A Positively Depressed View of the Situation - VASIF KORTUN

Istanbul is getting busier each day. For many years the city had nothing but local artists and artist-organized exhibitions. From the end of 1980s, with the advent of the Istanbul Biennial, the city took great strides in developing relations with the international arts community and the situation once dominated by art academies and provincial galleries, began to change.

In the last two years two new institutions, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, opened to the public. Proje4L is the city's biggest museum-quality exhibition institution. Platform has a flexible exhibition space, a library, an extensive archive and a residency program in the city's most active art district. The two institutions have been pursuing an international program, as well as organizing conferences and events. On the other side, a new gallery, Glarist, has provided new impetus and healthy competition to the best of the older ones, such as Gallery Nev. The maverick publication ‘art-ist' now printed in Turkish and English, maps the field. The institutions founded in the late 1990s such as the Borusan Art Gallery and Karsi Sanat, as well as an artist initiative like the Loft or a hybrid space lie Mentalklinik, embrace diverse roles.

The economic downturn of the last two years has forced private founders as well as grant seekers to focus on respond on responsible and sustainable projects, as opposed to the showy one-off events of earlier years. It seems that people have sobered up. The end of the support of populist practice could be said to have had a positive effect on contemporary visual culture. Formerly excluded, the contemporary is slowly becoming a partner in the local economy of art.

At the same time there are certain warning signs for contemporary practices. Corporate initiatives that support well-worn exhibition projects occupy much of the city's cultural life and satisfy a kitsch sensibility. From the bank galleries of the 1980s, through the bank-operated cultural centers of the 1990s, the phase has now moved to the building of museums by banks. While it is quite commendable that financial institutions have been able to compensate for the lack of public support and philanthropy, they have also edged out independent programs, making their existence quite difficult, and cannibalised and all-too-eager media. A much worse case is the branding of cultural initiatives under corporate identities, such as lifestyle promotion masquerading as art in the media and the willful evaporation of the public speech in favor orthodoxy.

For many years, contemporary art was hard to come by in the city. Not only were the institutions not prepared for it, there was also little common ground for negotiation between the artist, the institution and the audience. The artist was a self-styled orphan. S/he was irreverent towards the restraints of the cultural establishment; the market base the establishment would conceal so deftly, the suffocating arguments of accountability and right-to representation. There were very few anchors other than the reticent support of the Istanbul Biennial. Home was a kind of diaspora because the possibilities would often come from an occasional project abroad. If you did not untangle the knot of identity from within the local cultural lineage, you could be exiled. That led to the creation of micro communities where liberated conversation and occasional self-organized events took place. But things have changed in recent years, with new institutions, brilliant artists, exhibitions that went beyond the average and an increasingly integrated international situation. I would go so far as to call it the ‘Istanbul Miracle'. History has proven that if you just make people believe the hype, and empower it with a voice, it can really happen. While things are undoubtedly not what they used to be, not only in Istanbul, but also in many places around the globe with their incontestably common reason, other questions remain unasked. But, let's not spoil the fun today. Belatedness produces speed. The sense of the global party is immanent; finally everyone is invited. But the hosts have just left the table. You make do with the leftovers. You may be outside the temple, but with reasonable leftovers one must not lose humour, but rather build one's conditions for survival.

Let's come to the question of how contemporary art culture circulates in a megalopolis of ever ten million inhabitants? Or, is it a city that is many cities disconnected by differences in class, culture and access? Istanbul remains and ad-hoc city that looks as if it makes no claim about the contemporary and too much claim to history. It seems that despite all odds, we have to accept that contemporary visual culture operates with an international syntax morphed by local temporality and situatedness. One could be written off as an eager and privileged subject of globalization. Although the art that comes from here may be, at some point, not visibly original, it is replete with contingencies in structure and constructions of significance. And, only time will tell if Istanbul 's little miracle will not only take place in semi-public discussion, in artists' folios, and during the days of the Biennial, but in the everyday.