Art and politics at the crossroads

IN the lobby of Istanbul’s gleaming new modern art museum hang four plaques recording congratulations from Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder along with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. That European leaders should acknowledge a faraway museum inauguration was no accident. The opening was speeded up, from March 2005 to December 2004, to coincide with a historic European Union summit in Brussels that agreed to open membership negotiations with Turkey.

It was a striking instance of art’s commerce with politics, amped up by geography. Istanbul is now as large as any European city, yet Turkey borders on Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Istanbul Modern’s chief curator, Rosa Martinez, calls the museum’s opening “a strong aesthetic, social and political statement” about Turkey’s will “to live together with the other European countries.” Indeed, the plan to build a contemporary museum in the city’s heart had stalled for years until Erdogan’s government cleared the way, according to museum board chair Oya Eczacibasi.

Can art in Istanbul remain immune to political pressure or even criticize the status quo? Or will this art be co-opted by political and economic forces?

Only 35% of Europeans support Turkish membership in the EU, according to a poll released by the EU in August. Underlying political concerns is a deep-seated cultural anxiety: Is Turkey, a comparatively poor and mostly Muslim nation, European enough to join the club?

In 2002, former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing contended that admitting Turkey would mean no less than “the end of Europe.” Enter the Istanbul Modern, with its collection of Turkish and international art housed in an enormous two-story restored warehouse on the Bosporus, facing Asia and Topkapi Palace -- not unlike the Tate Modern on the Thames, facing St. Paul’s Cathedral. As if to answer Giscard, Blair’s plaque reads: “As we look ahead at the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union, it is increasingly important that the world learns more of what Turkey and Turkish people have to offer us.”

Eschewing art as tourism

ART and politics took center stage this fall with the ninth Istanbul Biennial, an international art exhibition funded by the same organization that founded the new museum, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. The art fair, which opened in mid-September, coincided with the initial round of EU membership talks with Turkey and strengthened the country’s European profile, suggesting that Istanbul is the next stop on the biennial train after Venice -- whose own biennial was co-curated this year by the Modern’s Martinez.

Politics informed this year’s Istanbul Biennial all the more for focusing on the city itself. Curator Charles Esche, 43, a Briton who directs the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and his Turkish co-curator, Vasif Kortun, 46, said that in years past, curators came to Istanbul and were wowed by the amazing Byzantine and Ottoman sites. As a result, they would display art from around the globe in historic settings, with Japanese videos, for example, shown inside 6th century Hagia Sophia. This practice, Esche said, meant overlooking present-day Istanbul and amounted to “a refusal of history.”

“Art becomes tourism in exotic sites,” he said, “which tourists come to see.”

By contrast, Esche and Kortun elected to embed their installations in the contemporary working city, at several venues in Beyoglu, Istanbul’s commercial and entertainment center.

If the job of biennials is to gather art from near and far, then Istanbul, an enormous patchwork of East and West, amounts to a very long-running one itself. From the time the Emperor Constantine made the city his capital in AD 330 through the Ottoman Empire, governments commissioned artists throughout the civilized world to adorn their city. So Kortun’s and Esche’s innovation of offering residencies to biennial artists in fact followed tradition.

From a few weeks to several months, artists came to produce, as Kortun put it, “works about Istanbul, for Istanbul.” Fifty-three artists and art groups participated, some from Western Europe or the New World, but most from the old Ottoman Empire or environs: Croatia, Albania, Kazakhstan, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Romania.

Esche and Kortun were seeking not depictions of the city’s truth (could it be found) but rather artists’ responses to Istanbul, an effort to refract the city’s myriad aspects through many lenses.

“We wanted to avoid generic internationalism -- which amounts to globalism as decoration,” Esche said. “You need to be specific: Our artists come from cities, not countries; Ramallah, not Jordan.”

Two telling examples were installed in a dilapidated 1890s apartment building. In one dwelling were placed 29-year-old Polish artist Paulina Olowska’s hand-woven rugs, one depicting a model clad in a bikini made from scraps of old Turkish carpet. (So much for the chador.) Nearby, Israeli-born Michael Blum, 39, who lives in Vienna, “re-created” the Istanbul apartment of a character he invented, one Safiye Behar, left-wing intellectual, labor leader and “long-time lover of Kemel Ataturk.” Ultranationalists objected to the work as an insult to Ataturk, founder of the Turkish state. But Blum retorted that “in 2005, as Turkey and the EU are playing liar’s poker about their common future, Safiye might prove to be a helpful guiding model. A product of both the East and the West, she devoted a lifetime to what she believed in.”

Curiously, Styrofoam appeared independently at three separate sites. Turkish artist Huseyin Alpekin, 48, exhibited what appeared to be the four Byzantine horses that had been displayed in Constantine’s Hippodrome until Crusaders removed them to Venice’s San Marco in 1204. Alpekin “repatriated” the sculptures -- but only as Styrofoam copies on loan to him from a Vatican priest. As if to undo the Crusaders’ purloining, another Turkish artist, Serkan Ozkaya, 32, brought a 29-foot-tall golden Styrofoam replica of Michelangelo’s “David” to Istanbul -- only to witness the sculpture collapse during installation. A video by Bali native Tintin Wulia, 33, depicted a Styrofoam model of Jakarta -- that city’s wildfire growth implicitly likened to Istanbul’s.

Contrast the three works sculpted from all-purpose synthetic matter with Byzantium’s “Monuments of its own magnificence” invoked by W.B. Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium.” Does that chart the journey from past to postmodern present? Do the four bogus horses and tumbledown “David” symbolize the huzun, or melancholy, that Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk associates with Istanbul?

The city has always been a site of theft and recycling: In the 6th century, columns from the temple of Diana at Ephesus were commandeered to build Hagia Sophia.

Pamuk’s own situation parallels that of the Modern’s and the biennial’s. His recent bestseller, “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” focuses on contemporary Istanbul. And Pamuk, recently awarded France’s foreign literature prize, the Prix Medicis, is caught up in similar politics. After he said publicly that Turkey had committed genocide against Armenians and Kurds in the early 20th century, he was accused of “public denigration of Turkish identity.” His upcoming trial can hardly enhance Turkey’s image before the EU, which requires freedom of expression and a free press. Straddling two continents, Istanbul navigates between Western and nationalist drifts.

Kortun told Deutsche Welle, the German broadcasting service, that if the matter does come to trial, “Orhan Pamuk will only gain from it, and we will all gain from it. He will be exonerated, of course. And the prosecutors will realize that they can never try something like this again.”

Challenges of the future

THE biennial was likewise sensitive to appearances. Its most overtly politicized work was situated on the margin, in an auxiliary installation. Upstairs in a customs warehouse was hung a simple display of photographs depicting some of the 352 people tortured to death in Turkey’s 1980 coup. A label informed viewers that junta members remain immune from prosecution.

“Western Europe has as much to learn from conditions in Turkey as vice versa,” Esche said. “Turkey is Plan B, a creative juggling and steering that is absent” in Europe.

With about 300 galleries and new exhibition spaces, the art scene in Istanbul is burgeoning, and Martinez easily cites a roster of Turkish artists and designers gaining international reputations: Kutlug Ataman, Hussein Chalayan, Ayse Erkmen, Haluk Acacke.

Will those voices maintain a distinct character, equal but separate, or will Turkish artists ape European models? The challenge is to forge new art that recalls Istanbul’s traditional role as a melting pot synthesizing East and West, just as EU membership for Turkey could forge bonds between the West and the Muslim world.