The 10th Istanbul Biennial : Global War Optimism
By Gina Fairley

A month before the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Abdullah Gul was elected president of Turkey. He is the first Islamist president in this largely Muslim but secular country. What has this to do with Hou Hanru’s Biennial one may ask? It signals a greater transition, a psychological shift, one that is echoed in the Istanbul Biennial’s own reinvention as it celebrates its twentieth year.

The opening line of Hou Hanru’s catalogue reads, “We are living in a time of global wars.” It is an ominous rather than optimistic tone and immediately frames his exhibition as challenging, complex and politically inclined. But there is also an urgency in Hou’s title, “Not only possible but also necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War.” It is as though he is calling us to act, led by this posse of 100 artists.
To consider the Istanbul Biennial one has to start with the city itself. Istanbul is the physical meeting point between Europe and Asia, metaphorically, East and West. In recent years this has become more layered given Turkey’s border with Iraq, Middle East unrest, and the conglomerate strength of the European Union to the West.
The Istanbul Biennial historically has navigated this terrain, challenging our cultural and political readings of place. Some exhibitions did this by siting contemporary art works within Istanbul’s antiquity, such as Dan Cameron’s “Poetic Justice” (2003) that used the Haghia Sophia and Yerebatan Sarnici (a Byzantine cistern). Others broke the mould, most significantly Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun’s 2005 Biennial under the simple title “Istanbul”. Choosing urban regeneration over beauty, they used sites such as factories as portals to contemporary narratives and, if anything, was a precursor to Hou’s exhibition.

Hou Hanru’s theme of ‘Global War’ uses the literal position of conflict (given Turkey’s location), to discuss ancillary contemporary conflicts: cultural homogeneity, economic pragmatism, urban gentrification and a growing religious conservatism - universal conditions experienced in the wake of globalisation. These ‘conflicts’ geographically fall within the developing world where the challenges of transition are most raw. Complex ideas. But it is this complexity, this global/local conditioning that sits at the core of Hou Hanru’s 10th Biennial.

Hou positions these ideas within the Istanbul context by selecting venues that are symbols of Turkey’s Republican-modernist utopia, using them to critique its failures and future. He explains, “The Istanbul Biennial has gained a certain maturity and is now facing the task of injecting new blood and reinventing itself… [with] original terrains for diverse, innovative and relevant experiments, rather than a showcase of products of sure values.” (1.) Hou’s exhibition then begs the question, did it deliver those original terrains and remain outside the staged product?

Re/defining Utopia

Chinese-born Paris-based, Hou Hanru is the second Asian curator invited by the Istanbul Biennial; the first was Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa in 2001. The often-cited criticism that biennales lack historical contextualisation was addressed by Istanbul Modern’s exhibition “Time Present, Time Past”, surveying the past nine Biennials. Lee Bul, Magnus Wallin and Sislej Xhafa represented Hasegawa’s exhibition “Egofugal”. It is interesting to mention Lee’s “Cyborgs W1-W4” which connect with Hou’s inclusion of her seminal installation “Mon grand récit: Weep into stones…” (2005) at the Atatürk Cultural Centre. Both works explore the utopian promise of perfection.

Hou believes, “Architecture has always been closely related to political projects.” (2.) The three primary venues he has chosen are: The Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM), at central Taksim Square; the Istanbul Textile Traders’ Market (IMC), and Antrepo No. 3, facing the Bosphorus. He uses them to examine two parallel concepts: optimism and utopia. Additionally, smaller projects scatter the city with guerrilla-style projections for “Nightcomers”, and the university sites of SantraIstanbul and KAHEM on the Asian side.

AKM was the jewel of this Biennial. Constructed in the early 1970s, it is under threat of demolition from capitalist expansion – a global reality. Hou used the umbrella-theme “Burn It or Not?” choosing 15 artists who mostly used ‘architecture’ as a metaphor for failed socio-political systems. Didier Fiuza Faustino and Lee Bul’s installations immediately set the tone. Positioned so it can be viewed from several angles, Lee’s fantastical landscape has a kind of graceful chaos sufficiently discombobulated that we begin to believe it could be real. Faustino’s adjacent installation “Lost Illusions”, sits as a pandora’s box echoing the building’s geometry and suturing its utopian dream with the artist’s personal story of migration and search for ‘a better place’. It has the presence of a temporary construction site, signalling our very illusion of utopia is not static. 

