Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center / January 23-March 3, 2007
By Adnan Yıldız

Screening: Mathilde Willink SUPERPOES

2006-12-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December, 23:00, 18:30
Mathildelicious
The Netherlands, 2002, 53'
A Jasmina Fekovic Film

The Wayward Canon Night

2006-12-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

The Wayward Canon: A forum for screening and collaboration

2006-12-10T04:47:00.000-08:00

New Exhibition at Platform Garanti

December 13, 18:30
*Discussion - The Wayward Canon
Ian White and Mark Aerial Waller

A discussion between Ian White and Mark Aerial Waller on the ideas behind the Wayward Canon and the showing of art and film in unpredictable formats and spaces.

The Wayward Canon is a forum for screening and collaboration founded by artist Mark Aerial Waller for event-based interventions in film and television. The series presents cinema as a physical space, as well as a site for historical position and analytical content. The projects are typically durational, and introduce a specific relationship between films and the spaces in which they are presented.

December 15, 20:00
*Event-The Wayward Canon presents: Simon and the Radioactive Flesh

A film and intermittent art video screenings that transcend into a purgatorial nightclub setting with djs and disco balls – be prepared to dance.

Simon and the Radioactive Flesh uses Louis Bunuel's 45 minute film of an ascetic, Simon, a devotee of Simon Stylites, who proclaims his faith through standing on a column in the desert. The devil visits on several occasions to lure him from his duty, eventually succeeding in transposing him to purgatory; a beat nightclub in 1960's New York. In this reworking of the original film, each time the devil appears the narrative is interrupted by the insertion of a contemporary video art work. The interruptions continue throughout the film until finally we too are spatially interrupted, finding ourselves in a parallel to the purgatorial nightclub setting of the film's last dance, Carne Radioactivo (the Radioactive Flesh).

Artists' videos presented:
Benjamin Callaway / Carousel/
Sophie Brown and Catherine Evlid / Its time to give in /
Nasan Tur / The puddle and the blue sky /
Mark Leckey / We are (untitled)
Omer Ali Kazma / She has had it /
Pablo Bronstein / Trojan Horse /
With the collaboration of Giles Round.
Total screening time approx 1 hour, dancing thereafter.

Mark Aerial Waller is an artist in residence with IRP, Platform. He is currently working on a new film entitled 'Seed Bank' and a series of Wayward Canon events for Istanbul. The Canon has traveled internationally with presentations in London, Berlin and New York. Past events include: My Kleine Fassbinderbar, a 15 hour monument to Fassbinder's 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', installed in a site specific bar with a mirror reflecting the screen, The Sun Set, an invitation for artists, poets and writers to respond to the disjointed temporality and epic theme of Aaron Spelling's Hollywood soap, 'Sunset Beach' and La Societé des Amis de Judex, the recontextualisation of Apollinaire's pre-surrealist attentions to the early popular cinema of Louis Feuillade, where a smoke machine acts as a spatial and temporal agent.

Ian White is a adjunct film curator at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and curator of the Special Programme at the 2007 Oberhausen Short Film Festival. As an artist, his most recent project was a collaboration with Jimmy Robert for Art Now at Tate Britain in December 2004.

Realised with support from the British Council in Istanbul and the Arts Council of England.

Lecture: Matthew Schum

2006-12-03T03:38:00.000-08:00

Working in the City: What the 9th Istanbul Biennial can teach us about being in the city as artists and viewers

Matthew Schum

December 7, 2006, 18:30

Matthew Schum is a graduate student at the University of California San Diego in the program for history, theory, and criticism of Art, department of Visual Arts. He studied in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University prior to moving to California, via New York. As a researcher he has worked for the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and most recently the Walker Art Center. Schum was born in Minneapolis in 1978.

This talk marks the completion of a three month residency at Plaform Garanti studying contemporary art, primarily through the lens of the last Istanbul Biennial.

Lecture and Book Launch: Mika Hannula

2006-12-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

The Politics of Small Gestures Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art
Mika Hannula
Lecture and book launch
December 1, 18:30

“The Politics of Small Gestures
Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art"
published by art-ist, istanbul

...This is an argumentative book. It is openly opposed to quite a lot of different attitudes, trends and tendencies that are popular and widespread in contemporary art. It certainly has a good look at its enemies and a good go at them, but at the same time it tries to make a very precise point of also being for something else. In one simple sense, the whole book is about what that ‘something else’ can be. A ‘something else’ that comes in the guises and acts of small political gestures. A ‘something else’ that allows us to find and generate tools and the courage to find alternatives beside and beyond the instrumentalization of our life worlds, the society of the spectacle, the full blown commodification and mystification of artistic practice.

As an argument, it does not come out of nowhere. It has a distinguished background, a certain acutely present ‘thisness’, and hopefully also a future of a productive and challenging kind. The background that it emerges from is my personal experiences in contemporary art over the last couple of years. You will find numerous reflections on these confrontations with individual works of art in the main argument. What needs to be addressed, already at this point, is the intellectual debt this book as an argument owes to the realization of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun, and held in September 2005. This book is an extended and developed version of an argument first put forward in an essay published in the Istanbul Biennial reader...
Mika Hannula,

Ph.D in Political Science, born 1967 in Turku, Finland.
Lives and works both in Berlin and in Helsinki. Works as lecturer, writer, critic and curator.

Currently professor for Art in Public Space at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, Finland, and also associate professor for Artistic Research at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Göteborgs University, Sweden

A selection of publications:
Everything or Nothing – Critical Theory, Visual Culture and Contemporary Arts, Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2005
Artistic Research – methods, theories and practices, Göteborgs University, 2005 (with Juha Suoranta and Tere Vadén)
Rock the Boat: Localized Ethics, the Situated Self, and Particularism in Contemporary Art, Salon Verlang, Köln, 2003 (with Tere Vadén)

News from Platform Staff . Talks . Presentations

2006-11-24T02:57:00.000-08:00

November 29
Let’s Hack the Illusion!
Oyku Ozsoy
e-WORLDS TOWARDS THE PROBLEMS OF CONTEMPORARIES
information society / hacktivism / cybercrime / cyberterrorism
Cafe Absinthe in Gdansk, Poland

November 15
Curating a City
Vasif Kortun
Art Papers Live!
The Premier Contemporary Art Lecture Series
Richard H. Rich Auditorium, High Museum, Atlanta

14 November
November Paynter
Encore and more
A presentation on music and art as part of Applied Go Go.
MM Center Zagreb, curated by Lala Rascic.

November 14
Thinking About Institutions: Platform Garanti
Vasif Kortun
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

November 12
Wrestle Panel Discussion
With curators Tom Eccles and Trevor Smith
Theater, Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts

A special panel discussion addressing the Wrestle exhibition with curators Tom Eccles and Trevor Smith, as well as invited guests Arthur Danto, Johnsonian Professor Emeritus, Philosophy, Columbia University; Vasif Kortun, Director, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Ute Meta Bauer, Director and Associate Professor, Visual Arts, MIT; and Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art, Vassar College.
The Hessel Museum of Art
Inauguration of New Hessel Museum of Art
at Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Mark Raidpere

2006-11-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Mark Raidpere
8th November - 9th December, 2006

In 2005 Raidpere was chosen to represent Estonia at the 51st Venice Biennale and his works, 10 Men and Shifting Focus, were considered by many to be amongst the most interesting works presented in the entire Biennale that year. Platform is keen to introduce these two impressive video works to Istanbul, the timing of which will coincide with the selection of works from Venice Biennale exhibition that takes place at Istanbul Modern. In addition Raidpere will show a new video work that has yet to be exhibited, making this the international premier.

10 Men, 2003

A feeling of vacillation and disturbance takes place in Raidpere’s work 10 Men. The artist filmed ten violent long-term male offenders in Tartu prison. He simply asked them how they wanted to be perceived in regard to their personality. The work is unscripted and set against a background of crackling music, reminiscent of a musical box. The prisoners sit posed, some show their tattoos, others are coy and some belligerent, it is the juxtaposition between their obvious masculinity and the empathy that the viewer feels for their situation that creates such tension in the work.

Shifting Focus, 2005

In what amounts to a feigned interview and apology to his mother, Raidpere deals with the complexities wrought by the transmutation of feeling(s) – that in turn change their form and nature. The elements of the supposedly half-phrased apologia, the preparatory connection as it were, are all pretence and posture. The scene is staged, the lighting set and what ensues at the opening work is the ironic and vain grooming of the artist’s hair in the lens of the camera. Shifting Focus reveals that a feeling allied to the mechanism of intention most often remains isolated and somehow untranslatable, and that the supposition of our shared feelings is largely a projection.

New Work
Andrey/Andris, 2006

Mark Raidpere, b. 1975, Tallinn, Estonia.
Raidpere has exhibited extensively in the last two years. In 2005 he represented Estonia in the Estonian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. A publication marking the event titled Isolator was also very well received. In 2005 he also presented work in several group exhibitions including those at the Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn and at the Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin. In 1998 Raidpere was awarded the Annual Award of Estonian Cultural Endowment. Raidpere won the Hansabank Group Art Award in 2006.

Anu Aaremäe On Raidpere

HTMlles Program Istanbul

2006-10-18T03:38:00.000-07:00

In Istanbul HTMlles EXPORT 2 [06] is co-produced by NOMAD and hosted by Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center and The Apartment Project. The local presenters include The Apartment Project, Selda Asal, NOMAD, Ceren Oykut, Ozlem Sulak, Hatice Guleryuz, Bengu Karaduman, Filmmor Women’s Cooperative, Ulku Songul, Melek Ozman Nancy Atakan and Tuna Erdem.

