CONVERSATIONS: CONRAD BODMAN / Borusan Contemporary

Guest curator of “Universal Everything: Fluid Bodies” presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2018.

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.

– Naz Cuguoğlu

CONVERSATIONS: CHRISTIANE PAUL / Borusan Contemporary

Guest curator of “What lies beneath”  presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2015.

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.

– Naz Cuguoğlu

CONVERSATIONS: MARGOT NORTON / Borusan Contemporary

Guest curator of “Mika Tajima: Æther” presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2018.

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.
– Naz Cuguoğlu

Theater of False Ruins: Interview with Abbas Akhavan / Art Asia Pacific

*** This interview is published in ArtAsiaPacific’s Blog.

Abbas Akhavan, whose practice spans drawing, video, sculpture, performance and site-specific installations, is fascinated by the places in which he works. He pays close attention to the local architecture, economy, and inhabitants, immersing himself in the area while maintaining a respectful distance, like a good neighbor. He is particularly interested in the domestic sphere—in his words, “a forked space between hospitality and hostility”—and the cultivated plots just outside the home (the garden, the backyard).

The Tehran-born artist emigrated to Canada with his family in 1977 and is typically based in Toronto, but has spent the past year in San Francisco as the Capp Street artist-in-residence at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. This culminated in his first solo show in the United States, titled “Cast for a Folly,” which uses as its departure point an obscure photograph of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. Looted during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the museum lost nearly 15,000 objects in a span of 36 hours. The photograph, taken by director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative Corine Wegener, depicts the museum lobby in an eerily frozen state, with its doors barricaded with empty vitrines, furniture in disarray, and a layer of dust, scattered loose due to the bombings, covering everything in sight. At the Wattis, Akhavan recreates this image in a new installation that includes sculptures, wall-based works, fabricated furniture, and living organisms. We spoke at a bar near Wattis about his move to San Francisco, the significance of the photograph, and his new show.

Belonging / SFMOMA Open Space

Dear Mine,

It was not easy to get here. It took me many rainy days in San Francisco to self-reflect, thinking about inequality and privilege. Witnessing a homeless man sleeping on top of a sewer lid to warm his body with toxic gas while another man took a picture of this scene, maybe to post on social media; deep thinking about a country’s history that I did not feel any responsibility for before.

Illusions about belonging.

Published in SFMOMA’s Open Space.

FLOW - A collaborative text / Droste Effect

Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu & Mine Kaplangı) included video works of Funa Ye and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergul) as part of the FLOW OUT exhibition, hosted by Bilsart (Istanbul) and held between May 29 and June 30, 2019. The program is based on the common practice of thinking, expressing and writing collectively about the present. As co-authors, they continued to write the collective essay through email exchanges—no one is the owner of the piece, whereas each of them is a participant. FLOW OUT does not belong to a place, but it refers to contemporaneity, addressing the problem of authorship in a collaboration, and experimenting with the idea of thinking and producing together.

Published in Droste Effect Bulletin #19.

CONVERSATIONS: CHARLES MEREWETHER / Borusan Contemporary

Guest curator of “Between Art and Physical Space” by teamLab presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2016.

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.
– Naz Cuguoğlu

CONVERSATIONS: WILLIAM EWING / Borusan Contemporary

Guest curator of the exhibition Aqua Shock: Selections from the Water Project presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2016.

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.
– Naz Cuguoğlu

Continuity Error at SALT Beyoglu / Art Asia Pacific

** This review is published in Art Asia Pacific. ISSUE 109, JUL/AUG 2018.

I experienced the 1990s in Istanbul as a child. I did not grow up in a family who regularly discussed politics, so what I remember from that period are mostly big gatherings with family friends and a feeling of community. The first major survey of Aydan Murtazaoğlu and Bülent Şangar, prominent figures who shaped the ‘90s Turkish contemporary art scene, presented as the reopening exhibition of SALT Beyoğlu in Istanbul, prompted a reconsideration of these glossed-over memories. Prints, photographs and installations from the ‘90s and early 2000s address a period that was in reality marked with the tightening of the state’s grip over citizens, enacted in the name of safeguarding the new neoliberal economic system; weakening workers’ rights; as well as the unsolved murders and kidnappings of Kurdish citizens who had been labeled terrorists. Yet, underlying the political and economic uncertainties of the time were the artists’ efforts in defusing the polarization of society, evident throughout the exhibition.

