Posted on 11/02/2001 1:53:55 PM PST by a_Turk
Mosques and modernity
Oct 25th 2001 | ISTANBUL
From The Economist print edition
A treasure hunt for modern work among ancient monuments, the Istanbul Biennial is a celebration of culture's fundamental unity.
A TURKISH bath at the Istanbul Biennial has given a whole new meaning to the nude in art. In this extraordinary art installation, female viewers in the inaugural week were invited to strip down and lather up (massage optional) for a performance in the women's section of the Cemberlitas Hammam—Istanbul's most famous bath house, designed by Mimar Sinan, the great 16th-century mosque builder and Ottoman answer to Michelangelo.
Inside the bath house, a Bosnian artist, Maja Bajevic, staged a performance by (clothed) Bosnian refugees. Several women stood in the steam bath washing tattered fabrics embroidered with patriotic slogans. Tired phrases from Marshall Tito's day—“With the youth that we have, we should not be afraid of the future”—were hung out to dry. Using women's work—sewing and washing—to give voice to the silent and secondary victims of war, Ms Balevic turned the hammam, traditionally a place of care and conversation, into a personal and political art space.
Unusual convergences of old and new, East and West, lie at the heart of the Istanbul Biennial. Since 1987 the organisers have invited curators from across the world to come to live in the waterfront city and fill its historic spaces with cutting-edge art. This makes the Biennial (which runs until November 17th) one of the most exciting and accessible of the big international art shows. Viewers find themselves on a treasure hunt through the city's rich mix of historic monuments, including the Topkapi and Dolmabahce palaces, the Hagia Eirene church and the imperial mint.
Unsuspecting visitors to the 6th-century Yerebatan cistern will be surprised by the animations and sculptures of a Korean artist, Lee Bul, that seem to levitate in mid-air like high-tech resurrections from the murky depths of this Byzantine water tank. Not all the installations show such a strong imagination, and if an overall judgment has to be made, the artistic quality of the Biennial as a whole is mixed. But the experience of walking in and out of history is exhilarating by itself, and well worth the trip for its own sake.
Yuko Hasegawa, the 2001 curator, has just the right cross-cultural background. Raised a Zen Buddhist in Kyoto, she grew up amid respect for tradition. In Tokyo, she became a contemporary art curator before leaving for New York to work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her husband is a neuroscientist and she herself is interested in art's overlaps with science and psychology. As the bath-house indicates, her guiding idea for this year's Biennial is to treat looking at art as a shared rather than a one-on-one encounter.
She describes her approach with an unabashed slogan of her own: “I want to replace the three Ms of the 20th century with the three Cs of the 21st.” Her three Ms are men, monetarism and materialism, which, she believes, have led in western society to an over-emphasis on the individual. Her three Cs are collective intelligence, collective consciousness and co-existence. We need these, she thinks, to survive and prosper henceforth. Although she could not have predicted it, her words had unexpected resonance at the show in the week after September 11th, when it opened. Everyone from taxi drivers and waiters to street vendors and artists were bursting with a need to share their thoughts and news about that tragic day.
In artistic terms, Ms Hasegawa's insistence on collective experience is more than a catchphrase. She has chosen artworks which link us to a world beyond our familiar lives and which act as a bridge between different cultures. For example, Francis Alys, a Mexico-based artist, presents a slide-show installation called “Sleepers”, where you sit on a sofa filled with Turkish cushions watching images of people and dogs snoozing in the streets of Mexico city, shot at sidewalk level, as though at your feet. A Colombian art group, Cambalache Collective, take a magic-bus approach. They drive around town in what they call a street museum—a commandeered bus—offering free rides in exchange for a small item of personal value, a pack of cigarettes, a hairclip or a photo. Cambalache then display these offerings jumble-sale style on a terrace of the mint. The message is that we can personalise humdrum, everyday transactions by reminding ourselves of their emotional connections.
Only connect
For Cambalache, and for many of the artists in this Biennial, art is more a means of communication than a form of self-expression. In the Hagia Eirene church, you can see the direct and colourful drawings of an octogenarian artist from Côte d'Ivoire, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. He has invented an alphabet of over 400 pictograms to translate the oral history of his tribe, the Bete. In an overgrown courtyard of the imperial mint hang the wooden carvings of one of the most interesting artists in the show, an aboriginal sculptor, Du Weng Sig, who has never left his native Taiwan. He lives in the fog-shrouded mountains to the south and carves his pieces, which he says reflect his ancestors' spirits, out of the materials he finds there. Rather than sell his art, he gives it to friends on important occasions—a birth or the building of a new house, say—as a token for the transmission of good spirits.
To begin with Ms Hasegawa looked for Turkish art to put in her show. But she soon found that most young Turkish artists are more interested in shooting photographs and videos than in working with such traditional materials as textiles, carpets and ceramics. One Biennial artist who marries both traditions, Hussein Chalayan, is better known in Europe as an avant-garde fashion designer. A Turkish Cypriot based in London, Chalayan makes wearable art out of air-letters and kites; in his fashion-show-plus-performance-art pieces, models arrange themselves as bits of furniture, transforming into skirts and dresses as they move. He is interested in clothes as mutable materials that communicate ideas. And although his first label, perhaps unsurprisingly, went bankrupt, he will be making his mark in London this season. His work is on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum's “Radical Fashion” exhibition (until January 6th 2002), and Asprey, London's grandest luxury shop, has just made him creative director.
The single most charming work in the entire Biennial draws its inspiration from the rapid growth of this metropolis, already numbering more than 12m people. When a baby is born in Istanbul's big maternity hospital, the new parents can press a button triggering a meteoric burst of light on the bridge over the Bosphorus that links Asia and Europe. For its Italian creator, Alberto Garutti, this light piece, activated on average of 70 times a day, is a way for people across the city to celebrate life itself. It is a reminder also that this city of mosques is a place of modernity.
I heard it's from the Greek "eis ten Boulen," To the City Council. Allegedly comes from a signpost outside of ConstantinopleThat's what I read too, with the minor variation in wording. Poli, Boulen, I don't know Greek, other than that Polis (police) means city.
Valerie Solanis, light.
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