Programme
Friday (27.10.06)

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center
18:00 Running web art programmes on computers Flatlandia, Distibutive
Justice, The Lies Project [the computer room]
19:00 Opening- Introduction by Kyd Campbell and Basak Senova [the gallery]
19:30 Screening of the documentary Le Phantome de L'Operatrice intro by artist [the gallery]

The Apartment Project
11:00 – 14:00 Oral Histories!: Part 1 Intro to Recording & Topics

Saturday (28.10.06)
Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center
11:00 web art projects-demo by Kyd Campbell [the computer room and the conference room]
12:00 a talk by Tuna Erdem [the computer room and the conference room]
13:00 BREAK
14:00 XS Labs Electronic Textiles workshop [the conference room]
16:00 Filmmor Women's Cooperative presentation and screenings by Ulku Songul and Melek Ozman [the conference room]
16:40 a presentation by Nancy Atakan [the conference room]
17:00 Bioteknica Workshop [the conference room]
19:00 NOMAD selection: screenings by Selda Asal, Ceren Oykut, Ozlem Sulak and Hatice Guleryuz and presentation by Bengu Karaduman (the conference room)

The Apartment Project
11:00 – 14:00 Oral Histories!: Part 2 Interviews

Sunday (29.10.06)
The Apartment Project
15:00 Interactive Walk Flatlandia
17:00 Oral Histories!: Part 3 Presentation - Recorded and/or live broadcasted on radio
Tea Party

NOMAD is an Istanbul-based association that targets to produce and experiment new patterns in the digital art sphere by using various lenses of other disciplines. NOMAD's production network aims to build strong connections across territorial borders through digital culture oriented projects. The main goal of these projects is to establish a productive communication channel that enables access to new resources of information. Since 2002, NOMAD has developed numerous local and international projects including festivals, exhibitions, performances, multimedia events, experimental film screenings, lectures, panels and publications.

The Apartment Project is a 25 square meter, ground level exhibition space, initiated as the first artist-run-space in Istanbul, 1999. The programme of the space is based on interdisciplinary collaborations and has hosted a variety of performances, installations, exhibitions, happenings and events incorporating with local and international institutions, artists and other participants. Most of the projects aim to establish a direct communication with the passer-bys through the three oversize windows facing the street.

HTMlles

2006-10-18T03:35:00.000-07:00

HTMlles Festival : EXPORT 2
October 19-29, 2006
Belgrade | Sofia | Istanbul

From the 19th-29th of October 2006, a program of art works and artists that participated in the 7th edition of the HTMlles festival themed Peripheries + Proximities will travel to 3 cities: Belgrade, Serbia ; Sofia, Bulgaria; and Istanbul, Turkey with the goal of fostering new dialog and collaborations. Through a series of focused encounters, interactive workshops, artists talks, performances and short exhibitions, the traveling Canadian artists and their works will encounter numerous curators, gallerists, cultural operators, local artists and local publics in each of the 3 cities. The touring works will be presented in parallel to programming produced by local partners and translated in English and in the respective local languages. All events are open to the public, including the interactive workshops.

visit the website for info on participating artists and city schedules.

participating artists and curators include: Chantal Dumas[ca], Michelle Teran[ca], Caroline Martel[ca], Joanna Berzowska[ca/po], Jennifer Willet + Shawn Bailey[ca], Emily Hermant[ca], Andreja Kuluncic[cr], Maja Ciric[sr], Miroslav Karic[sr], Basak Senova[tr], Selda Asal[tr], Anica Vucetic[sr], Zana Poliakov[sr], Natasa Teofilovic[sr], Aleksandra Jovanic[sr],Yofka[bg], Veronika Tzekova[bg], Adelina Popnedeleva[bg], Diana Popova[bg], Greta Gancheva[bg], Leda Ekimova[bg], Nina Boyanova[bg], Yana Kostova[bg], Vladia Mihailova[bg], The Upgrade! Sofia and The Upgrade! Skopje, Ceren Oykut[tr], Ozlem Sulak[tr], Hatice Guleryuz[tr], Bengu Karaduman[tr], Filmmor Women's Cooperative[tr], Ulku Songul[tr], Melek Ozman[tr] and Tuna Erdem[tr].

Events in Belgrade: held at O3one Gallery and Kontekst Gallery
October 19-21

Events in Sofia: held at the Red House Center for Culture + Debate
October 23-26

Events in Istanbul: organized by NOMAD and held at Platform Garanti
Contemporary Art Center and The Apartment Project
October 27-29

The HTMlles Festival is an ongoing project of StudioXX, Montreal, Canada's foremost women's digital resource centre, in operation since 1995. The HTMlles Festival, started as an annual event focused on the position of women in cyberspace, has now evolved to become an international biennial project which includes all facets of new media and web art technologies. The Montreal events now stand as a globally-known meeting place for women and feminists working in creative digital mediums and the addition of circulation projects has created an international network for Canadian new media artists.

Following the EXPORT2 tour, the next HTMlles biennial event will be held in
October 2007, in Montreal. As a major international event, the HTMlles
Festival seeks submissions from international artists and academics and
collaborations with international curators, and cultural operators. visit
the website, and here for further details.

StudioXX and the HTMlles Festival receive support from numerous governmental
and private bodies including : The Canada Council for the Arts, Le Conseil
des Arts et des Lettres du Quebec, Heritage Canada, The Municipality of
Montreal and The Canadian Embassy in Ankara.

Frieze Art Fair, London, 2006

2006-10-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

Platform Garanti was invited as one of two not-for-profit spaces to participate in Frieze Projects 2006. Our project ‘collecting point’ was a drop off point for art publications, periodicals and other materials that were displayed for reference at the Frieze Art Fair. 44 Boxes are now on their way to Istanbul to be made permanently available for public research at Platform.

Frieze Projects has been the annual curatorial programme presented at Frieze Art Fair. For more information.

Frieze Review

Questioning Alternative Practices

2006-09-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

Questioning Alternative Practices 1
23 - 24 September, 2006
Hosted in part by Platform Garanti

A three part workshop/seminar organized by Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle, questioning viability of artists-run spaces and artist collectives as alternative contemporary art practices. Artists' initiatives have been a crucial force in development of public cultural institutions. From Gustave Courbet's revolutionary artist-curated exhibitions, to more current examples such as artist run spaces, centers and collectives, these grass-root initiatives have historically offered a critical alternative to official, state mandated institutions. It can be argued that these smaller, self-organized models are often more effective in contributing to cultural development and produce impact disproportionate to their scale. However, contemporary factors that influence practices and models of artists' initiatives, such as new institutionalism and modes of collaboration shaped by governmental cultural policies (EU – European cultural capital for example), as well as market-driven dynamics in western and non-western cities, are speeding up the privatization of public and urban space, and need be carefully considered as artists'-run spaces are now frequently instrumentalized for goals of urban, institutional and cultural normalization. This workshop will examine the current state of artists' initiatives and discuss potential for new models and structures.

The discussions will take part in three different cities addressing topics pertinent to these specific locations. The first session will take place in Istanbul in September 2006, and will focus on several key contextual factors: the glamour newly bestowed upon self initiated artistic projects in the age of globalism, Turkey's bid to become a member of the European Union and the related rapid and large scale transformation of Istanbul. The second session will occur in November in Berlin, a city which recently undergone a drastic transformation and unification, where production of critical visual culture is so much driven by artists' initiatives that it maintains more then thirty such organizations. The final session will take place in January 2007, in Nicosia – a divided city that is almost entirely lacking in such initiatives for which this project aims to present a range of possible models for effective alternative cultural institutions.

Saturday 23-09.2006
15:00
Introduction: Pelin Tan & Anton Vidokle
16:00
Maria Lind, European Cultural Policies vs. self- organization
16:30
Martha Rosler (artists run and cooperative galleries / alternative spaces in North America during and after the NEA)
17:00
Bikvanderpol (artists organizational practices in Western Europe and the problematic of Rotterdam as European Cultural Capital 2001)
17:30
Haris Pelapaisiotis group (artists initiatives at the edge of Europe)
18:00
Coffee break

18:30 - 19:30
Focus Groups/Discussion: participants and audience separate in 4 separate focus groups for
in-depth discussion of the four presentations.

Sunday 24-09-2006
10:00
Artist Initiatives, at Pist with K2 and Pist Presentation
14:00
Meeting at BAS, Presentation
16:00
Closing Remarks

Haris Pellapaisiotis is a photographer and a professor at Intercollege, Nicosia. He is the founder of Arttalk - an independent discursive platform for contemporary art and theory in Nicosia.

Pavlina Paraskevaidou founded and ran Archimede Staffolini - a contemporary art gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus from 1998-2005. She holds a law degree LLB (Hons) and an MA in History of Art. She is currently a research student in Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.

Maria Lind is the director of IASPIS (International Artist Studio Programme in Sweden) since 2005. During 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München where she ran a programme which involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno and Marion von Osten. The format of a retrospective, or survey, was explored in a one-year long retrospective with Christine Borland 2002-2003, only ever showing one piece at a time and a retrospective project in the form of a 7-day long workshop with Rirkrit Tiravanija. From 1997-2001 she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and, in 1998, co-curator of "Manifesta 2", Europe's biennale of contemporary art. Lind curated "What if: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design", filtered by Liam Gillick. LIND was one of 10 contributing curators to Phaidon's "Fresh Cream" book, and she has contributed widely to magazines including "Index", "Site", "Frieze", "Art Monthly" and "Parkett", as well as to numerous catalogues and other publications.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She took her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974. Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work in the public sphere ranges from everyday life — often with an eye to women's experience — and the media to architecture and the built environment. She has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and homelessness. Her work has been seen in the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany; several Whitney biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues.