 Most of the scenes captured in the show’s works, especially the photographs and the videos, depict the coexistence of individuals of different ages, political backgrounds and economic conditions in various public spaces, such as Şangar’s Untitled (1994), of a couple talking in Taksim Square. This brought to mind 2013’s Gezi Park protests, when citizens realized the power of banding together. Further proposing the significance of dialogue was the collaborative performance-installation Unemployed Employees-I found you a new job! (2006–2018) by Murtazaoğlu and Şangar. The work involved recent graduates from the art departments of local universities folding t-shirts while talking to the exhibition’s visitors about the challenges they face. These conversations were an attempt to spark much-needed empathy, and address the polarization of Turkish society, which is a pressing issue today. Even the artists’ tendency to produce in partnership with each other is a manifesto for this cause.

Works made by the artists individually nevertheless echoed the possibility of solidarity as well. Şangar’s Move Forward a Little (2004–05) comprises close-up photos of different public buses, collaged into one big bus with two fronts. One can see that the only way for the individuals trapped in the malformed vehicle to move forward is for them to come up with a solution together. Untitled (Windows) (1997–2007), another photography-based work by Şangar, suggests that one method to contribute to progress is to at least become an active witness, rather than fully ignore society’s problems. In the series of film strips, Şangar tries to escape from the window of a house, while Untitled (Accident) (1997–2000), captures the mysterious murder of a man, also played by the artist, from behind a steering wheel in a car. What is asked of the audience is to simply become involved in piecing together the narrative. 

In Murtazaoğlu’s work, there is a second layer, which is the objectification of the female body in a patriarchal society—the suggested solution is the coming together of women from different backgrounds to enact change in their communities. Stadium (1993–95) is a photograph of young women at İnönü Stadium standing next to each other to form a diagrammatic figure of the ovary. The gathering subverts the official ceremonies held during country-wide holidays in the arena by inviting the attendees to celebrate their bodies and power, rather than a national event, as well as the function of the locale itself, meant to showcase typically male, physical prowess. In the photograph The Pilot (2001–03), a woman who is in official-like attire, with a white shirt and black trousers, talks to girls of Romany origin dressed in colorful, long skirts. Although more frequently seen in Turkey are scenarios of officials interrogating ethnic minorities, the faces of the three figures suggest an understanding towards each other.

As we approach the 2018 general elections in Turkey, what little hope there was for the future is dissipating. With over 100 academics and journalists still jailed and increased levels of control from political authorities on freedom of speech, the exhibition directed us to think about the power that is in collaborative action—there is no better time to start fostering feelings of mutual understanding.

The Archive of Feelings // Istanbul Queer Art Collective / M-est.org

All images are selected from Istanbul Queer Art Collective’s work, Just in Bookcase, a wooden suitcase filled with personalised library cards, memorabilia, and photos. For more information about the work, please see: https://www.istanbulqueerartcollective.co.uk/just-in-bookcase

This article—published in m-est—is a text and image-based response to the performance work Psychic Bibliophiles: What the Cards Say by the Istanbul Queer Art Collective, which took place as part of the House of Wisdom exhibition curated by Collective Cukurcuma at Framer Framed in Amsterdam on November 24, 2017. The text was written in San Francisco thinking about the San Francisco Public Library. It is unknown whether this project will ever take place in San Francisco—this is just a daydream. A part of this text was also published in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts zine titled Beyond Bloodlines: A zine about queerness, family and kinship in 2019.

Art Asia Pacific Almanac

This article was published in Art Asia Pacific Almanac, 2019.

CONVERSATIONS: CHOI DOO EUN, CREATIVE DIRECTOR AT THE ART CENTER NABI / Borusan Contemporary

*This interview is published on Borusan Contemporary Blog.

