Yaratıcı üretimin sürdürülebilir iradesi: An interview with Beral Madra
(Röportajı Türkçe okumak için buraya tıklayın)
Independent Turkish art critic and curator Beral Madra’s résumé is long and impressive. She coordinated the first two Istanbul Biennales in 1987 and 1989, was the curator of the Turkish pavilion in the 43rd, 45th, 49th, 50th and 51st Venice Biennales, co-curated the exhibition Modernities and Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World in 47th Venice Biennale, and that is just the first page. She has curated over 250 group and solo shows of international artists and is the author of several books, including Post-peripheral Flux: A Decade of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (Literatür Yayınevi, Istanbul, 1996) and Home Affairs: Ten articles published in Radikal 2000-2009 (BM CAC Publications, Istanbul, 2009). She is also the director of the Beral Madra Contemporary Art Center (BM CAC), an archive and library open to research and academic work.
On the 22nd of September I paid a visit to Beral Madra at her home in Istanbul, where she lives with her husband, the photographer and multimedia artist Teoman Madra. We spoke about the state of the arts and cultural institutions in Turkey, her thoughts on this year's edition of the Istanbul Biennale and the complicated relationship of Turkish cultural institutions to local government and state power.
* * *
Willson Tarbox: You curated the first editions of the Istanbul Biennale that is currently in its 16th edition. What are your thoughts on this year's show, it’s message, it’s artists and the evolution of the Biennale since your early involvement with it?
Beral Madra : The evolution of the Istanbul Biennale is very much in step with the big trends in contemporary art history and historiography at the moment. This year’s edition lends much needed attention to women artists and to artists from other dominated or marginalized groups as well as, of course, to ecology, which is at the heart of the show. But outside of the narrow microcosm of the Biennale, do we really care about these things in Istanbul? There used to be many trees in the surrounding area that have since been cleared to make way for the city’s sprawling expansion. The sea of Marmara used to be blue, now it is completely polluted. There used to be 187—nearly two hundred—species of fish in the Bosphorus and the Marmara and now there are only about 20. The waterways were clean and potable until about the 1950s. On the 18th of September [2019], just before the Biennale’s opening, there was an explosion of a chemical factory in the neighborhood of Tuzla and for days afterwards there was bubbly white foam in the water.
WT: This summer, during a press preview and conference at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris Biennale curator Nicolas Bourriaud and Bige Örer, the Biennale's director, spoke about the ecological and climate crisis that the selected artists sought to address and of the political and cultural significance of the Biennale in the capital of a country with authoritarian leanings, even describing the Istanbul Biennale as a "site of resistance" to the ruling power. Would you say that that is an accurate description of the Biennale in Turkey’s cultural landscape ?
BM: Mr. Bourriaud, as a renown curator with socio-political statments, had to react to the current political and cultural environment of Turkey; this is the most subtle way of expression. The Biennale is a form of free expression in a time which we describe as Post-truth. It allows for a rare form of creativity that we do not have in cinema or journalism and it receives financial support from the private sector rather than the state funds. In fact, if resistance is one of the aspects, sustainable will of creative production is another aspect.
WT: On my way to see you I saw a video spot for the Biennale on one of the television screens in the Istanbul subway. In it we see what appears to be a 24-hour news program that opens with helicopter shots of an official motorcade as it approaches a presidential palace. The motorcade stops in front of a diplomatic delegation and out from one of the limousines emerges a human-sized trash bag. The trash bag and the president embrace before entering the palace. In the next scene, the two appear behind identical podiums at a press conference where they are illuminated by the flash of cameras and reporters clamoring to ask questions. In the following scene we see the trash bag addressing the United Nations. Finally the camera cuts to the mass of plastic waste floating in the Ocean—”the Seventh continent”—to which the title of the Biennale refers. I was stuck by this spot not only for its clever irony but also for this subtle dig at representations of state power in Turkey.
BM : I think that video art is more free than other creative productions in Turkey because its public is small and elite. Its message can be more critical because it is less widespread.
WT: But this video was being played on television screens in the Istanbul metro.
BM: The Biennale staff is made up of many young people who are quite smart and engaged. They know how to get subtle messages past the censors. The video plays on the ignorance of high level people towards visual art. This video is like a collage with a second meaning that is not understood. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the private sector in Turkey doesn’t respect the environment as much as they should and industry is controlled by the same businessmen who sponsor the arts. The Koç Holding Company, the Biennale’s main financiers, is a prime example of this. They are the primary investors in both the Istanbul Biennale and the Pavilion of Turkey in Venice Biennale since 2007. They have almost single handedly been responsible for shaping the cultural narrative both in Turkey, where they sponsor and fund most museums and outside. However Koç’s investment in art isn’t merely philanthropic. It began in the 1980s as a way of gaining visibility for their brand and their stocks on an international scale, and what better place to do this than in the art market, where the world’s wealthiest congregate and mingle.
In addition to gaining visibility for potential investors, implication in the arts has also been a way that wealthy special interests have long cherched to promote a positive self-image.
Artists and art critics in Turkey are confronted by this monopoly of the private interests in the arts. We are asked to address and evaluate the art, it’s mediation, it’s institutional presentation, but never the dynamics of the institutions that promote it. The positive side is that the financial support gives opportunities to contemporary artists to produce artworks that have clandestine critical content.