Bik Van der Pol
Already for ten years the artists from Rotterdam Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol have been working together. Their engagement with the surrounding area results in (often architectonically inspired) installations with a program questioning the history and future of the locations. Their projects are oriented towards issues of functionality and utility of art in a given situation or place. Like intermediaries they are determined to change the cultural climate and to modify it in a constructive way. The international attention for the projects of Bik Van der Pol is increasing and in 2005 their work is on view, among others, in Museum het Valkhof, Nijmegen, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Wiener Secession, Vienna and Cork Caucus, Cork. They are also the key figures of the New York initiative ‘Nomads & Residents’.
www.bikvanderpol.net

Pelin Tan, 1974 / Germany. Research assistant and Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Social Sciences – History of Art, Architecture Faculty, ITU. She graduated in 1996 from Sociology – AU. and completed her master degree at the ITU about: “globalization and contemporary art after 1990s”. Tan is a DAAD granted Ph.D. candidate at Humboldt Univ. working on “the concept of locality in social-political engaged art projects after 90s” – and is a guest lecturer about “space politics” at Berlin Technical University – History of Art (2006-2007). Tan is the co-editor and producer of a non-profit Istanbul based contemporary art issue “Muhtelif”; Istanbul correspondence of Atlanta based art magazine “Artpapers”. She has curated at TENT and Witte de With Contemporary Art Institutions (2003-2004), and curated, organized several international art and architecture projects. As a writer she contributed books: self-service city: Istanbul, b-books; Kulturelle Topografien, Metzler; The [un]common place, Actar. TRACER 1-2, WdW; Felons by A.Phelan, FROM/TO by Karl-Heinz Klopf, Linz.

Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow and is currently based in Berlin. His work has been exhibited in shows such as the Venice Biennale, Dakar Biennale and at Tate Modern, London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Musee d'art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; UCLA Hammer, LA; ICA, Boston; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; P.S.1, New York; amongst others. With Julieta Aranda, he put together e-flux video rental. As founding director of e-flux, he has produced projects such as Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist, Do it, Utopia Station poster project, and organized An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life and Martha Rosler Library. Anton Vidokle was a co-curator of Manifesta 6.

Rana Zincir Celal is Vice President for Programs at the Chrest Foundation, a US foundation with grantmaking programs in Turkey and Cyprus. Prior to that she was working as a consultant in Istanbul on a number of projects including a research effort on philanthropy with the Third Sector Foundation of Turkey and a cultural policy initiative with Anadolu Kultur and the European Cultural Foundation. She was the initiator of “Leaps of Faith”, an international contemporary arts exhibition which took place on both sides of Nicosia and the Buffer Zone. Prior to her work in Istanbul, she was based in the Economic Development Unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. She is a member of the Greek Turkish Forum and a board member of the Domini Foundation, which is a donor advised fund operated in partnership with the UN Foundation. Her educational background is in political and economic development from Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

We all laughed at Christopher Columbus: Exhibition Text

2006-08-31T01:51:00.000-07:00

14 September – 21 October 2006

Roderick Buchanan
Jeremiah Day
Omer Fast
Runo Lagomarsino
Deimantas Narkevicius
Amalia Pica
Florian Wüst.

There is a fine, but clear difference between an artistic reconstruction of an historical event made in order to question, or reconsider social attitudes of interpretation; and an artistic interpretation of a past event created to explore newly applied layers of meaning that effect its reading today. The former considers the truthfulness of historical representation, the problematic dialectic between collective memory and factual source, and more often than not it is a personal quest instigated by the artist in order to understand an important moment in their own relative history. It is also a topic that has of late been applied more and more often curatorially to explore a distinct artistic practice that focuses on the reconstruction of historical events to explore their past and current significance - from re-enactments to documentary videos.

The difference in the angle of the latter approach - that of artistic interpretation of an historical event - is that the artists’ relationship with the referenced moment is based on a pure infatuation with a specific happening. This interest is nurtured through research and intrigue and results in a work that is an individual, artistic interpretation, developed from a subjective point of view.

Such an approach can be a one off-affair, a fascination with a particular moment in time that the artist cannot let lie. When after having worked through every facet and detail of it for themselves they choose to produce a work of art that is then several layers removed from the original factual source. Alternatively, the approach described becomes a repetitive strategy, whereby the artist selects a series of partially related incidents in history as starting points for artistic examination as in Jeremiah Day and Florian Wüst’s practice. Wüst for example has researched one seminal happening after another that made an impact on American and German history. The list incorporates, amongst others, the matter of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the so-called Spiegel-Affäre of 1962. In each of his final interpretations he uses a similar system of working that adopts video or audio, wall drawings and installation, so linking his selected subject matters via the aesthetic of his own oeuvre and thus in a new area of classification and at a new moment in time.

Two exhibitions, the first at Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam, the second at Platform Garanti in Istanbul and a future publication aim to explore these inspired investigations of the past. The exhibition at Platform is composed as open in plan as possible, to allow the works to form a journey and the events explored by the artists to be viewed individually, while at the same time as part of an ongoing conversation. Although the subject matter of the works is not related, or consequentially linked in history in any acknowledged way, there are points of allusion through the artists’ similar approaches and attitudes. The significance the events considered is already determined in collective, internationally distributed history. Without disregarding this underlying historical significance, the artists form new interpretations of the subject matter that can be read autonomously, as well as in relation to the past they reference. This is most evident in the way the selected artists embrace the fictive within incident, without being compromised by feelings of responsibility to accuracy.

The statement ‘We all laughed at Christopher Columbus’, adopted and adapted by Runo Lagomarsino became the linchpin in the first exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam and remains in place as the title of the exhibition in Istanbul. As this statement continues to maintain a strong presence, a new work by Lagomarsino inhabits the exhibition. Casi Quasi Cinema presents in a model cinema the flyer text handed out by the US Directorate for Special Operations for a screening of the film The Battle of Algiers (Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo 1966) when it was shown at The Pentagon in August, 2003. The Pentagon considered the film a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq and the flyer read, as does the text in the work:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Two other works in the exhibition reference specific films. Omer Fast’s two channel video Spielberg’s List is constructed from the experiences of persons who participated as extras in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Spielberg shot his film on location in Krakow and employed thousands of local residents for the dramatic recreation of the historical events on which the movie is based. Some of the extras are old enough to have also experienced these events as they occurred in reality earlier in their own lives. Their recollections as witnesses and as viewers – indeed their duplicate first-hand experiences – bracket a fifty-year span during which events turn into movies, memory into filmed narrative. Fast mixes and juxtaposes footage of the constructed Plaszow film set with the neighbouring landscape. Interviews with extras who recall scenes from the film, are re-edited in the subtitles to offer more literal references to their fictive origins. In addition the videos include clips shot on the ‘Schindler’s List Tours’, thereby showing how notions of memory and place are both expanded and put under duress when history turns into film and when these layers are combined in a new multi-dimensional artistic interpretation.

The Role of a Lifetime by Deimantas Narkevicius features interview material with controversial British film director Peter Watkins, best known for his genre-breaking fictional documentary The War Game, 1965. Narkevicius' film combines three distinct elements. The first is his interview with Peter Watkins, recorded in Lithuania where Watkins lived for many years in the course of his self-imposed exile from Britain. The second is a sequence of drawings of the Lithuanian landscape, some depicting an unusual theme park, Gruto Park, a repository of Social Realist sculpture from the post-war era. The third comprises scenes of Brighton shot over an extended period by an amateur film enthusiast and never intended for public consumption. The Role of a Lifetime creates a space for Watkins to discuss his ongoing wish to liberate the film going audience and allow them the opportunity to be involved in a film’s research. And, by presenting his thoughts in a work by an artist interested in exploring the history he has created, his desire to encourage people to think about time, space, structure and process is intensified twofold.

Formed in a similar vein to consider memory, history and its interpretation through film is Amalia Pica’s work To Everyone That Waves. The 16mm footage shows an event organised in the harbour of Amsterdam of people waving farewell to those boarding an old sailing ship. Pica describes a fake collective memory that is generic and stems not from the literal historical event – in this case mass migration from this harbour to the Americas - but from the many fictive responses reproduced by film, media and our imaginations. By taking advantage of the presence of an old ship, asking those in its vicinity to participate on the spot and using an old black and white film format, Pica layers together different fictional associations with no true accuracy to historical fact, to produce a personal interpretation of how we might imagine such a scene now.

Reflecting on the limitations of historical description Jeremiah Day’s project on the reconstruction of monuments in Washington DC sets an interesting precedent for the reconsideration of what memorials mean in our current society. His installation of photographs, text and sculptural elements take as their reference the renovation of major memorials and monuments in DC during the summer and autumn of 2004. He proposes that this process of reconstruction is no coincidence but a symbolic re-organisation, initiated to parallel the USA’s shift in political discourse. On each of the photographs Day has handwritten notes suggesting his claims of propaganda, that offer a fragmented form of storytelling.

Florian Wüst's installations deal with the ambivalent relationship between subject and state. This relationship is constantly changing under the productive pressures of renegotiation and reassessment. Nonetheless, and as also explored by Day, the defining power of the state tends to treat signs, images and language as malleable material even where they refer to concrete historical events and conditions. Under these conditions discourse is likely to turn into doctrine. The installation Protecting freedom until there is no freedom left (2004) uses J. Robert Oppenheimer as the historical lens through which past and present histories are artistically examined. "Oppenheimer, who has often been called the father of the atom bomb, later refused to support the hydrogen bomb program of the U.S. government. Following this refusal he was accused of being a communist and subsequently lost his security clearance and his official advisory positions in 1954. By concentrating on the form of communication of the actors and the subjective approach of those involved Wüst lifts the discussion out of an abstract political context and presents a series of personal characterisations.

Whereas in Wüst’s work, actors are brought in to render an interpretation of the Oppenheimer story in Roderick Buchanan’s video History Painting real soldiers present a current interpretation of their predecessors of two hundred years ago. Filmed in Wellington, Tamil Nadu and Catterick, North Yorkshire during the summer of 2004, the film projection features newly passed-out soldiers from the Madras Regiment in Tamil Nadu and their counterparts in the Scottish Infantry Division. In 1803, the predecessors of these young men fought alongside each other at the Battle of Assaye. Both regiments still carry the Assaye colours, featuring an elephant, and the victory at Assaye is central to their respective sense of honour and identity. Although Roderick Buchanan’s new work has its roots in a particular historical moment, its reach is more contemporary and more complex in ambition.