Thought Experiments with Léonie Guyer’s Work November 27–December 7, 2018, 11 days / The Wattis Institute Blog

** This is an attempt to understand what is going on between me and Léonie Guyer’s works, exhibited at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. I sent an e-mail to my long-term colleague, Mine Kaplangi, every day, keeping Léonie’s works on my mind as a portal to look into the world. Following the suggestions of Léonie—various forms of thinking hidden in the exhibition space—I imagined these emails as an invitation for a dialogue rather than a monologue, manifesting the possibility of unlimited ways for love and care, in the format of sharing in this unique case.

** Published on the blog of the Wattis Institute.

The Chronicles of Flowers: Bahia Shehab / Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art

* This review is published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art | Duke University Press / November 2018. Bahia Shehab: The Chronicles of Flowers @Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul, Tue 9 May 2017 to Sat 17 Jun 2017.

NEW WORK: ETEL ADNAN / Art Asia Pacific

Installation view of ETEL ADNAN’s “New Work” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2018. Photo by Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

*This review is published in ArtAsiaPacific: 
http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/WebExclusives/NewWorkEtelAdnan

Presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Eungie Joo, Etel Adnan’s “New Work” marks the Paris-based artist’s stateside return. Adnan, who is also a poet and essayist, was born in Beirut in 1925, but spent a significant part of her life in Paris and San Francisco, such that exile became part of her existence. She once said in an interview: “I like the sea and I like the mountains. I am assimilated into Western culture [. . .] but I am also very attached to the Muslim world [. . .] There is a duality in my life as in my thinking.” The 16 works in the show demonstrated the significance of visual abstraction to Adnan as a means of respite from language, which she experienced to be restrictive due to her upbringing—she was born to a Greek mother and a Syrian father (a highranking Ottoman officer), educated in French in Lebanon, and exposed to Turkish and Greek at home—as well as her subsequent life between cultures.

ETEL ADNAN, Explosion Florale, 1968/2018, hand-woven wool tapestry, 163 × 198 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut.

Liberated from the dictates of language, through which she struggled to express herself, her compositions offer a generous, poetic space for viewers to navigate freely. Among the exhibits was one of Adnan’s most recent tapestries, titled Explosion Florale (1968/2018), which echoed her earliest tapestry design, executed by Hal Painter in the late 1960s. Also on display were abstract paintings of oranges, yellows, greens and blues that reflect the sky of California. These are the palettes apparent at dusk—when melancholia and serenity collide and it is arguably most difficult to be away from home. The compositions in all of these works loosely evoke the movements of tree branches on hillsides, and the rising and setting of the sun. They embody both the transience of life and the steadfast presence of nature. 

The untitled paintings also all bear a triangular motif that represents Mount Tamalpais, the subject of Adnan’s lifelong obsession, which began when she moved to Sausalito in California in the 1970s. Not only did she repeatedly draw the mountain from the windows of her home, she used it as a reference point for her philosophical thoughts, as is apparent in her seminal book on the links between nature and art, Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986). In the publication, Adnan hints at the almost supernatural attraction that she felt to the mountain, which was not only a hideaway for her, but the center of her orbit, her lover, and the protector of her memories. “The natural pyramidal shape of the mountain became embedded in her whole being,” writes Simone Fattal—Adnan’s partner, sculptor and publisher—in her 2002 essay “On Perception: Etel Adnan’s Visual Art.”

Perhaps it was no coincidence that after viewing Adnan’s show, I felt an earthquake. It was in the middle of the night and when I woke up, I spent hours scouring the news for information about the disaster. There was no trace of it ever happening. No one else had felt it. It had been exactly 24 days after my permanent move from Istanbul to San Francisco. I asked myself: Were Adnan’s images the reason behind my illusory earthquake? What happens when the land beneath us moves? When the earth—containing the cumulative memories of the universe, non-human habitants and archeological heritage—shakes, does it bring us closer to “home”? 

It is no surprise to me that according to geoscientists, there is a blind thrust fault, lying beneath Mount Tamalpais. 

ETEL ADNAN, Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, 58 × 49 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut.

Etel Adnan’s “New Work” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until January 6, 2019.