Contrary to these two pieces, Hou placed primarily photography at AKM criticised as too subtle a medium to compete with the building’s strong features and irresponsible with light bleeds from its glass façade. The counter argument was Hou used the site’s flaws and tensions with great consideration, playing off visual connections. Such as the tiled wall’s reflections echoed in Vahram Aghasayan’s watery photographs displayed against them; or connecting architecture and aspiration in Daniel Faust series, “UN (United Nations)” 2006-07 paralleling Le Corbusier’s New York masterpiece with AKM. Sensitivity and opportunity override the sites pitfalls as a ‘white cube’ and challenge those ‘sure values’ Hou mentioned with honesty and consistent enquiry.

The Edge of Optimism

Individual works can often get overshadowed by political agendas imposed upon an exhibition; a typical condition of the biennale format. Antrepo No. 3 is the greater victim of this condition. It forces obvious connections rather than encouraging curiosity and discovery. The venue itself it huge, raw and works vie with sound bleeds. Hou chose two concepts for Antrepo: “Entre-polis” and “Dream House”. Entre-polis, a buzzy-term translated as a city-state shaped by new world fluidity/hybridity, looking at trade, migration, technology and communication. It’s about openness, constant redefinition, and explores how we, as individuals, navigate that dynamism and its repercussions.

Curator Okwui Enwezor makes the comment, “Millennialism is the picture of the nineties” and its anticipated utopia has not been fulfilled in the 21st century. (3.) The individual works at Antrepo tackle these failures of the 21st century, however, they become overtly charged through their placement, creating too much ‘bounce’ or sensation. Some have criticised the sledge-hammer juxtaposition of Harma Abbas’ ‘karma sutra warriors’, AES+F’s expansive youth war-scape (a version shown at Venice) and Huang Yong Ping’s minaret positioned as a missile. Add Adel Abdessemed’s balanced knifes, Michael Rakowitz’s looted antiquities from the National Museum of Iraq and David Ter-Organyan’s everyday bombs within sight, and they become pawns acting out prescribed tensions. To use Enwezor’s words, which refer to the wider theme, this venue is “poised between ambivalence and disavowal.” (4.)

Approached outside of this weighty ‘whitewash’, there are equally interesting, subtle connections. If we choose the story of ‘gentrification/social mobilization’, we find parallels in Malaysian artist Wong Hoy Cheong’s film made by children from Istanbul’s gypsy community and Spanish group Democracia’s photographs “Smashing the Ghetto” documenting the destruction of a marginalised society as a kind of sideshow spectacular. Two further films explore this same narrative: “Minhocao” (2007) by Brazilian Lia Chaia, where the artist swallows photo-booth-images of housing estates, a metaphor for the city swallowing everything, and Minouk Lim’s “New Town Ghost” (2005), a rapper doing slam poetry on the back of a truck circling Seoul’s Yeongdeungpo Rotary area, commanding listeners to obey development. These are powerful art works. They critique a contemporary urban situation with humility and honesty.

Another connection across this dense exhibition is simply through ‘materiality’. We construct utopias through material wealth, material consumption. Lee’s installation is the most obvious example using everything from foam to polyurethane, stainless steel and electrical circuitry, materials of our modern world constructing a vision of utopia. Similarly Jewyo Rhii’s installation at Antrepo uses found materials to create the ultimate ‘date’ environment for urban couples; nearby is Chen Hui-Chiao installation, which takes ‘materiality’ to an extreme level with thousands of needles and threads forming an ethereal carpet; a bed of orange balls a fragile dream-scape. It sits in direct contrast to Ter-Oganyan’s witty exploding bags of popcorn, pumpkins and boxes-of-air, looking malicious in their faux-bomb materiality. Maybe it can be summed up by Seoul-based group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ digital slogan “everything is art”.

Possibly Necessary

Hou stipulated that artists were not to be identified by nationality. Although a laudable position, a biennale without nationalities goes against its exposé tradition and Hou’s desire to draw connections between the local/global condition; the local needs to be defined. Context is important. Context is relevant. Why did non-Muslim, Chinese-born Paris-based artist Huang Yong Ping make a work that uses the Haghia Sophia minaret as a religious/political detonator? Context starts to give us a framework for understanding such art works. 

Hou Hanru has shown us that a post-globalisation dialogue is necessary. Together with Okwui Enwezor’s suggestion of our failure in the light of Millennialism, it is vital that we continue to explore the very complex issues that Hou Hanru has raises in his 10th Istanbul Biennial.

Notes:
1. Hou Hanru, 10th Istanbul Biennial catalogue, 2007, pg 24-25
2. ibid.; pg 34.
3.- 4. Owkui Enwezor, “Contemporary Art’s Civilisation Gap” catalogue essay 10th Istanbul Biennial, pg. 387, 2007