The project was realized with financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam.

We All Laughed at Christopher Columbus

2006-08-25T04:25:00.000-07:00

Roderick Buchanan
Jeremiah Day
Omer Fast
Runo Lagomarsino
Deimantas Narkevicius
Amalia Pica
Florian Wüst

Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and November Paynter

Text by November Paynter

September 14 – October 21, 2006

Much artistic and curatorial practice today aims at exploring the truthfulness of historical representation, or the problematic dialectic between collective memory and factual source. Of late, there has been a great deal of attention on artistic practices that focus on reconstructions of historical events - from reenactments to documentary videos, the aim is often to question, investigate or reconsider social attitudes of interpretation. Opposed to these tendencies the exhibition We all laughed at Christopher Columbus deals primarily with subjective, artistic interpretations of specific historical events.

The significance of the events explored is already determined in collective, internationally distributed history, and although the subjects are not related, or consequentially linked in history in any acknowledged way, they do suggest points of allusion by way of similar artistic approaches and attitudes. This is most evident in the way the selected artists embrace the fictive within incident, without being compromised by feelings of responsibility to accuracy, thus leaving space for the audience to interpret their own response to each work and construe hypothetical, historical associations.

We all laughed at Christopher Columbus is a project organised in three parts. The title of the show is taken from a work by Runo Lagomarsino featured in the first version of the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam between 22 July and 3 September 2006. The presentation in Istanbul includes the participation of two additional artists Omer Fast and Deimantas Narkevicius, a new work by Lagomarsino, as well as adapted installations by Florian Wüst and Jermiah Day. Thuhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs, where the first exhibition offered a buoyant, more light-hearted approach to the title and concept of the project, the second exhibition in Istanbul will possess a more melancholy attitude and approach. The third part in the series will be a publication, which will bring together texts and thoughts that have influenced and been discussed in relation to the two exhibitions.

A performance by participating artist Jeremiah Day will take place on the opening night (14th September) at 10.30pm.

We all laughed at Christopher Columbus at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam: Roderick Buchanan, Jeremiah Day, Runo Lagomarsino, Ola Pehrson, Amalia Pica, Florian Wüst. Screening of November by Hito Steyerl.

This project was realized with financial support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam.

New exhibition: Of the one and the many

2006-07-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

Of the one and the many
July 7 - August 12, 2006

Adrian Paci, Turn On (2004)
Maja Bajevic, Back in Black (2003)
Eva Koch, Approach (2005)
Serkan Ozkaya, Goldenboy (2006)
Leyla Gediz, Atlantis (2000 - 2001)

Many faces merge into one as different stories of traumatic events, despair and deprivation present the problems of the many as well as the unifying constant that links their lives.

Goldenboy hangs in the window of Platform, as if the final act of a human, when all else in lost and the last moment simply becomes a record of movement of time in space.

This melancholic sculpture can be read as an allegory of man’s search for meaning in the inexplicable and intangible. As can the confrontation of language in Approach, which takes as its starting point Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. As voices recite the first 13 verses of Paradiso, another group of people recite the same verses in sign language. The work enters a field of interpretation and although it is the same language that is spoken, it is not a given that we understand the same thing.

In Albania it is common for the power to cut several times a day and people use generators to get by. The unemployed men in Adrian Paci’s Turn On for a time come together with one purpose to provide light in the darkness. The generator acts as a symbol for renewal and hope, while also revealing suppressed and invisible identities within the specific, turbulent, social context of countries in transition.

In Maja Bajevic’s Back in Black a minimal intervention into everyday reality opens the depths of the deepest collective and individual frustrations. With their faces masked to be identical and replaceable, people tell dark, cruel and cynical jokes about wartime Sarajevo. Their humour denotes the very Real that cannot be symbolised, the truth, the unutterable, the trauma that is not being discussed.

On Saturday, August 12, 2000, two explosions caused the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk to sink in the Barentsz Sea. All 118 sailors aboard died. The 118 portraits of Atlantis by Leya Gediz stem from a single black and white photograph of one of the sailors who never returned. Subtle differences in the drawings render each sailor a personality, yet they remain as a collective memory, a moment in history that will forever unify their lives.

Also see these shows:
Looking Awry
curated by WHW
Concerning War – Soft Target. War as a Daily, First-Hand Reality BAK/Utrecht

A Performance for a Poem, Son:Da and Erinc Seymen

2006-07-03T06:35:00.000-07:00

We are witnessing a gravely evident transformation of everyday life by nationalism through a wide range of methodologies. These vary from direct propaganda to the subtle agitations involved in current agendas like the European Union negotiation process, debates about minorities and secularism. It is a time when critical and intellectual divergence is antidemocratically censored, punished and sabotaged through emotional and physical sanctions by the state. This creates a situation where iconic figures such as the "flag girl", ali desitero, and many others are reproduced, or re-circulated to the benefit of the nationalist discourse. On the other hand, the rhetoric of a text that dates back more than half a century can accommodate today’s zeitgeist surprisingly well.
In the context of the flow of ideology from "inside" to "outside" son:Da and Erinc Seymen presented a performance constructed around a poem written in 1939.
The performance comprises an audiovisual manipulation and an on site installation that aims to open to discussion the sphere of influence of poetry as a tool of artistic expression and a method of ideological rhetoric.
June 30, 2006
Images from the performance can be found here

Platform at Textual Matrix Workshop

2006-06-07T02:40:00.000-07:00

Frame Builders
Project in Two Parts: Workshop and Exhibition
Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea

Textual Matrix
May 24, 25, 26 and 30, 2006
Textual Matrix
Dr. Friedrich Meschede, Curator of Visual Arts, DAAD B�ro Berlin, daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany
Kestutis Kuizinas, Director, Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania
November Paynter, Curator, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey
Perry Lowe, Director of Communications, Eyebeam, New York, USA

Textual Matrix is a workshop that pursues the inquiry into the activities of four contemporary art institutions worldwide. Stemming from practical queries on the functions and directions of the IAS, this workshop extends the internal issues of the IAS to broader issues surrounding the �art institution� in general and its searching for a new orientation, a new identity and a new function demanded by the art world. Invited from Germany, Lithuania, Turkey, and the United States, these institutions foster their own particular identities while maintaining a balanced interaction between the local and the global, the arts and the related fields, museums and alternative spaces, and forge their own unique public communities. The models of bold choice, experimentation, and specialized practice these institutions provide are important references in assessing the complex problems of the public and art institutions, the public in the arts, and the practical and productive functions of art institutions that the IAS and other organizations face.
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Platform at Platform Vaasa, Finland

2006-05-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

out on the edge a symposium

invited lecturers:
Vasif Kortun (Turkey) is curator at and founder of Platform Garanti in Istanbul
Cesare Pietroiusti (Italy), trained psychoanalyst and visual artist based in Rome
Alenka Gregoric (Slovenia) is curator for Gallery Škuc in Ljubljana
Juraj Carný (Slovak Republic) is a freelance curator
Câtâlin Gheorghe (Romania) is an art critic, a theorist, and curator for Vector Association in Iaši
Sally Timmons (Ireland) is an artist, part of Via, Dublin
Francesco Ventrella (Italy) is an art historian and curator based in Rome
Jan-Erik Lundström (Sweden) is director of Bildmuseet, the Contemporary Art Museum in Umeå The symposium is open to everyone, but only for a limited number of people, so please make a registration no later than 28th of May in order to participate.

Exhibition: VOID: A View from Acropolis

2006-05-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

VOID: A View from Acropolis

xurban_collective

9 May – 17 June 2006

The transferal of archaeological remains from the site of Bergama to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the more recent introduction of gold mines that encroach upon the ancient acropolis’ surrounding landscape, are considered vis-à-vis by xurban_collective, physically as sites of excavation, destruction and renewal and in turn ideologically as sites of local and international controversy.

Over the past year, xurban-collective has researched, observed and investigated the framework of dialogues between the two neighbouring sites of Bergama and the area’s gold mines. In their inquiry the idea of ‘a dig’ has been applied literally and conceptually to extract and collect evidence of spaces between the archaeological formation and the contextual framework that the site rests on. These voids, as xurban_collective describe them, clarify past and ongoing actions, catastrophes and forms of recursive treatment that the structures have experienced.

Within this discourse, Istanbul sits as a location between sites, a place where nodes of power facilitate and actualise the exploitation of Bergama and of the mining area known as Ovacik. VOID: A View from Acropolis takes place in Istanbul, at Platform Garanti, as an exhibition formed by yet another system of transferal. Earth taken from the area of Bergama and transported to Istanbul rests in a mound in the window of Platform Garanti as a symbol of digging, transferal and void. Large format photographs depict in minute detail the plants that blanket the archeological ruins in a protective layer, naturally filling voids and hiding excavations of the past. Flanked by time-lapse shots of the hill of Bergama and the mine’s quarry, all these ideas are then condensed and described through gestures and actions, performed and filmed by xurban_collective on site.

Combined these works present a test ground for political engagement by reflecting upon contemporary social conditions of territory and historical transformation. Just some of the many debates they raise include: the hierarchical positioning of memorials; the colonial displacement of local resources overseas; the implementation of archaeological disruption in the search of truth and the ecological effects of cyanide mining. The result is a an exhibition, or non-museum that correlates in time and place the current controversy of excavation for gold with the existing controversy of the excavation of Bergama.

A dig is the cut on earth. A trench is the void! Water is the filler. Plants are the decorations. Settlement is the context. Resistance is the motivation. The Altar does not exist.

