Talk: Erden Kosova - From Miracle to Crisis. Contemporary Art Practice in Turkey






Tuesday, November 22 , 2011, 7:30 p.m.

In the mid-nineties, the emerging and expanding field of contemporary art was received by a young generation as an attractive platform that can be utilised for articulating a political outcry -as a reaction to the tense atmosphere of Turkey of that time. Yet, in the last decade a series of social changes caused stagnation in terms of art production: firstly, the political matters that have been the prime concentration of this art practice were no more taboos but have become manifest within wide-scale public discussion; and consequently the art practice have lost its previous edgy character and could not replace it with a fresh formula; secondly, the drastic, nauseating process of institutionalisation of the field by the sudden interest of the prominent bourgeois families and corporate firms created a schizophrenic atmosphere for any political tone with the art practice --the general view on contemporary art by the public and the local intellectuals was that it became the ultimate field of cultural decadance -contemporary art field have not been able to elaborate a response to this criticism yet. Do all these occurances sign at a crisis?

Erden Kosova is in the editorial board of the e-journal red-thread.org and member of the Back to School Initiative, an Istanbul based collective. He works and lives in Istanbul.

The talk is taking place in the framework of the cooperation between uqbar and the initiative Back to School (Istanbul), on the occasion of the international project TANDEM. TANDEM is implemented by MitOst (Berlin), İstanbul Bilgi University (Istanbul) and Anadolu Kültür (Istanbul) with the support of Stiftung Mercator (Essen) and European Cultural Foundation (Amsterdam).