The Bienal: Part 2

On Saturday, we went to Beyoğlu and Karaköy for Bienal exhibits. As I explained in my last entry, most of the installations are inside the city, not in a museum or a special venue but in the old mansions and köşks and historical buildings that normally are all boarded up or somehow else impossible to enter. A living part of Istanbul that makes the city and her past as much on display as the art. Each piece and place reflects and echoes some of the fear and darkness of the past, and of the present.

In Beyoğlu, we found an exhibit in a Greek mansion built in 1915. The artist has carved into what looks like slices of trees Armenian symbols and placed them in the ceiling. You lie on yoga mats on the floor and look up at them. The symbols are especially known by local "treasure" plunderers, for when the Armenians were driven out of their villages, they often hid their belongings somewhere in the landscape--or so it was believed--and marked or mapped out the location with these symbols carved into rocks. There are snakes and hawks and scorpions and ghostly figures marching in a line. The house itself is abandoned and dilapidated. You can wander all the floors. The walls themselves are works of art--layers and layers of colors painted one over the other and chipped and rotted and decayed.

Down the road from the Greek mansion, is an empty parking garage scheduled for demolition by the demolition-obsessed city government. Not that it's an architectural wonder or anything--just a vast empty gray space in which an exhibition consisting exclusively of sound has been installed. Clicks and drips and heartbeats and echoes of car noises fill the empty space. A blue collar place about to be gentrified into a upscale mall or hotel.

Down on Bank Street, a few Bienal exhibits are houses in the Salt Gallery, set in the gorgeous 19th century Neo Classic Ottoman Bank designed by Aléxandre Vallaury.

In the basement is an installation called "How Did We Get Here" about the censorship of books and life following the 1980 coup. It echoes what we are going through now--as journalists are attacked on the street, ordinary people are arrested for insulting Erdoğan during discussions in city parks, and a new campaign of coup-era nationalism has been revived resulting in war in the East and mob attacks on Kurds in the West. Among the titles censored by Turkey's military on "moral" grounds are Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the Plague by Albert Camus. The hatred of knowledge and science and intelligence and enlightenment is absolute.

In one section, artist Hale Tanger has reconstructed an apartment from the 1980s--complete with radio blasting military news and children's notebook filled with nationalist slogans and praises to Atatürk. All the rooms are Spartan, black and white, military clean--except for one. A small door leads to a closet full of hidden things--costumes, jeweled mirrors, colorful yarns. Soul and imagination and play stay cowered in the back.

Playing with the toys and costumes in the closet

In the Istanbul Modern, we see a young man with his shirt unbuttoned halfway down to his belly angrily approaching the young student workers one by one. "How dare you put something in this place that the State does not approve of!" he rants at one girl near the entrance. He spends at least an hour stomping from sign to sign, looking for the word "Armenian"--and every time he finds it, he harangues the nearest Bienal worker. It's almost a performance in itself. Will he come back with a mob and attack someone, burn something, kill someone even to deny there are killers in Turkey's past? Was he sent here by some government agency or just lone freak?

The angry young defender of the State

He hates this: A scroll painted with the crimson derived from an Anatolian insect. The secret of extracting the dye is known only now in Armenia. Drawings with the dye gradually give way to a more modern, industrial red--the red of the Turkish flag that blocks out the organic color of the past.

He hates this: a painting by an Australian, Vernon Ah Kee, who saw in the "violence in Turkey's East" a parallel with his government's oppression and massacres of the Aborigines, particularly the Palm Island riots of 2004.

This installation by Sonia Balassanian--an Iranian Armenian--particularly enraged the young man. It is tuff stone from quarries just over the Turkish border in Armenia, across from the ruins of Ani. Each one resembles a head and seems to recall the deportation and murder of Istanbul's Armenians in 1915 as well as the beheadings in the Middle East today. The man tells the young girl manning this installation, "You people have turned this place into a house to worship the Armenians and insult the motherland!"

Another exhibit takes the abstract economics data--graphs, charts, projections, and uses everyday materials to turn them into three dimensional forms. A rainbow colored pattern of sticks are the annual work fatalities in the coal industry, a three dimensional web of colored wire is a graph of industrial pollution over time. They are beautiful, and as Delal says, when I look at them, I get a strange feeling at the front of my forehead, like a part of my brain is developing that wasn't there before: the abstract ideas turned into math, turned into pictures, turned into toys.

One last exhibit is in the museum library, a thought experiment by Lebanese artist, Marwan Rechmaoui. It represents the kind of "partial censorship" prevalent in the world today, where the choices look like they are there, but nevertheless are not--a perfect metaphor for Turkey, where we are constantly being told by the government how free everything is and yet drowned in censorship. the library book shelves are covered with a clear plastic wall. In each section there is one slot where one book can (with difficulty) be pulled out and read. You can see all the others, but not touch them.