Talk: Exhibition as School in a Divided City, April 25, 18:30, Anton Vidokle

2006-04-14T01:47:00.000-07:00

Exhibition as School in a Divided City

Anton Vidokle to speak on Manifesta 6

Anton Vidokle is a Moscow-born, New York based artist. His work has been exhibited in shows such as the Venice Biennale, Dakar Biennale, Lodz Biennale, and at Tate Modern, London; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Musee d'art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; UCLA Hammer, LA; ICA, Boston; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; P.S.1, New York; amongst others. Together with Julieta Aranda, Vidokle put together e-flux video rental, which started in New York last fall and is currently travelling to Kunst-Werke, Portikus, Extra-City, as well as other venues. As the founding director of e-flux, Anton Vidokle produced and published online projects and print publications such as Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist, curated by Jens Hoffman; Do it, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Utopia Station poster project, and others, including An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, based on the photo archive of David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the ongoing Martha Rosler Library. Anton Vidokle is a co-curator of Manifesta 6, Nicosia.

Talks: Wednesday, 12 April at 6:30 pm

2006-04-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

David Kareyan & Eva Khachatrian
Contemporary Art in Armenia
Wednesday, 12 April at 6:30pm.

Curators of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) David Kareyan and Eva Khachatrian will talk about contemporary art in Armenia at Platform Garanti CAC. David Kareyan will present "New Forms of Resistance In Armenian Contemporary Art From the Nineteen Eighties to the Present" and Eva Khachatrian will discuss "Women's Art and New Technologies in Armenian Contemporary Art".

David Kareyan was born in 1973 and graduated from the Fine Art Academy, Yerevan. He curated the Armenian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale and has organised exhibitions in Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the USA. He has also participated as an artist in a number of group exhibitions in Europe.

Eva Khachatrian was born in 1977 and graduated from the Conservatory, Faculty of Music Theory, Yerevan, where she also received a masters degree and now works as a PhD candidate. She has curated exhibitions in Sweden, Norway, Iran and the Czech Republic, mainly focusing on women artists and new technologies.

Archiving disappearance, symposium Nr.1

2006-04-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

Archiving disappearance, symposium Nr.1: The introduction
Friday, April 28, 6.00 - 8.30pm
Saturday, April 29, 2.00 - 6.30pm

A public symposium organised by Krist Gruijthuijsen, with guest speakers Bik van der Pol, Brian Holmes, Alexander Koch, Anders Kreuger, Raimundas Malasauskas, Bob Nickas, Seth Siegelaub.

When, as an artist, you aren�t successful at the beginning of your artistic career, the shift from living and working as a practicing to a non-practicing artist is easily made. So easy, that it takes some time to realize that this step has been taken. But what if your position in the artistic field is accomplished, you�re a successful artist and you decide to stop producing work? Is this to be seen as the end of one�s career, or as a statement towards the art world? Is it not possible to blur from one profession to another and for others to accept this decision as private rather than as a considered statement? Does the impossibility of �stepping out� without the art world examining one�s reasons, implicate a radical fusion of art and life?

When we talk about successful artists who made the decision to stop producing work, we also refer to them as having "stepped out" of art. In the project Archiving Disappearance, this phenomenon is investigated.

The first symposium will take place on the 28th and 29th April 06, in the gallery of Platform. Those invited to participate in the project have already been dealing with this subject in various ways and will introduce their research during the event. The complete project will comprise an archive, two symposia and a publication. Krist Gruijthuijsen was a guest of the Istanbul Residency Programme at Platform Garanti from October 05 � March 06 with the support of the FONDS BKVB, the Netherlands.

For information about discounted hotel rates and travel information please contact platform@garanti.com.tr or call +902122932361.

This symposium is supported by the Consulate General of the Netherlands, Istanbul; the Mondriaan Foundation, the Netherlands; The French Cultural Insitute, Istanbul; Consulate General of Sweden in Istanbul; the Goethe Institute, Istanbul

Talk is Cheap: Discussion between Minna Henriksson & Mika Hannula

2006-03-21T05:26:00.000-08:00

Songs of Freedom and Love
TALK IS CHEAP

Discussion between Minna Henriksson & Mika Hannula

For the publication TRIBUTE TO C-CASSETTE,
Catalogue of the exhibition SONGS OF FREEDOM & LOVE

Mika H: Songs of Freedom & Love at Platform, in Istanbul. What is the main motivation why you want to do and curate this exhibition?

Minna L. H: I have never curated anything before, but being curious about different possibilities of acting in the field of visual art, and having the possibility to learn something new - not saying that I would want to be a curator, but also not saying that I definitely am not interested in that - I wanted to find out how it could be.

Also, to work with someone like you, who has a lot of experience in curating exhibitions, but also knowing that you are a very straightforward person and easy to get along and work with, I saw this as a possibility of becoming an interesting or even rewarding process.

Another reason was the excuse of doing something in Istanbul. I am very attracted to the city, and I would want to find a way of setting one of my feet there one day. To stay connected to there I see as a move into the right direction. Also, I know that the art scene in Istanbul needs inputs – more so than many other places. And I am very happy to bring this group of good artists and good people from Finland to Istanbul, most of who haven’t visited there before.

One more reason for making this is that the Embassy of Finland in Ankara expressed interest in being part of an exhibition of Finnish artists in Turkey. That is actually how the whole process got started.

This is not the first exhibition you are curating in Istanbul, but some years ago with Kari Immonen you made 'Stop for a Moment - Painting as Presence', exhibition of Nordic painting at Proje4L in Istanbul. Now if you look back at that, how rewarding was it, and why do you want to continue working in Istanbul?

Mika H: Yes. This is a kind of opening that leads to many directions. It is a truly cruel situation, but beneficial nonetheless, to demand an answer to the question why do you do what you do. But I think your answer mainly covers most of the corners in a nice way.

Regarding what I have co-curated previously in Istanbul, it is obvious that I got seriously hooked. The city, and the contemporary art context in Istanbul, is very tempting and also very inviting. It is, of course, a completely different question and picture if you look in from outside like we do, or if you look from inside in the site of Istanbul like the so-called locals do. But I would not be so worried about that discrepancy. It is always there. More importantly, Istanbul, more precisely, Beyoglu area and Platform, are a very fascinating location to do something at - and with.

But why? Well, perhaps this is a bit wishful thinking, but I see it as a very energetic site that still has maintained enough open-minded curiosity, something that allows things and acts to collide and clash in a productive and meaningful way. A site that has not become a spectacle or too predictable.

But let me re-track a bit. The question about whether our previous effort was rewarding. Yes, it was, and it was due to the constellation of the whole project. It was very much like the construction of our current show. It is predominantly a group effort. Something that is discussed and done through the shared passion and wish to generate some kind of a positive and challenging effect. Curating can be very rewarding if you can do it in a very close and intensive working relationship with others. I would never ever curate anything alone. Too much ego in da Spiel, and simply too boring. I am basically a writer. And that is an activity you do alone. And when I want to do something else than writing, I try to seek myself into a collective - hahahaa - a collective groove, that is.

Then, yes, my question back to you: Do you think it is problematic to be involved in an exhibition process that has a rather clear geographical background?

Minna L. H: A year or two ago I would have been very passionate about this topic, and opposing any projects, which could be categorized as national or regional. But since then I have also got my hands dirty - I have come to notice that in order to get things done, one just has to follow certain rules, and loosen up on others, and when it comes to funding of projects, most often where I stand now it is relatively accessible for me from Finland or the Nordic countries.

But that is not to say that one cannot do something critical with that also – that one would have to make exhibitions, which support and strengthen the already existing stereotypes of some particular geography. Anyway, this kind of exhibitions of national representations are happening less these days, at least with Finland, and also other, more interesting and relevant connections and themes can be found in the exhibitions.

There are, and there will be some categorizations with the funding bodies, which are determined by the geography, as the money usually comes through the foreign or cultural ministries, whose main interest often is to promote their culture abroad. But the situation is not as bad as it might first seem. For example, what we are trying to do, and also doing here is an exhibition, where the money comes from a country called Finland, and some rules are immediately implied into that, although they were never underlined to us. But other than the geography where the artists should principally come from, we do have the freedom to make and say more or less what we want to within this frame. And with this exhibition at hand, we are not claiming that we, all living in, or coming from, Finland, would be representatives of some collective identity, and that there would be some undercurrents in our works to do with where we happen to be from. Our exhibition is about something much more general.

But then more specifically to think here about a possible Finnish-Turkish link – what is the point in bringing this particular exhibition to this particular city and country? I would like to think that this is an exhibition of artworks by young and contemporary artists, who are from a country, which is located somewhere in the north, in the outskirts of Europe. The exhibition then being in a country in another end of Europe will perhaps have some relevance to its audience and create a dialogue already, and also, through the shared concerns to do with the geographies.

I hope you agree with some of this. And my question to you goes: What do you think of the Finnish movie director Aki Kaurismäki?

Mika H: Yes, I do agree. Basically I think it is ridiculously childish to keep up the illusion that we are not attached to this or that nation-state, city, institutions, context etc. Furthermore, I think it is really sad and self-defeating to deny where you come from. That said, it is as obvious that even if we all come from a specific site and situation, most of us don't need to stay and remain there. What this, in fact, implies in a discursive sense is the responsibility to take part in the making and shaping what it means to be, for example, a Finn, a woman, or a volley ball player. In other words, because every identity, especially collective ones, are never solid, natural or stable, but they are constantly constructed and contested and conflictual, it is your responsibility to provide alternative ways of defining concepts that are important to you.

To quote on old friend of mine, philosopher and artist Carl-Gustav Lilius who passed away a couple of years ago:
“A person who loves his/her nation can demonstrate this well by being critical about that very entity that one comes from and one loves. It is to show that where you are from or where you live is of such vital importance that you want to take part in the ongoing discussion about what kind of a nation it is, what it could be and what it should be.”