CONVERSATIONS: RUDOLF FRIELING, CURATOR OF MEDIA ARTS, SFMOMA / Borusan Contemporary

* Commissioned by Borusan Contemporary, to read the conversation: https://www.borusancontemporary.com/en/blog-conversations-rudolf-frieling_818

Guest Curator of West Coast Visions: Artists from the SFMOMA Media Arts Collection presented at Borusan Contemporary in 2014

Inviting a curator to an institution’s collection could mean various things: A dialogue or a monologue—emptying all the existing narratives to define them with new meanings or reshuffling them around. These collaborations require horizontal allies and generosity from both sides—an attempt to find the undercommons in a world of broken relationships.

Borusan Contemporary has invited seven curators in the last six years to its ever-growing collection of new media art to unlock these probabilities. This series of conversations is a curious response to this cultivating network of associations and relationships, marked with site-specificity and temporality, in a city that is always in flux.– Naz Cuguoğlu 

Naz Cuguoğlu: When you were developing the concept and intuition behind the exhibition West Coast Visions: Artists from the SFMOMA Media Arts Collection, what were the major motivations, concerns and/ or curiosities behind the selection of the works?

Rudolf Frieling: Museum collections tend to struggle with an inherent contradiction: They collect works to be exhibited so the public can view them but the exposure to light, environments, and yes, even the public, can only harm the work in the long-run. In media arts, typically the opposite is true. The more often we install a work of variable media, i.e. a work based on changing technological conditions, the more we need to review its components to keep it alive and updated. It’s a simple preservation strategy but also the single most important reason for seeking opportunities to show works from our collection as often as possible. That said, there is obviously a desire to learn more about the relevance and content of works when placed in different contexts. It was such a pleasure to see historic and contemporary works come together at Borusan Contemporary because of its unique location and clearly quite different cultural context compared to San Francisco.

NC: Thinking about Borusan Contemporary’s architecture as the “Haunted House”, its proximity to a bridge and the sea which both connect and separate, how did the collection and physical space of Borusan Contemporary influence your curatorial decisions?

RF: The exhibition happened at a time when SFMOMA closed temporarily for its big expansion in 2013-2014. We were thus very interested in exploring ways of showing parts of the collection elsewhere. The fact that Borusan Contemporary’s collection has such a strong focus on media art was certainly a key factor, but even more so the space and location of the Haunted House. The proximity to the water, its traffic of boats and commercial ships, made me think of Doug Hall’s beautiful two-channel video installation Chrysopylae, which he had just premiered in a very similar setting underneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the same location that featured so prominently in its visual narrative. Replacing this setting with the geographical twin situation of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge—also known as the Second Bosphorus Bridge—prompted the concept for the entire show. In the end, its placement inside the exhibition space—with the effect of conceptually penetrating the walls of the Haunted House to look out onto the outdoor scenery, only it was the Bay in San Francisco—was extremely suggestive. Another work, Bill Fontana’s Sound Sculpture with a Sequence of Level Crossing was then placed on the rooftop terrace fully exposed to the noisy soundscape of Istanbul. The views on that terrace are simply amazing and called for an artwork to be embedded into that scenery. It was actually the first time that the artist brought this installation, which he had shown previously only in an indoor gallery situation, back into its origin of an urban soundscape, taking it once again out of the protected museum space. Listening to trains passing among the sound of passing ships or cars as well as the occasional call to prayers was a truly transformative experience of this work. This is precisely the reason why it is so important to test the relevance or contemporary currency of a work in a different setting. The fact that trains didn’t “belong” there acoustically, ultimately led a neighbor to insist on the work to be shut down. Subsequently, we took that to heart at SFMOMA and reacted very sensitively to similar complaints in our neighborhood when we installed the work temporarily in our new outdoor environment of the expanded building in San Francisco.

In short, these two works led us to think about “place” and the displacement of the West of the US to the literal as well as metaphorical border between “West” and “East” in Turkey. The other works, Steina Vasulka’s multi-monitor installation The West, Bill Viola’s video of the The Reflecting Pool as well as Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy were selected in relation to this idea of the mythical “West” and of course to fit the available spaces. 

Doug Hall, Chrysopylae, 2012

NC: In addition to the “place,” what else has been informing and transforming your work recently? Which books, films, exhibitions, and individuals have you been surrounding yourself with?