In the Italian high school is a film by a director from Inner Mongolia and a video by a German-Turk making a journey across Bulgaria to explore how the Ottoman past is remembered. From the top floor, glancing out the window toward the courtyard, you can see the vast ruins of the dilapidated French orphanage, now hidden behind other buildings in Beyoğlu. It's symbolic in itself--showing how behind the city's facades are gigantic relics of a past erased or purged.

Wandering the abandoned mansions--the Bienal on Büyük Ada

I had a dream when I was a freshman in college, the culmination of a lifetime of recurring dreams of haunted houses. I wandered lost inside a wood mansion, full of stairways and panels in the wall, and rooms within rooms. I could feel there was something else in there with me, something unseen. Up and down stairs, empty rooms full just a second before I entered. I opened a panel in the wall of the living room and climbed down a narrow step into a basement room with a fireplace. Removing the bricks of the fireplace revealed another room. I knelt down and peered in—the feet of a chair, a dark red carpet. It was also fire-lit and I knew that whatever presence I had felt waited there. I crawled through and woke up.

I like art that raises a question in your mind that your rational side can’t answer—only an image, only an experience can provide some kind of release. The Istanbul Bienal has several exhibits this year among the crumbling mansions and köşks of Büyük Ada. The exhibitions and venues work together to weave a spell. When the exhibition disappoints, the house takes over.

A break in the old crumbling stone wall. You wander left and down toward the sea through thick wood—oleander and acacia and fig and palm. There’s a break in the tree and the red ruins of a köşk—red brick, red rust, the ruin of red blankets ripped up in the debris.

            It was once the Yanaros Mansion—a richly extravagant köşk overlooking the sea. İzzet Paşa, who conceived of the Armenian massacres under Abdul Hamid II was it’s original owner. Had he stood in one of those ruined windows and looked out toward the Asian shore dreaming of the killings to come, of the blood? 

The house passed to Trotsky, who wrote his history of the Russian revolution here, "It has been four and one-half years. I have the strange feeling of having my feet firmly planted on Büyükada." At sunrise, he would from the peer where the strange sculptures now stand in the water. White animals with mirror images of one another built in sea trash, rotting on their backs. The dead, the ghosts, the land of monsters, of demons and invisible presences breaking into the world of the living.

The tall ginger-bread towers of the Rizzo Palace jut up over the trees—of all the houses this is the one that most resembled the ones in my dreams. On the wooden porch is the small of long years of neglect and rickety old furniture. I catch the reflection of a woman in a dusty window overlooking a fly strewn table.

Sound feels the house. Speakers on each floor that makes the walls seem alive. There’s a dark basement, a narrow stair. You can peek into the ruins of a kitchen, a bathroom, a study, a broken window. A white curtain still flutters over a white dust window. There are roof tiles on the floor made in Marseilles, France. On the top two floors is a video. When I first look, a digital naked dead man is wandering a field of white, muttering “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” When I last look, he is on a bed in a house that suddenly collapses beneath him into a black void.

I followed one woman as she peered behind a blackout curtain into the ruins of a bedroom—high ceiling, blue curtains, broken furniture and dust and a giant mirror with a French inscription, delicately carved woodedn frames.

“Muazzam!” she whispered. And something else waiting in that room heard her, something that no one had recognized in a century.

The Cihannuma—the World Viewer—a red tower with a 360 degree window that sticks up into the blue sky from the Mizzi mansion. Mizzi was a Maltese businessmen. His son, Giovanni, brought a telescope up into this tower and spied on all the islands and city and sea.

Inside is a “sound” exhibition. Susan Phillpsz has taken photos of a shipwreck and placed recordings of undersea noises all throughout the empty rooms of the stone palace. You stick your head through a crack in the wall and there’s the metal parts of an old Nazi ship and the sounds of something metal on metal banging relentlessly against each other under water. The light pours in muted through the stain glass windows. One of the stray dogs had wandered in.

The art of ruin, of things crumbling away into time but fat with ghosts, hidden spirits and monsters and demons folded in quantum pockets among the rubble. A draft of air caught coming through the autumn wood, a cold memory, the rust, the remnants of the face painted in the wall, rain-washed and snow washed over hundreds of orbits around the sun and flaking off into the dirt.

On the quay, we end our day with food. The Arab tourists are everywhere. The station for the horse and carriages is behind us somewhere. You can hear the clop of horse feet. the place is a hole in the wall, but crowded with locals. They serve piyaz and köfte only--it's amazing. The crowds, the food, the sunlight--we are out of the spell of the old mansions.