("Ihminen joka pitää omasta maastaan, voi osoittaa sen erittäin hyvin juuri kriittisyydellä. Osoittaen sen maan olevan niin tärkeän, että hän osallistuu jatkuvaan keskusteluun siitä, mikä on tämä maa, minkälainen se voisi olla tai sen pitäisi olla")

But to your question. Aki Kaurismäki? Who is he? Never heard. Is he some figure skating guy? Or did you say movies? You mean like nature documentaries or what?
Can't you ask something more sophisticated? Something more intellectually valid?
Like, why don't you ask me what I think about Mika Häkkinen or Kimi Räikkönen or Ville Valo, the singer of HIM?

Which brings me to my question: how would you relate to and define the concept of quality in terms of contemporary art - both as an artist and curator? In other words, what is quality in our practice?

Minna L. H: Quality – if you know what it is, and how to get there, please tell me too. I certainly know that it is something that is a rare encounter in the art field these days. Too rare. The speed, that we produce art works and exhibitions with, leaves little time to think about a thing called quality. We get by with very little of it. And we are not even demanded of it much. We all know very well how to disguise the lack of it in another thing called quantity - the volume, the spectacular, the more in all the dimensions, which will save our neck until the next project, but leaves the viewer with not much anything but an empty feeling to take home.

I guess that quality in an artwork, as well as in an exhibition is something to do with the intentions, motivations and generosity of the maker, and the attitudes of pursuing for the result, which is to communicate that something to the viewer. But it is not easy, as even if you spare all your sweat and tears over an artwork, there is no guarantee of quality. It takes a little luck too, and sense of the situation. It can also be something small and modest. But genuine it has to be.

But striving for quality certainly is something that is keeping me in the art business – something always to try to reach to. And if it wasn’t for the quality, I don’t know what there would be left to go for. It is something you cannot measure, but something that leaves a gut feeling in your stomach when you have encountered something possessing it. And it stays with you for a while.

Question to you: what brought you into the art field in the first place, and what is it that is keeping you there?

Mika H: Lost and found - or lost and never found, or always found. Yes, the question of ones background: where do we come from? I guess there is no common background for any of us. I did not study art, or art history, but something else. That something else was philosophy and political science and I did it exactly during the times when most of the old answers from the establishment were tumbling down and it became very evident that the old regime did not have the imagination to move towards asking the new relevant questions. The Berlin Wall came down, an entity called Soviet Union ceased to exist. During these dramatic changes, I was still within the closed up walls of the university. I remember it very clearly. All those fabulous changes around you, and your professor demands that, in order for you to have any right to say anything, first you must read a small library full of books by someone who never ever left his hometown - this is herr Kant. Thus, it just seemed such a waste of time to go the usual insular and highly specialized route of an Academic.
Thus, I went somewhere else. And that somewhere else was both journalism and writing with art in a more essayistic way. Not about it, but with it. I have no explanation, but from very, very early on I enjoyed enormously being in art museums. Of course, and this I say without any irony in fact, it was a perfect place to take smart and beautiful girls into - but also a perfect place to spend time alone.

I guess the reason - besides being a professional semi-captured by ones profession - why I still remain active in the field of contemporary art is that in comparison to other areas of society, it really does provide at least a chance to seek for alternative ways of thinking and perceiving who we are, where we are and where we might want to move towards to.

In other words, it still has at least little room in it to move and manouvre so that what comes out of it is not a product you must buy, play and then throw away. This chance for thinking through alternative ways of being in the world might not always be visible, and not that tall, but it is still there.

Then we bounce back to my question to you: Give me an example of an artwork that has meant something special to you? And why so?

Minna L. H: Sure. I would like to relate my choice of the artwork to the city we are working with here - Istanbul. The story about this work is also something I like to tell whenever someone has the time to listen, as I like going back to remembering it. But here I try to keep it short.

It dates back to the time of the Istanbul Biennial, but the one in 2003. It was a Biennial, where very little excited me, and perhaps that is part of the reason why this work then stood so much out. It is a piece by UK-artist Michael Nelson. It was not in one of the main venues of the Biennial, but as a public space project in the Sultan Ahmet –area in a place called Büyük Valide Han.

One sunny day I went to see it with a friend of mine, a local, from Istanbul. He more or less knew the area where it would be on the basis of the address given in the Biennial listings. But we took the taxi just to be on the safe side.

Still we had to walk the street up and down, as it appeared to be a busy bazaar street on the Sultan Ahmet –area, and we could not see the usual Biennial banner anywhere. Instead, on the third time passing the same street, a man came up to us saying ‘Biennial?’ and we followed to the direction that he was pointing at, to the dark passages of an abandoned looking craftsmen’s workshop. In the end of the corridor, on the second floor of the building we saw some dim light, which we followed to a semi-open door of a china-workshop. It turned out that they knew a thing or two about the Biennial, and also had the key to the stall opposite, where Mike Nelson’s piece was to be seen.

What we saw, once inside, was a situation as if someone had just left their darkroom in a big hurry, and everything was left unfinished. There still were photographs in the developing liquid, and a picture of Ataturk hanging on the wall. Once my eyes got used to the darkness lit by a single red light bulb, I saw hundreds of black & white photographs hung to dry on strings suspended between two walls. The photographs were taken on the streets, where I had also just moments before been walking, when thinking of being completely lost. The installation continued with a steep and narrow staircase into an almost darkness, where there was another room full of photographs hung on lines of strings, also images of the surrounding area. It was a great temptation to take a photo from the line as a little souvenir, as it seemed that someone else had also taken one as a couple of the clothes pegs were hanging empty on the line.

After leaving the installation, which actually gave a creepy feeling in your stomach, as somewhere in the back of your mind you were still doubting whether it was all just staged, and an artwork, or if something violent had really happened there just moments before. But the more confusing thing actually happened, when we left the space. A man from the workshop next door appeared and offered to show us the sights from the roof. He didn’t speak English, so the presentation of the historical buildings of Istanbul was not as interesting to me as it was just to look at the view from the rooftop. Afterwards he took us to his workshop, where he showed us how to knit rugs. I took a photograph of him, and he gave me his business card, so I could send him a copy of the photo when back home. Then I noticed that on the wall there already were tens of photographs taken at the roof, with different people posing next to this man. The photos were accompanied with thank-you –letters, obviously from Biennial-tourists just like me.

What I liked about this work was that it was apparent that Mike Nelson had invested a lot of thought in the research and execution of the work, and on the context of it – the city and the particular site. The work was everything but easy to access. In order to get there, you had to be somewhat alert to be able to find it, and you had to be able and willing to communicate with the people, who were to show you the way and open the doors – you had to confront, and interact with, the 'real' city. But all that effort made it a rewarding, and also a special experience.

In the installation it was ambivalent where the work starts and where it ends. You don’t know how much of it is coincidence, how much is designed and controlled by the artist, and how much is intervention by the people, whose everyday working environment it is. Most certainly, hours later, when you leave the place you feel stunned, confused and impressed, and maybe also guilty because of the photograph in your pocket that you nicked from the installation.

And a similar, but very different question back to you: name one group-exhibition that has made an impact on you, or influenced you as curator, and explain why?

Mika H: Minna, that was a very good answer - and a fantastic piece. Damn, it makes me jealous as hell. Damn and triple damn on top of that.

But to your question. Ha haa. I wish I could answer the last Istanbul Biennial, 2005, but because our exhibition takes place in one of its sites, it’s way too close to home. Would smell baaaad.

Thus, I need to go backwards a bit. What has left perhaps the most lasting mark on me is to have had the chance to see from a very close distance how the Finnish curator Maaretta Jaukkuri works. She is a curator at Kiasma, Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, responsible for ARS 2001, and this summer doing the biennial in Lofoten, Norway. It is also in Lofoten where she did this amazing and unique site specific exhibition of over 30 art works located in very remote places and villages in these far away islands on the north of Norway.

My admiration to her work is not so much based on the actual results of the exhibitions I have seen her done, but the way she relates to both the artist and his/her work. You sense a deep commitment and a sense of respect that comes about very seldom. It is crystal clear that for Jaukkuri the priority from 1 to 212 and counting is the work of art - and how that is then mounted - in a white cube or an a small island - depends completely what that works wants to say, how and with what kind of nuances. What I respect most in her way of working is the fact of how much time and energy it really takes and consumes to take these responsibilities and commitments seriously enough.

And yes - my question back to you. What if we change the sides. Can you give an example of an artwork that left you really disappointed - or even angry?

Minna L. H: Huh, this is a tricky question. I don’t see much point in using this publication as forum for simply saying that I think that someone’s work really sucks, so I will not drop any names here.

But what comes to my mind first when thinking of an art work, seeing which would, and often does, really irritate and frustrate me, and also make me angry, would have to be something, which is merely supporting and confirming some false ideas and stereotypes, but not fulfilling any critical, constructive or other purpose. It would present something, which is part of my reality, but it would be obvious that the work was crafted to fulfil the expectations and demands of the Western star-curator. It would perhaps consist of some blonde people, women, naked, dancing in the forest, swimming in the lake in a summer’s night or doing something as poetic as that in the idyllic Finnish nature.

And then the question: What do you think of the efficiency, approachability and accessibility of the gallery space – is the white cube the ideal exhibition format for contemporary art, which often aims at addressing different audiences and deals with other than just aesthetic issues?

Mika H: Hahaa. What's wrong with naked people swimming in a lake during the mid-summer night? Well, hahahaa, just about everything if and when its framed as art.

But to your question: white cube? I kind of tend to be rather diletant with this issue. For me, white cube is a vehicle that is potentially good and interesting for many ways of taking part in the production of knowledge and communicating that knowledge within contemporary art and visual culture. In other words, at the best of times it serves as a white page. It is very flexible, and can be turned into so many different things. It is a starting up position - and then you really have to do something with it. Take it somewhere, twist it, trash or caress it.