RF: I could speak of many influences, of course, but probably the single most defining factor is my first-hand experience of artworks that move and challenge me. Most recently, we were able to acquire and exhibit two moving image works that address in striking ways the experience of migration and an Afro-American reality. The first is John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea and the second is Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message and the Message Is Death. The complexities of these histories and narratives, reflected both in cinematic terms but also, in Jafa’s case, in part through the familiar aesthetics of online videos, powerfully addressed not only an emotional and political state of tensions particularly in Europe and the US over the last years but also touched so many different people in our audience that it made me even more aware of our urgent need to critically reflect on our life in these times of conflict. On a related note, have you seen Spike Lee’s Blackkklansman? The final minutes of this film are as groundbreaking as it gets in that regard within the tradition of cinema. The best “activist” film I have seen in a long time.

Bill Viola, The Reflection Pool, 1977-1979

NC: Although I have not watched Blackkklansman yet, I did see the works by Akomfrah and Jafa at the SFMOMA. Both works made me think about the potential of the institution to complicate the existing narratives, and to create a space for alternative ones that could be written by the community. It requires an awareness of the sociopolitical landscape within which the institution is rooted.

RF: Sociopolitical landscape absolutely influences and has influenced in the past my thinking and programming but I would also argue that it now affects the entire museum and the way we try to work on more meaningful connections to our various audiences and times. We need to tell different stories by different artists, stories pushed aside by the grand narratives of Western art, stories that challenge not only us in terms of its open-ended form and content but also inherently question our very definition of art. One of these examples is our upcoming exhibition “Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here” which I’m co-curating with two amazing colleagues, Dominic Willsdon, now director of the ICA at the University of Virginia in Richmond, and Lucía Sanromán, curator at large at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, our partner in this exhibition and direct neighbor across the street. We will be addressing the fact that contemporary art has been influenced not only by performative and media-based art over the last decades but also by socially engaged art or “social practice” as it is often called—a fact not reflected in most museum collections. Lacy is arguably the most influential pioneer of this form of art making outside the institutions and venues of art. The question I’m asking thus is: How can we work on a more complex, more nuanced, and richer representation of the history of contemporary art? I can relate to this form of art not only because artists like Lacy rely upon media-based installation formats in their attempt to reflect on the various uses of media in communities as well as in our society. More importantly, many of our current movements and social phenomena, from “MeToo” to “Black Lives Matter” resonate deeply with Lacy’s 40-plus years of socially engaged art. Sadly, the themes and issues are recurring.

Steina, Batı - West, 1983

NC: I watched The Roof is On Fire by Lacy recently, and also had the chance to meet her. Although I agree that the themes are recurring, the general context that surrounds them have changed. Nowadays, we are more careful with the questions of representation—who gets to talk about which community, and whether they have the right to do so. Lacy acknowledges this change. I appreciate the fact that the institutions take the “risk” to reflect on these complexities, and to find the right language to do so. Could you say a few words about some methodologies that you use?

RF: Indeed, contexts have changed and this has guided our concept of the show in many ways. For one, the title reflects this current moment and the collectivity of authorship. It’s not the right place to reflect on many issues more broadly, but let me just point to our fundamentally collaborative process in the development of the concept in close dialogue with the artist: it’s one exhibition in two quite different institutions, co-organizing and co-curating this project. While this is obviously a retrospective format, meaning we’ll have objects, photographs, films/videos as well as documents that speak to those past contexts and narratives, the approach has always been to find a representation of voices that is first and foremost an experience for the visitors. This line of thinking follows closely the artist’s own trajectory of “re-thinking” her own works. On a related note, though, we also wanted to focus on the current state of affairs in our country by inviting a series of youth organizations to provide a series of artistic and activist responses to the legacy of the Oakland Projects.

NC: How would you describe your curatorial vision?

