Within the mainstream rut of Istanbul’s municipal culture, the quicksand intractability of life is often as painfully uninspired as the next concrete high-rise somewhere far on the edges of the city’s sprawling, octopus-like mass. And it expands outward, to cartoonish dimensions, overblown like a caricature in which its blemishes and faults are accentuated, even highlighted because they are utterly human, and in that way endearing, or at least worthy of compassion. But Istanbul’s hard and fast reality is generally immune to such soft and rosy sentiments.
For these reasons and untold others, an art exhibition in response to Istanbul as a whole is a curatorial challenge out of the myths of Greek heroism. That’s where Kevser Güler stepped in, and up, to the platform of superlative achievement, as is her track record amid the uppish halls of such establishments as Arter. She has come to symbolize a different way to exhibit art, one that provokes its audience to think for themselves while exploring the profundity of her artists’ subjects and their contexts, materially and intellectually.
In her prefatory text, as one of the opening introductions to the thick book that accompanies the prolific show, Güler used the buzzing term “neoliberal capitalism” as a way to understand the struggles that Istanbul has endured, in response to its recent uptick of monumental environmental and sociological shifts. Instead of using the place name “Istanbul” in the title, as was true for the earlier, briefly concurrent exhibition at Sakıp Sabancı Museum, “Past Present Istanbul,” she simply, cleverly, landed on “This Place.”
At Sakıp Sabancı Museum, professor and artist Murat Germen curated representations of the city along similar although largely divergent lines in relation to Güler’s work at the YKKSY. “This Place,” like its title, follows a certain ambiguity. The question is persistent throughout Istanbul’s multivalent, layered histories, of what it is, and even what it is called, for who, when, where, how, why. And by foregrounding younger artists, alongside deceased historical painters and older generations, Güler propped up her curation of the city like the answer to a question.
The question, however, is where the artists come in. But they ask it not in the manner of daily speech, with its prosaic machinations, but through the surrealistic vocabularies of images, space, even feelings and in some cases simply an awareness of context, a wavering focus on the emptiness that surrounds any given point of attention. As with her recent Arter exhibition, “On Celestial Bodies,” Güler has a knack for correlating seemingly contrasting ambiguities within the setup, placement and titling of the artworks as displayed.
Under the calculated, though, at times also lighthearted efforts of Güler’s curation, the YKKSY has transformed into a research hall, unfolding inwardly to a pluralistic vision of Istanbul’s layered pasts. From the outset of the exhibition, a video and photography installation by Sinem Dişli lead seers into an investigation of Yarımburgaz Cave, which is also the name of her piece. It is, like much of the work at “This Place,” an exhaustive archive of a contemporary artist’s practice, their multimedia productions focused on a specific ecology.
Located in the western reaches of Istanbul’s Thracian lands, stretching outward to the Greek and Bulgarian borders, Yarımburgaz Cave is a uniquely fruitful site for scientists and excavators with an eye on everything from Byzantine ruins to Stone Age artifacts. In her more artistic portrayal, Dişli showed the graffitied inner walls, which, in thousands of years may still bear the traces of someone’s 1978 birthdate scrawled along the rocky curves of its interior. Photographs of various passages, surfaces and findings are annotated with her handwriting.
There is a cartographic profusion of insights into Istanbul’s urban area, seen not only from the vantage point of moderns, but throughout its every record of geological formation and human settlement. Güler made a point to intersperse archaic ephemera, such as a number of city maps, written in the old Arabic script of Ottoman-Turkish. To see Istanbul’s trendiest, weekend youth lifestyle district of Moda, Kadıköy meticulously laid out in the antique style of the city’s bygone predecessors is to reconsider the passage of time as equally cavernous.
In the interest of universality, transcending Istanbul’s singular lure, “This Place” also addresses the enigmas of space, as defined, because, by definition, it actually indicates a gap, somewhere to be occupied. Many of the artists grasped this well, among them Deniz Aktaş, whose meticulous, naturalist drawings show a vacant ecology, a grassy field inhabited with an unidentifiable presence of form, or its absence. Güler went back into dusty painting collections to convey the idea, exhibiting Migirdiç Civanyan’s empty seas in “Ship in the Storm” (1894).
One of the more peculiar voices among the exhibition’s artists in terms of straight, pictorial depiction, is by the characteristically provocative multidisciplinary Nilbar Güreş, whose C-print photos are uncanny in their sociological admixtures, set within environments that are equally supernatural as they are hyper-realistic. One of the two pieces exhibited is titled, “Watering the Roots” (2010), from the Çırçır Series, in which a secularly dressed middle-aged woman absurdly pours a small, electric kettle of water onto the upturned roots of a dead tree.
“Watering the Roots” foregrounds a more traditionally dressed woman, similarly aged, holding an older type of tea kettle. But she looks away from the uprooted tree, and from the chaotic scene of industrial mountain tunnel construction behind them. Beside her, the more apparently environmentally minded woman is dressed in black daywear with a modern scarf around her neck, wearing reading glasses. In a single still, Güreş has managed to portray the dualistic drama of life in Turkey, in which differences in class and culture are exposed every day.
A few of the artworks at “This Place” had an interactive element, offering audiences opportunities not only to interact within the localizing nexus of the show but also in the interest of connecting to the world through Istanbul’s multicultural soul. Istanbul could be said to be one of the deepest roots of humanity. Its linguistic diversity is as diverse as its soil, which is a point made quite freshly by Ali Taptık, whose piece “Postcards for Gardener’s Cookbook” (2016) includes verdant typography in Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, English and Armenian.
But the scale and degree of work shown and referenced in “This Place” is only paralleled by the hilariously satirical and cheekily ambitious Zeyno Pekünlü, whose installation, “Everything I know” (2015-ongoing) is comprised of printed paper on which a practically endless enumeration of statements is written, describing every conceivable thing that the artist can be said to know. It is an apt metaphor for “This Place,” and for Istanbul, a city with vast sources of knowledge and experience, which, in a postmodern context, is best left to art.