At the same time, it is evident that white cube cannot serve all purposes and potentialities that contemporary art might have or enjoy. But this bounces it all back to the main question: what does one want - and why? Where you show depends what you are after, as it is also clear that what you find depends very strongly on what you are looking for. Thus, in the end, I believe white cube is better than a yellow cube, not to talk about a brown cube.

Continuing with the questions: What time is love?

Minna L. H: It's KLF, I remember, and a rather irritating tune.

But in an ideal world, love-time would be all the time. Here, where I am living, I must say it is not – people are not spreading too much of it around, at least not in professional relationships. But it certainly would not hurt to do that. Even, and especially to those, who piss you off. Of course, you cannot love everyone, but what you can at least try to do is not to take things too seriously and to be extra sensitive and protective about your own positions. Ideal would be to be able to live in some kind of a loving conflict (as you might say) instead, and to spread around some good will and empathy. At least I could do more of that, and in fact, now could be a good time to start.

Do you think that the environment in which you are living in Finland is more normalising and restrictive than the one in Germany, Berlin where you are mainly living now?

Mika H: Yes, your question reminds me, for some strange reason, of an early 1980's song by the one and only Olivia Newton-John. Our dear Olivia was singing how she wished that she and someone else would do the thing: Lets Get Physical, Physical...

Now you might wonder, what does this sad but true song have to do with normalisation? Well, perhaps the link is the thought as a fact that we should always recall from a man called Foucault. The fact that power is always a productive force. It produces effects - and then these effects can be of any value, worth or agony. Thus, normalisation is a productive force. And it can be a beneficial force to go against - if you have the means and the energy to do so. In other words, I still kind of need and also enjoy those forces in both locations. They give me a clear case of being against something. They make me feel alive.

It is difficult to compare Finland and Germany. This is so because basically there is no one unity of Finland or Germany. That said the main problem with this kind of a comparison is that normalization is a force with local colours. The way it functions might have the same name but its content vary dramatically from one cultural, political, economical and social background to another. And yes, the demons are just different from one place to another.

Anyhow, let me link back to your previous answer, and ask you with a help of a riddle. Did generosity kill the cat, or was it curiosity that killed the cat or was it really in the end phlegmatism that killed it? And what is this "cat" that are talking about?

Minna L. H: Why I asked you about normalisation, was because here where I am right now, Malmö, the south of Sweden, it is very topical a term in the local art agenda - just like a little more than a year ago it was discussed in Istanbul in relation to exhibition series at Platform, and sometime earlier in Zagreb. Words go around, and how, and whether, they get the local colours, as you say, is something I am curious to see here.

But the riddle, the cat. You gave me a hint that it refers to my previous answer, so it could be a relationship, a love. But you tell me.

And then, maybe you can also answer another question. What does the word freedom mean to you and stand for?

Mika H: Well, yes, words go around, and yes, the one thing that you can be sure about it is that when the buzz hits the art world with a concept such as normalization, things have already gone very badly or just moved out somewhere else, far away. The quality of the trendy art discourse is like the quality of the "normal" taxi driver. The moment they start to talk about how to make money with stocks you know they’re gonna crash in 22 nano-seconds.

Then we got two questions here. The cat. Yes, love is a very good answer, so is hate. Both of them four-letter words. Something you can easily set on a T-shirt and make millions and millions selling them.

But freedom. Yes. Reminds me of that classical saying by Mahatma Gandhi: Eye for an eye makes two men blind.

But freedom. We got freedom to and freedom from. The other one makes things possible, and the other shapes the space that nobody can interfere with. The other is, for example, freedom of speech, and the other one protection of private property.

But freedom is a personal sense. When it really comes down to it, for me freedom is about the ability to keep on keeping on. It is about the ability to see that what you do has at least a small chance of making things around you little more meaningful and better. When I say freedom, I see hope. And when I say hope it means freedom.

Huh huh. We are getting very deep down and dirty here. But lets continue.
Moments of resistance. Where is that for you? How would you define for you a meaningful sense of a critical positioning?

Minna L. H: It is clear that it is impossible for me to form enough of a genuine critical position to, and make work about, something that I see on the news at the BBC-world. That is not to say that I wouldn’t want to support some others, who I see as being on the right track against the global currents, and whose views and methods in doing that I agree with.

But for me it has to be something more intimate, something that is going on in my immediate surroundings and I experience more or less first hand, but I also feel that I have something new or a little bit different to say about. Sometimes the trigger could already be that no one else is doing anything about something that I feel important to point out and resist.

Saying that it has to be something intimate, doesn’t mean that it would need to stay as my personal or local observation, but it can of course become something that deals also with some general and global issues. And some level of universal readability is of course a quality in an artwork. But it has to have its starting point in the urgency towards the topic.

And a simple question: Can art change the world?

Mika H: Yes, sure, a lot of different things can and do change the world: sports, caricatures, space shuttles and why not painting on a wall. This question also again reminds me directly of a song. That is David Bowie and his Changes, the song where he plays with the beginning of the letter of the word singing chchchchchchchchchchanges...

But I believe art has a great potentiality to allow us to think through in a critical but constructive way who we are, where we are, with whom - and where we are from, and where we want to move towards to. But the question is how. And this how is only possible within a personal and direct experience. It might be first of all a personal encounter and a potential change, but because that must be the first step, it does not close out that this change within a person has effects on his/her surroundings and other people.

Finally, the fact remains: in order to achieve some (any kind of change, indeed) you must first be able to imagine this chance.

Now I steal a mirror from our neighbour who is watching the Olympics (curling, how superdupersexy) and turn it towards you: Can art change the world?

Minna L. H: It has done it for me, on the professional as well as on the personal level. But I am not sure if that counts as I am working in the field, and sadly enough, in one way or another, I spend most of the time in a day with it. And I realize that it could be something else that I found meaningful to devote my time to, even to build a space shuttle, and that would then change my world.

But being on the mission to change the world for others too, there are advantages to do that as artist - it is easier to enter doors and subjects, which would otherwise be closed from others than the specialists of a particular field. Artists have certain freedoms. This could already be in comparison to other professions in the art field. If, for example, an artist makes a group exhibition, which is usually the job of the curator, they are not expected to, and don’t need to follow the conventions of exhibition making, but they can do something radically different. If a curator does the same, it is immediately linked to the whole tradition of the field. As artist you can step into a role with not even claiming to master it.

But freedom walks hand in hand with responsibilities, and here they are those toward the audience. I would like to think that being an artist indicates that I am aiming at changing the world, and have to believe in the capacity of art doing that. But then, what I have to offer to someone else, is not necessarily a body of new and radical knowledge, but maybe a little something, which is based on my experience, and which together with many other similar kinds of little inputs can potentially move someone to a direction, which makes them experience their surroundings, and themselves in it, in a different way.

I hope I somewhat answered your question, but went roundabout, as I pretty much agree with what you said there before, and figured that I would have good chances in getting caught if I copy-pasted your answer.

And question to you, continuing and concluding with the same topic of wanting a change: Give me a song, which would characterize the conversation we've had here, and why did you choose this particular song?

Mika H: First one is of course Love Me Tender, Elvis himself, and then comes to my mind Personal Jesus, Johnny Cash's version, and then I kind of seem to move towards Marvin Gaye's I Want You - but no, I still need to choose something else. It is a song called Emotional Hooligans by Gary Clail & On-U Sound System.
And why? This is about the real thing: opening the window, reaching out, falling - and enjoying the fall. Emotional hooligans.

A Lullaby for Freedom . Mika Hannula

2006-03-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

Songs of Freedom and Love
For the publication TRIBUTE TO C-CASSETTE,
Catalogue of the exhibition SONGS OF FREEDOM & LOVE

Once upon time, not that far in present history, was a smallish nation state that was proud of its ability and wish to promote freedom and prosperity all across the world. A nation so fond of its own project of organizing freedom that it did not always remember what it was actually trying to do and what did it stand for.

It was a nation shaped by the aim that all the people in the world would love each other and take care of each other. A nation keen on promoting human rights and democratic values.

It wanted freedom and it wanted justice. It wanted all things good and it opposed all things bad.

But then, one sad time, this smallish nation state was caught in a controversy. There was a problem. The smallish nation state was involved in a site and situation in which not all people were friends with one another and not all people were nice to one another. There was a problem and there was a conflict. There were fights and there were violence. There were demands from all sides of the problem that did not match so easily.

The smallish nation still wanted freedom and it still wanted justice, but it got really confused and scared that not everyone can always have it and enjoy it in the same place at the same time. It wanted all but came out short-handed. Bruised and burnt.

The small nation had to do something. And because it thought that the best way to deal with a problem is to look away and deny the problem, it no longer was ready to talk about freedom and justice. The smallish nation shut up. It became very quiet.

Granted, the smallish nation did indeed think that problems would disappear if you look away. One by one, like dominoes. Close your eyes and you have brotherly love and harmony, which is always and in any situation much much better than conflicts and disagreements.

The smallish nation looked actively away and fell silent. It did not dare anymore to talk about freedom. It did not dare to talk about justice. Furthermore, it wanted that nobody else either would talk about these nasty issues. It just wished that everyone would leave it alone and let it continue to live in the illusion that it had fought so hard to achieve. The smallish nation thought it to be utterly unfair that its peace and quietness was disturbed.

The smallish nation was humming a lullaby for freedom, digging its own grave and enjoying it. And while the smallish nation smoothly slid into the woolly domain of pleasant dreams the reality outside kept becoming more and more cruel and devastating. But that, thought the smallish nation, is not its problem. It does, it really does support and wants to have freedom and democracy but only if it does not disturb its afternoon naps. I mean, sighed the smallish nation, is that really too much to ask for? Is it really, it sighed again and again, so damn difficult to believe everything is fine and dandy when it certainly is not?

