Open Library

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

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?

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

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

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]

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

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

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)