RF: I try to find ways to help us be relevant for as many people as possible, to produce, collect, and exhibit works that are challenging as well as accessible, that are socially engaging but with a unique aesthetic experience. In this currently debated artificial juxtaposition of contemplation and experience, I’m advocating for a much more experiential program without sacrificing criticality for a simple spectacle. Primarily, I bring a sense of temporality and performance into the realm of fine arts. The museum that we need is a place for active engagement, agitation, activism—which can include contemplation, see the most recent exhibition “Sublime Seas: John Akomfrah and J.M.W. Turner” at SFMOMA where we brought a 19th century painting by Turner, The Deluge from Tate Britain, into a dialogue with the large-scale cinematic installation Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah. Ok, full disclosure, it was the artist’s idea, not mine but we embraced it as a radical way of deepening our sense of history in our museum. I doubt that you can call that a “vision” but it’s a foundation for making decisions on a daily basis.

NC: The questions about inclusion / exclusion, and accessibility are important issues to dwell on, especially in thinking about the growing inequalities in San Francisco, and the housing crisis. Could you tell us more about your day-to-day decisions? One way is creating collaborations and decentralizing the power—as in your Lacy show—but also recently the permanent collection was opened for the ones who were impacted by fire and smoke.

RF: We discuss this social and political situation in the Bay Area almost every day. It’s challenging to find responses that go beyond simple gestures like the one you mention in your question. It’s not easy to be nimble and spontaneous in such a huge organization like ours but we try to find ways to be even more connected to our communities. One way of doing that is to sustain a range of exhibitions and public programs that address the problems of our time, that provide criticality with an acute sense of keeping the program accessible. Ultimately, our public will want to see things in the museum to which they can relate. The histories of the artists in California are key to that vision, and so are the histories and cultures of Afro-Americans in the U.S., see the enormous feedback on Arthur Jafa, or the ground-breaking critical survey “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”, which just opened at our museum. Last but not least, being a team-player in this institutional ecosystem of the larger Bay Area is also part of our DNA.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Rudolf Frieling is a curator, educator, and scholar with an M.A. in Humanities from the Free University of Berlin and a Ph.D. from the University of Hildesheim, Germany. In 2006, he was appointed curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; from 1994–2006 he was curator and researcher at ZKM, Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany; curatorial projects prior to 2006 include the net art section of the Sao Paolo Biennale (2002) and Sound-Image (2003) in Mexico City; he was co-editor of multimedia and print publications from Media Art Action (1997), Media Art Interaction (2000), Media Art Net www.mediaartnet.org  (2004–5), to 40yearsvideoart.de (2006); since 2006, he has curated for SFMOMA a series of survey shows around notions of collaboration, participation, and performativity: In Collaboration: Early Works from the Media Arts Collection (2008); The Art of Particiption: 1950 to Now (2008/2009); Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012) as well as many monographic exhibitions with among others Douglas Gordon, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sharon Lockhart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Christian Marclay and Anthony McCall; he also collaborated on the SFMOMA presentation of Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera (2010) and oversaw the SFMOMA exhibition William Kentridge: Five Themes (2009). Spearheading the notion of the museum as a producer,  Frieling’s commissions for SFMOMA include Sylvie Blocher: Men In Gold (2007), Bill Fontana: Sonic Shadows (2010), Jim Campbell: Exploded Views (2011/2012) as well as Christian Jankowski: Silicon Valley Talks (2013). Frieling most recently curated Film as Place for the reopening of SFMOMA in 2016 and was co-curator of the retrospective Bruce Conner: It's All True (2016/2017).

How to build and maintain a relationship with a curator over time, and why it's important / Joan Mitchell Foundation Blog

Naz Cuguoğlu leads a curatorial tour of 'Ghosts' exhibition, Istanbul, Turkey.

*** This article is commissioned by Joan Mitchell Foundation, to read it on the foundation's website: https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/journal/how-to-build-and-maintain-a-relationship-with-a-curator-over-time

Naz Cuguoğlu is an Istanbul-based curator and art writer who consults with Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipients as part of our ongoing Professional Development series. We asked Naz to share her take on how artists can build and maintain relationships with curators. 

The relationship between the artist and the curator is like a long-distance love affair, sometimes marked with geographic separation and lack of face-to-face contact. As it is extra difficult to maintain these kinds of relationships, it requires even more love, care, and patience from both sides. While there is not one perfect, magical solution that anyone can offer to make this relationship work, there are multiple strategies that you can make use of to make it as healthy and sustainable as possible. 