Press Release: Borga Kantürk - Ahmet Ögüt

2005-12-19T01:59:00.000-08:00

20 December 2005 – 28 January 2006

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre presents the first comprehensive exhibition of Borga Kanturk and Ahmet Ogut along with a performance video series by Absalon titled “Solutions” 1991-93 shown in the vault.

On the opening night of the exhibition the 20th December, Kanturk and Ogut will talk about their individual practices and their presentations in the gallery space at 6pm.

Borga Kanturk uses painting as his artistic medium yet it is often difficult to call the result of his production processes ‘paintings’. He makes hand made copies of official documents, which dictate a public identity on to the individual, like diplomas, student identity cards, honours certificates, examination passes, and identity cards. These experiments with ‘artificiality’ and ‘constructedness’ become an act of protest through recreating the original images while distorting and reframing them. These remade objects, which were brought together in an installation titled “Borga Kanturk/Retrospective” shown in the exhibition ‘I am Too Sad to Kill You!’ at Proje4L in 2003 served as a starting point for other works.

The concept of ‘constructedness’ was carried over to the “KUTU (Box) Portable Art Gallery” project initiated in collaboration with artists from Izmir. The project originated from the idea of the artist creating a space for him/herself: “if you don’t have a gallery build it yourself!” KUTU is designed to be a prefabricated art venue with cardboard walls. The flexibility of the architectural structure allows the use of different materials depending on the requirements of the space. KUTU delineates an interim space within the real space (gallery) it inhabits like a parasite and transmits a whimsical and critical perspective through its nomadic existence.

Platform hosts a multi-layered selection from Borga Kanturk’s oeuvre. There are works which designate an intimate space, introverted and secluded: play-dough sculptures, found toys, “slightly melancholic mortal objects, tiny fragile statuettes that risk being disfigured with a touch” and everyday objects like a pack of cream cheese, a playing piece from a game, a leaf from a memo pad and a pencil. Little scenes made out of play-dough bring together elements borrowed from TV and computer games, such as a scene depicting a 1cm figure watching a Kylie Minogue music video. In Kanturk’s words: “a pocket size version of the dream of large scale production.” Next to them is the series of paintings bearing the title “ALLA TURCA” NEO-ROMANTIC emulating the renowned landscape works of romantic painters like Caspar David Frederich and William Turner on a small-scale. The attempt to discover landscapes provoking adventure on an artificial monitor; Lara Croft looking for the remains of a sunken ship underwater, a submarine in the midst of the blue, a car attacked by a UFO in an uncanny land, a passageway to a mysterious world. Little paradises that allow us to take a break from the everyday and daydream, habitats for protected adventures… “Creating a beautiful space that pleases you, withdrawing there and building your resistance there.”

Ahmet Ogut participates in the exhibition with three video works, one wall painting and a photographic series he produced in collaboration with Osman Bingol. Two recent video works “What a Lovely Day” and “Cut it Out” propose imaginary scenarios for real situations of cause and effect. “What a Lovely Day” depicts the playing out of a situation where the police stop and search a young man. Secret police, such as the ones portrayed in the video, exist in Ogut’s memory as a catalyst for assumed guilt and the fear of potential violence. His video is as much a re-enactment of scenes he has heard about, as it is a performance of his mind racing forward to conjure a future situation on seeing the tell-tale white car known to contain such police.

In “Cut it Out” a young man, who for Ogut represents the average American guy, sits on the floor in a pair of pants printed with an American flag motif. Posing as an Iraq posted soldier he curses the war, the people involved, the pointlessness of it all and numerously repeats the phrase “ it’s a lost cause, I want to go home” seemingly confused and referring both to America’s war efforts and the situation in Iraq simultaneously. Throughout his rendition he continuously breaks down in laughter, as if high and excessively nervous of a reality and seriousness he cannot express. On two occasions flash frames appear momentarily exposing two men dressed in the representation of terrorists fed to us by the media. The first time they stand behind the boy, posing as if guarding him, in the second all three appear dead. These split-second insertions jerk the viewer to look beyond the boy’s bewildered contempt to the more sinister reality it refers to.

“Death Kit Train”, another recently completed video will be shown for the first time at Platform in the context of this exhibition. In this work a standard modern car is seen slowly moving across the screen from right to left. When those pushing the car come into view there are not just two men, but maybe four, or eight. The line of men seems infinite, and their task suggests a reference to those in the workforce that perform mundane and often unnecessary manual labour and the many more that remain unemployed. Finally in the photographic series that Ogut produced in collaboration with Osman Bingol in 2002, the subject’s uniforms bring together the disorderly images of order with a black humour that can be read as the extreme point of military indiscipline. (Şener Özmen, excerpted from the catalogue of the exhibition ‘I am Too Sad to Kill You!’)

Borga Kantürk: was born in Izmir in 1978. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Dokuz Eylul University Fine Art Faculty Painting Department. He has been working as a research assistant in the same department since 2002. In the recent years Kanturk has participated in many international and national exhibitions. In 2005 he completed a three-month artist residency supported by Platform Garanti Contemporary Art centre and HIAP in Helsinki, Finland. He is the cofounder of KUTU Portable Art Gallery (2001) and K2 Art Centre (2002) where he continues to work as a Project Director.

Ahmet Ogut was born in Diyarbakir in 1981. He graduated from Hacettepe University Fine Art Faculty Painting Department. In 2005 Ogut completed a three-month residency at IAAB in Basel, Switzerland with support of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre and Pro Helvetia. In the recent years his work was shown extensively on an international basis and he recently had a solo show at Mala Galerija Ljubljana / The Museum of Modern Art of Slovenia. He is currently working as a research assistant at Yildiz Teknik University in Istanbul where he is continuing his graduate studies.
Text by November Paynter on Ahmet Ogut

9th International Istanbul Biennial

2005-09-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

9th International Istanbul Biennial
September 16 - October 30

Platform Garanti is one of the venues of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial with for artists and artist groups.

The two artists exhibiting in Platform’s gallery space are Hüseyin Alptekin and one of IRP’s guest artist Yael Bartana. Alptekin’s multi-media installation H-Fact, is a work inspired by his obsession with the quadriga of horses mounted on the façade of San Marco in Venice, which were originally from Istanbul. To the rear of the gallery is the two screen video projection Wild Seeds by Bartana. One projection depicts a group of 18-year-olds playing the self-invented game - The Evacuation of Gilad’s Colony and on the other are subtitles of their screams and banter.

In addition, two more biennial works adorn Platform’s façade.
A neon sign reading Geçici Geçen Kisi (Temporary Person Passing Through) by Otto Berchem hangs above the gallery entrance. Around this text, elements of the building have been painted magenta. This intervention is part of a series by GruppoA12 who have selected details of every biennial venue to be painted the same color in order to create a linking system of visual signage.

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

Curator Talk: Stine Hebert

My City Art and Public Space: May Symposium 8, 15 May 2010

DK03: Distributed Identity

Artist Talk

DK02. Hybrid Public Space

01. Distributed Work

Nilbar Güreş: "Artist Beyond" Talk

Céline Condorelli Support Structures

October 24 Saturday, 14:00

Cultural Agencies Panel

Towelflag

My City European Residencies [MCER]

The Columns held Us Up

Accented

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin: Global Mockery

Ciro Najle: The Tectonic Machine

Gijs van Oenen : Architecture, Security and Interpassivity

Peter Cook : Robots in the Woods

Building Knowledge

"Red Thread" Talks and Conversations - 3

On Support: 'Support Structures'

Charles Waldheim: Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape

How to Care?

Building Democracy

Artist Talk / Jacopo Miliani

Museum as Kraftwerk: From Cedric Price to the Serpentine Pavilion

Artist Talk: Jeremiah Day

Contact Improvisation / News Animations

The Bosphorus of My Mind /Christoph Keller

Architecture and Imagination

Book Launch SIT Manresa

On Support

Outskirts: Reflection on current artistic practices found outside the centre

Politiche: thinking through art

The 3rd Asian Art Museum Directors' Forum

Tokyo Wonder Site Panel

“Transdisciplines” Lecture Series -5: George Legrady

Open Studio Day at Istanbul Residency Program

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - 2:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Politics of Visibility/ Poetics of the Political...

architecture without architecture

Candid Stories

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series – 4: Fiona Raby

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 2: Marie-Ange Brayer

"Transdisciplines" Lecture Series - 1: Marcos Novak

Die Letzen Dinge [Last Things]

Subtracting of Zeroes / Mladen Stilinović

September 8, Jalal Toufic Lecture

September 11, Aneta Szylak Lecture

SITE SANTA FE BIENNIAL IN 2008

The Photographers

A Discussion with Bert Theis

Bert Theis will participate with ISOLA and OUT in the 10th International Istanbul Biennial.

Global Cities at Tate Modern

A Discussion with Bert Theis

Bosphorus Beat in Art + Auction Magazine

Book Launch In Venice

Atelier Bow-Wow

Why the Open Library?

artist’s book: an alternative space?

Vahram Aghasyan: Yerevan In Transition

Open Table: Ramazan Bayrakoğlu

Oda Projesi presents: The cloak room FM

Bik Van der Pol: books, magazines and systems of distribution

April 13, 18:30, Natasa Petresin Video Program I

April 14, 18:30, Natasa Petresin Video Program II and III

Open Library

April 5, 18:30, Dirk Herzog Screenings

Existing art in a non-existing state?

Maarten Hajer Conference

Chantal Mouffe

Frame Builders [a book from IAS, Seoul/Korea]

Platform at Global Art Forum

Public Event at Platform Garanti

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie

Screening: Mathilde Willink SUPERPOES

The Wayward Canon Night

The Wayward Canon: A forum for screening and collaboration

Lecture: Matthew Schum

My City  European Residencies [MCER]

Gijs van Oenen : Architecture, Security and Interpassivity

Peter Cook : Robots in the Woods

Charles Waldheim:  Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape