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participation within the Sparwasser HQ show at the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.


Sparwasser HQ at Platform
11 March - 17 April '04

Including work by:

Dave Beech, Heman Chong, Annika Eriksson, Lise Harlev, Jakob Kolding, Henrik Olesen, Susan Philipsz, Reinigungsgesellschaft, Oliver Ressler, Gitte Villesen + Archive: Old Habits Die Hard,
Organization Sparwasser HQ/ Lise Nellemann and Johannes Raether for Platform.

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center
Istiklal Caddesi 276
Beyoglu 80050 Istanbul

For five weeks the artist run space Sparwasser HQ will shift its activities from Berlin to the center of Istanbul. A variety of activities, performances, talks and exhibits will consider the artist's involvement in communicating and distributing artistic ideas by establishing alternative models of representation.

Invited by Platform, Sparwasser HQ will in fact act as both guest and secondary host in turn inviting artists and people of interest to contribute to the exhibition's developing conceptual framework. As a result, Sparwasser HQ will examine the different self-organized networks that develop through this process of inviting, hosting and collaborating. Through this process of researching collectives and mapping networks issues of self-organization and alternative representation will be raised and questions about alternative economies and values will evolve and establish themselves.

A program of meetings and dialogues in the gallery space will develop throughout the duration of the exhibition. Participating artists include Annika Eriksson, who invites Brasilian musicians to perform in front of her camera; Gitte Villesen who often invites people to tell their personal story to her and the camera; Jakob Kolding who asks publicly if there is any attempt to involve or exclude people living in the local neighbourhood to use the public space in the way they wish to use it. The video archive Old Habits Die Hard will also be housed at Platform with 50 art works selected by artist run spaces and art collectives available to the public to watch at their convenience. These situations consider representation, peoples' right for free speech and the use of the public space; all ideas which link to the framework of the research and archiving of artist run spaces and their activities.

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center was initiated in September 2001.
Located in Beyoglu, the most vibrant part of Istanbul, Platform acts as a
central meeting point in the city for cultural exchange between contemporary
artists, curators and critics. The building contains an artist archive,
research and lecture spaces, Istanbul Residency Program (open to
international contemporary visual artists, critics and curators of
contemporary art) and on street level a gallery committed to exhibiting both Turkish and International contemporary art.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Other Europe

video interviews

During a stay in Istanbul we met Cengis Aktar and Pelin Tan to talk with them about the European perspectives of Turkey. Cengis Aktar is a political scientist, lecturing at the Istanbul University about the extension of EU. We also met Pelin Tan at her office at the Institute of Social Science of the faculty of Architecture.

She´s also engaged in
publishing and curating on city planning and contemporary art. The talks open a discourse about the limits of democracy and the religious and ethnical dimensions of the European value system.

 

Cengis Aktar, political scientist

 

 

 

 

 

Pelin Tan, sociologist, writer and PhD candiate in History of arts. Research
assistant at the Institut of social sciences, Istanbul Technical University.
Guest Asst.Prof. in Trier Univ.-Art History. Writes for various magazines and participates in books about space & place discourses, globalization and ethics of locality. Invited curator at TENT /Witte de With, Rotterdam.

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