It takes two to tango.
The first step to building and maintaining an artist/curator relationship is accepting the fact that we both need each other, and that this is a mutually beneficial engagement. And when I say this, I do not mean that curators need artists to exhibit their works in their shows, and artists need curators to select, display, arrange, and preserve their artworks. I have no interest in repeating the long-existing discussion on who a curator really is, and whether we need them. I am more interested in highlighting the potential that this relationship between the artist and the curator has to offer at a time when we are going through intense political crises all around the world. I believe that it is even more urgent that we understand the importance of collaboration, in-depth dialogue, community, and exchanging ideas not only among society, but also between artists and curators. I believe that relationships between these two parties with different skills and approaches have a lot to offer for a better and hopeful future, through creating encounters between individuals with different perspectives, and eventually leading to a less polarized society. 

Finding THE ONE(S).
There is no monogamy when it comes to the relationships between artists and curators—it is more about pursuing multiple relationships simultaneously, so we can only talk about finding THE ONEs. And, there is no online dating application for finding the right curators that would be the perfect fit for your artistic practice, and with whom you’d live happily ever after—at least not yet. For this reason, it is important that you create platforms for yourself to increase the chance to meet individuals with similar research and artistic interests. One way is very well-known, but sometimes underrated: being present at the openings and events where you can grow your network of curators. It is also always helpful to follow digital and published art magazines to be up-to-date and tuned into finding THE ONEs. In this way, rather than sending copy-paste e-mails with your portfolio, you can keep your e-mails as personal as possible, tailored to the individuals to whom you are reaching out, and it mostly works—if it does not, it is also important to acknowledge that it’s actually okay, and that it’d be pretty ambitious to expect this spark to take place for every encounter. I think intimacy, flexibility, and openness are the keys in finding THE ONEs, and you never know where this relationship might lead both of you. It might be interesting to stop thinking about the ultimate outcome of this relationship, which is regarded as “the exhibition” mostly, but also considering “the process,” which is itself full of potential for inspiration and change-making. 

“You used to call me on my cell phone” Syndrome.
Once you have found THE ONEs, it is still important to keep in mind that, as with any relationship, the one between the artist and the curator requires time and effort. As we are living in the age of excessive information, it sometimes becomes difficult to keep each other updated, leaving the relationships to deteriorate through time. To prevent this, it is of course valuable to keep your website and social media accounts updated, and to send newsletters with news about your upcoming exhibitions and projects, ideally no more than once a month—too many newsletters can also be unpleasant. But what is more important is being aware that to build and maintain a relationship with a curator overtime might again mean more than that, if we can all try to keep things personal and intimate, leading to a more enriched dialogue and collaboration in the long run. To make this relationship sustainable, it is always worth taking the time to send private e-mails, inviting them to your studio, or to an ongoing exhibition, where you can engage in a more in-depth conversation about your practice. 

We are all in this together.
You might be asking yourself: Why all this effort? The truth is, we are all in this together. I believe the future is collaboration, learning from each other, growing and healing together. Do we want to change certain things about the ongoing politics, or do we accept things as they are? If you are also an advocate of the former, I suggest focusing on the process, the intimate dialogue, the micro effect on an individual level, rather than the outcome, or the big art events where no one has the possibility to touch upon each other’s lives. It might be the right time to imagine an art world in which there is no hierarchy also between the artists and the curators, forming relationships in which we can formulate intimate dialogues, and experiment together, so that we can even sometimes make mistakes for the sake of our progress. There is a lot we can learn from each other if we can keep ourselves open, and invest in our relationships as lovers do.

Five Artists Explore the Aesthetics of Mourning / Hyperallergic

*This review is published in Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/447649/galeri-nev-istanbul-we-do-not-know-this-to-be-so/

Joanna Rajkowska, “The Peterborough Child” (2012), video, 30 min. (image courtesy of the artist)

Making sense of death is a cultural mainstay, regardless of class or nationality, religion or race, gender or sexuality; most of us spend periods of time thinking about mourning, whether from inside or outside the process. But how it is done, approached, and thought about, varies pretty dramatically. The current exhibition on view at Galeri Nev Istanbul presents five artists, all from different places, each contending with how we mourn.  Curator Pelin Uran’s emphasis on video work speaks to the issue’s ubiquitous nature and fuels tension among the different ways of externalizing grief.

