Turkey at Biennale

Mavi Boncuk |

Venue: Arsenale, Isolotto
Lapses | 7 June - 22 November 2009 EXHIBITION

“Lapses” consists of two art projects: “Exploded City" by Ahmet Ögüt, and "CATALOG 2009" by Banu Cennetoglu, which both reveal the possibility for diverse memory formations – or diverse narratives - conceivable through lapses.

Ahmet Ögüt traces buildings that have recently been the site of a crucial event and have turned into ruins, thus triggering associations in our subconscious. “Exploded City” presents a model city by referring to the original architectural features of each building. The work questions the significations and values attributed to these buildings before and after the explosion, while detecting lapses that occur in our memory via media images. It also manifests otherwise concealed lapses by ripping the buildings off their memory. In viewers' minds, this research may find openings similar to Borges' forking paths, Calvino's fictions of imaginary cities, and Toufic's ruins.

"CATALOG 2009” holds to the fact that photography, extracted from the reality in which it was shot, is not only expected to exist in a new subjective and critical context, but also to become the bearer of expression for this new context. Banu Cennetoglu’s photographs pertain to different geographies whilst simultaneously being open to fictional narratives. The work is presented in the form of a performative “mail order catalog” where hundreds of photographs are classified under subjective categories. The artist will allow free download of all the photographs from the mailing catalog exclusively during the duration of the Venice Biennial. This process also signifies the questioning of the dissemination of artwork and photography as extracts of memory.

The Pavilion of Turkey is designed to be a straightforward, self-standing building at the Arsenale. This scaffold building functions as an interface to present these two projects with the intention of both separating and intersecting them in a subversive manner.

CONCEPT

The project developed for the Pavilion of Turkey is titled as “Lapses”. A lapse in the linear and continuous flow of time implies either a sense of disorientation or a disconnection with our personal surroundings. Only by recognizing (après coup) such a lapse do we realize our ability to restructure memory in the space and time continuum through an uninterrupted flow, with afterimages that recur by narrations and our senses. This is a subjective act. However, in societies dependent on the credibility of everyday media, huge visual archives operate as the collective memory.

In this context, “Lapses” consists of projects that demonstrate how the perception of “occurring events” can vary and lead to differing narrations of history because of lapses in collective memory - which is composed both by the media and by other surrounding environmental data. The project will be realized through the works of two artists: Banu Cennetoglu’s “CATALOG 2009″, and Ahmet Ögüt’s “Exploded City”. Both projects reveal the possibility for diverse memory formations – or diverse narratives - conceivable through lapses.

The project is accompanied by a book series of three volumes: the first volume is on the conceptual framework, the process and the spatial design; the second volume functions as the source, inspiration, reference for the entire project, consisting of philosophical articles; and the third volume discuses “lapses” through four case studies.

Basak Senova
ARTISTS

Banu Cennetoglu

Born 1970 in Ankara; lives and works in Istanbul. Cennetoglu works with photography, installation and printed media. Her research explores areas of socio-political uncertainty and documentation of such uncertainty as well as the questioning of the ability of the photographic medium to document. After a BA in psychology, she pursued her studies in Photography in Paris. Cennetoglu lived in New York (1996 to 2002) and in Amsterdam (2002-2004) where she has been a guest artist at the Rijksakademie, before moving back to Istanbul in 2006. Here, in the same year, she founded BAS, a space focusing on artist books and other printed media works. Among the recent exhibtions her work was included are Geographies of the invisible / Max Museo, 5th Berlin Biennial, 10th Istanbul Biennial, 1st Athens Biennial, Brave New Worlds / La Coleccion Jumex and Walker Art Center, and Wherever You Go / San Fransisco Art Institute.

Ahmet Ogut

Ahmet Ögüt was born in 1981 in Diyarbakır; lives and works in Amsterdam. Ögüt works with a variety of media such as video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media. His practice incorporates interventions created departing from social and political realities of everyday life and recent history. He received his BA from the Fine Arts Faculty of Hacettepe University, and his MFA from the Art and Design Faculty of Yildiz Technical Üniversity. Ögüt has been a guest artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2007-2008. Exhibitions in which his work has been included are among others: The Generational / New Museum, 7th SITE Santa Fe Biennial, 5th Berlin Biennial, Fuild Street / KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, 1st Contemporary Art Biennale of Thessaloniki, 9th Istanbul Biennial, Be[com]ing Dutch / Van Abbemuseum, Stalking with Stories / Apexart, Car Culture / Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; and solo shows at Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Küntlerhaus Bremen and Kunsthalle Basel.

Curator
Basak Senova

Born in 1970, Istanbul; lives and works in Istanbul. Senova is a curator and designer. She studied Literature and Graphic Design (MFA in Graphic Design and Ph.D. in Art, Design and Architecture at Bilkent University) and attended the 7th Curatorial Training Programme of Stichting De Appel, Amsterdam. She has been writing on art, technology and media, initiating and developing national and international projects and curating exhibitions since 1995. She is the editor of art-ist 6, Kontrol Online Magazine and one of the founding members of NOMAD, as well as the organizer of ctrl_alt_del and Upgrade!Istanbul. Currently, she is lecturing at the Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University.

Assistant Curator
Nazli Gürlek

Born in 1981, Istanbul; lives and works in Istanbul. Gürlek is a curator and writer. After a BA in Painting and Art history from the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence in 2006, she received her MFA in 2008 in Curating at Goldsmiths College. She is the co-founder of IM projects, an international and independent curatorial collective. She collaborated with the curatorial departments of Tate Modern for the Global Cities exhibition in 2007, and Galleria d’Arte Moderna (today called MAMbo) of Bologna in 2006. Among the projects she has curated are A Fine Red Line – Live (176 Project Space, London), Rhymes of an Hour (Loop Video Art Festival, Barcelona) and Between Mirrors and Windows (London). She is the guest co-editor of the contemporary art magazine Circa. She was also co-editor of A Fine Red Line : a curatorial miscellany (IM press, London 2008), and IM magazine (London 2007).

CONTACT
Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts
Üstüngel Inanç uinanc@iksv.org