WT: Is this private monopoly reflected in this year’s selection of Biennale artists?
BM: Not necessarily in the selection of the artists, but probably in conceiving the conceptual framework and selecting the artworks. The Biennale commission convenes a jury every two years to select a curator. This is quite positive because every year the jury is different and so is the curator. The curators try to understand the city but this is difficult because the time that they spend here is relatively short. They should stay for at least six months in order to learn how to better understand the local situation and make the Biennale useful for the public of Istanbul, which is a distopic megapolis. The ideal context is that the curators are free and independent in the construction of their concept and selection of local artists; however there are local power groups and relations that may interfere into this decision.
Another problem is that the Biennale does not have a permanent space and there are problems related to this every year. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) dragged out a space on the Golden Horn. This year the Biennale was supposed to have a space in the old Imperial Arsenal, a shipyard in Istanbul that was the main base and naval shipyard of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century to the end of the Empire, however at the last minute they told us that there was asbestos inside and that it was too dangerous. Thus at the last minute the venue was changed to the MSFAU Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture.
In the past there was a special space that was designated for the Biennale, by Nejat Eczacıbaşı, a Turkish industrialist and philanthropist from a prominent, wealthy Istanbul family who was one of the principal founders of the İKSV in 1973 on the 50th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. In 1980, Turkey underwent a military coup, and Eczacıbaşı wanted the Biennale to participate in the complicated restoration of democracy. In addition to music and theater festivals he established the biennale. I was the general coordinator for the first and second Biennales in 1987 and 1989 respectively and we used the historical spaces of the city. Beginning of 1990's Mr Eczacıbaşı was offered by the municipality the old Ottoman Fez factory; he invited architect Gae Aulenti for the restoration and the third Biennale was realized in this building. The political scene changed very quickly when Mr.Erdoğan became mayor of Istanbul in 1994. Eczacıbaşı died the year before and the newly-elected and conservative city government of Istanbul under Erdoğan began to dispute with Eczacıbaşı’s son, Bülent, who took over the Eczacıbaşı Holding firm after his father’s death. A deal was cut and Bülent agreed to handover the Fez factory, which was turned into an events center, in exchange for building permits to build a sky-scraper in downtown Istanbul. Now that a new mayor - hopefully with a different vision to Istanbul's culture life - has been elected, arts professionals ought to put pressure on him to return the Fez factory to its former use.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, three other biennales have emerged in Anatolia, one at the Black Sea Coast, Sinopale and on the Aegean coast Çanakkale and the other at the Iraq border Mardin. These civil society initiatives verify the fact that contemporary art and theory production is a significant need in Turkey. These, and other new cultural projects beg the question: What is the role of the State in the production of contemporary art? If there is a significant production of contemporary art in the country, the state should support it financially and open the channels of promoting it in the global art and culture arenas. However, the state and local gowernment art and culture policies in Turkey are still in Modernist populist stage, despite the investments of the private sector. Official culture policy is funding project which serve their interests.
WT: To return to the subject of the Biennale, I would be curious to know your thoughts on this year’s edition.
BM: The Istanbul Biennale is modest compared to large European biennales like Venice or Documenta. The latter has an endowment of something like 15 million euros, whereas, my guess would be that the Istanbul Biennale only has a couple of millions. No one knows because the official amount is never declared.
Mr. Bourriaud has invited artists who have been working more or less on ecological, climate change, gentrifications issues with a focus on relations between nature and indigenious cultures, on mysticism and theraphy and, psychedelic and esoteric approaches. I have also observed a slight inclination to a nostalgy of orientalism and colonialism.
Looking to 5 continents there are 10 from USA, 6 from UK, 6 from Turkey, 4 from Germany, 3 from Brasil, 1 or 2 from Spain,Tailand, Grönland, Kanada, Croatia, Taiwan, İrland, France, Australia, Austria, France, İran, Cek Republic, Arjantine, Greece, South Korea, Italy, Poland Peru, Holland; a number of them immigrant artists.
I will mention Rebecca Belmore's piece, which is located on the ground floor of the MSFAU because it weighs three tons and was produced here; Charles Avery's Ninth Stand wit Urchins, an installation with glass snakes etc. and Jennifer Tee's Crystalline Floorpieces, Simon Starlin'gs İnfestation Piece (Mask for Istanbul), Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, Claudia Martinez Garay's The Creator, Turia Magadlela's Four Five Series, Glen Ligon's Untitled (29 Ekim 2023), Suzanne Husky's Regeneration as interesting works that caught my attention; these works were somehow related to Istanbul's concerns on ecological disasters.
However the exhibits that interested me most are the parallel exhibitions happening all around the city tin the art galleries and in alternative spaces that are sponsored by the artists themselves.The artists enjoy being independent of labeled money!
The other critique that I would make vis-à-vis the Biennale here is that we do not know what percentage of its visitors are international and what percentage are local. By the numbers of previous years, the visitorship of the Biennale is about 300,000 and this in a city of 20 million. In order for the Biennale to succeed in the future, two things must happen: On the one hand, the Biennale needs to find a way to implant itself more effectively and more efficiently into the fabric of local, city life. Furthermore under the ambiguous political circumstances all cultural institutions need to create strong infrastructures that will allow them more freedom from financial or industrial special interests; they should work with NGO's, with the support of the public and raise unlabeled money for their projects. In this way they can escape from the ever conflictual field of money and art.