The gallery is small, and you immediately walk into Alejandro Cesarco’s video work “Present Memory” (2009). Projected on the wall is an image of Cesarco’s father, taken just after he was diagnosed with cancer. Upon death, this footage of the father is projected into his empty study, and recording it again, creating an infinite space where different segments of time intersect. The image is strained, threadbare, so worn-out that it creates the feeling that we are following a ghost in a dream-like state. The fact that his father looks directly at the camera in a highly serious manner makes the audience feel that we are disturbing him, and have been brought here to help the artist to release his father’s ghost.

Barbad Golshiri, “Vanitas; a Reenactment” (2008-2014), metal construction, light, slide, and liver, 22 x 120 cm (image courtesy of the artist)

There are other moments in the show that reflect on the difficulty of dealing with loss. As in the case of Cesarco, who breaks the linearity of time to heal, the devastating characteristic of death echoes in a work by Barbad Golshiri, titled “Vanitas; a Reenactment” (2008–14). As a response to Italian collector, Claudia Gian Ferrari’s final days, Golshiri builds a metal cylindrical projector. The odd thing about the work is a piece of animal liver being cooked by the projector lamp and dripping blood onto the floor. These drops reference a Persian literary trope, tears.  An image of the gallerist Ferrari lights the wall. She is distinguished by a snake-shaped ring and red hair, both recalling symbols of death. It is definitely not a work for everyone, for the ways it evokes extremely disturbing that feel uncomfortably personal.

Oreet Ashery, “Revisiting Genesis – Episode 9: Our Nurses” (2016), web series video, 11 minutes (image courtesy of the artist)

The show creates confusing feelings of devastation and lightness, genesis and destruction, as death usually does. Acting as a debriefing session for these feelings, the rest of the works in the show suggest the importance of community support when dealing with grief, particularly so in Oreet Ashery’s video “Our Nurses” (2016). The work brings together four palliative nurses, who develop close relationships with their patients, and experience grief every day. Put together, the four talk about emotional burn-out, making me think about Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” in which she mentions that grief is like an illness with all the physical symptoms, and we need to talk about it to heal. You can feel the relief of these nurses through their movement. They dance in pairs, interrupting the work’s main narrative, as they mimic each other and laugh, randomly moving their hands, hips, and feet.

The neighboring video by Joanna Rajkowska “The Peterborough Child” (2012) shows another artist desperately searching for a platform to talk about her fear of loss. After her daughter was diagnosed with eye cancer, and inspired by the ruins of Peterborough, where she had just moved to, the artist works to build a fake archeological site, containing a hand-made skeleton of a baby girl. The video tells the story of this project using a male voice, creating a video collage of found and shot images. Although Rajkowska is hoping that this place would turn into a temple for mothers in this city, a place that suffers an extremely high infant mortality rate, the project was cancelled due to protests from the community. This work highlights the fact that it is not always easy to find community support for new grieving methods.

The Propeller Group, “The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music” (2014), single channel projection, 21.15 mins. (image courtesy of The Propeller Group and James Cohan, New York)

Presented in a separate room, The Propeller Group’s video titled “The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music” (2014) showcases the benefits of community support. Separated from the other works in the show, this work creates an immersive experience for the audience to become part of the festivity of funeral traditions in Vietnam. As a musical journey, it merges documentary footage of funerals with re-enactments, creating a poetic language. The work develops around a transgender character and visualizes her passage from life to death. With performers hired for the funerals — fire eaters, snake handlers, singers — it makes a meaningful closing for the show, highlighting that death is not only loss, but provides an opportunity to celebrate life.

We do not know this to be so is on view at Galerie Nev Istanbul (Mumhane Caddesi No: 46- 50 Kat 2, Karaköy İstanbul) through June 22.

Isle // Ali M. Demirel / Art Asia Pacific

*This review is published in ArtAsiaPacific's May - June 2018 issue.

Mouth to Mouth // Slavs and Tatars / Art Asia Pacific

*This review is published in ArtAsiaPacific's September - October 2017 issue.