Gökcan Demirkazik

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  print November 2019

  16th Istanbul Biennial

  THE EIGHTH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL was titled “Poetic Justice.” Sixteen years on, the latest edition might as well have returned to that title. Roughly a month before the opening, a press release from the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) appeared in my inbox, somberly announcing the loss of the biennial’s main venue, the Haliç Shipyards, “due to the delay of the construction process . . . and the need to complete the disposal of asbestos materials determined to be present.” After lending its prestige to a real-estate project that threatens to destroy invaluable living and material

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  print November 2019

  Steffani Jemison and Samson Young

  Organized by Amsterdam’s De Appel contemporary arts center, Steffani Jemison and Samson Young’s double bill “Decoders-Recorders” took as its starting point the violence inherent to and resulting from the systematization and standardization of communication. Mobilizing artistic strategies—such as intuitive mark-making, erasure, nonsyntactic repetition, and layering—as tools of negation and transgression, the show expanded its critical gaze onto the tyranny of all bounded and binding systems.

  The exhibition opened with the series “To Fanon,” 2016–, Young’s rejoinder to the optimization of information

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  print October 2019

  The Otolith Group

  The watchful eyes of the science-fiction writer Octavia Butler and the composer Julius Eastman looked over the entrance area for the Otolith Group’s exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum. With the larger-than-life images of the show’s two patron saints nearly covering entire walls, it would have been easy to miss the flat glass vitrine on a pedestal containing ten otoliths (tiny calcareous bones found in the inner ear) that had each been taken from a whiting (a cod-like fish). Although the members of the group, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, expressly shied away from billing their exhibition as a

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  diary May 23, 2019

  Mechelen Stars

  IT’S GOT TO BE THE FULL MOON clouding my judgment. Otherwise, I would not have had a mini heart attack each time the French information screens on the Brussels-Antwerp intercity line read: “This train is headed to Anvers.” As far as I knew, I boarded from the correct platform in the direction of Antwerp just in time to catch the press tour of the Contour Biennale 9’s “Full Moon Phase,” and I would have been pissed if I ended up in Anvers (a sad little corner of Wallonia bordering France?) or Malines, which certainly could not be the Latinized name—look at it!—of the Flemish town of Mechelen. In

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  diary March 13, 2019

  Daze or Malaise?

  ARRIVING IN THE FORMER (INTERMITTENT) IMPERIAL CAPITAL OF MARRAKECH after a few days in Casablanca—Morocco’s economic powerhouse during the French Mandate—was a shock. Although only two and a half hours apart by car, the two cities could not feel more different: Casablanca’s wide, tram-lined boulevards and somewhat laid-back architectural modernism in glistening Mediterranean white contrasts with the earthy reds of Marrakech’s buildings, old and new, its continental climate with swooping temperatures, and, above all, its overwhelming hypersaturation of tourists. After arriving at Jemaa al-Fna

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  print March 2019

  CLOSE-UP: HINGE POLITICS

  THRESHOLDS ARE VISIBLE but not often seen. A threshold is hardly ever singular: It can be a passageway, an obstacle, a boundary, or a sight line. A gate ajar may evidence trespass, a lintel suggests new terrains, and an open door stands for opportunity. Though often considered an inconsequential void “just before” or “right after,” a threshold is also a quiet witness that absorbs echoes of the events beyond.

  Threshold, 2018, by Beirut-based artist Rania Stephan, draws our attention from those events to their scaffolding. The raw material of her ten-minute video is The Master of Time, a 1987 sci-fi

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  print February 2019

  Ana Mazzei

  Younger artists working with the vocabulary of Minimalism have joyously embraced its purported theatricality and have cultivated a post–Felix Gonzalez-Torres fascination with affect and the mechanics of its production. This often takes the form of a narrativized sentimentality, coupled with corporeal, alchemical, or mythological overtones. The critical literature on Ana Mazzei’s work has foregrounded the totemic quality of her quasi-Minimalist objects and the possibility that their “activation” may serve yet-unknown ends. Yet the Brazilian artist’s work, often featuring recognizable archetypes,

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  slant January 28, 2019

  On the Ground: Beirut

  IMPERMANENCE IS A PERMANENT CONDITION IN BEIRUT—a horizon of transience continues to shape its residents’ daily lives. While survival mode may appear inevitable here, a good number of Beirutis in the arts have ceaselessly cultivated self-criticism as a structuring ethos of their professional practices over the past two decades, braving Syrian oppression, Israeli assaults, a far-from-resolved garbage crisis, and, still ongoing, the protracted lack of an elected government, not to mention increased state surveillance. Although post-civil-war amnesia among the Lebanese and the constructedness

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  diary November 25, 2018

  Happy Birthday, Zayed!

  THE SAME DAY Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan aggressively implicated the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, his royal highness was busy headlining the second annual Future Investment Initiative—dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” for its congregation of mega-executives and heads of state—at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton. Despite cautious last-minute cancellations from many, the prince appeared ebullient and pithily announced the success of the conference: “More people, more money.”

  The inverse—“more money, more people”—is

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  print September 2018

  Rayyane Tabet

  Opening a thick, bright-yellow-bound, German-language book about the ancient city of Tell Halaf in his grandparents’ library, Rayyane Tabet found a New Year’s card addressed in a casually elegant cursive hand to his great-grandfather. Both the card, sent from Weimar-era Berlin, and the book itself were written and signed by Baron Max von Oppenheim—the scion of a powerful German Jewish banking dynasty and attaché to the Khediviate of Egypt who went on to discover a neolithic archeological site in northeastern Syria in 1899. Stalled by the Ottoman bureaucracy and World War I, Oppenheim was

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  diary April 02, 2018

  Talk Therapy

  I’VE DECIDED THAT MY FAVORITE FORM OF TIME TRAVEL is going to the Emirates. From remote-controlled taxi trunks to my astonishingly steep learning curve around identifying objects in the hotel room, the sun-kissed futurity of the Emirates feels like an overexposed Instagram filter with washed-out colors—save for the deep and vibrant blue of the sky. Indeed, visions of luxe, calme, et volupté are to be had on the highway rather than under the scorching sun. You move through Happiness Street in Dubai in order to reach the Abu Dhabi Highway, where you can tune into thirty-second blurbs about world

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  print January 2018

  Halil Altındere

  There could hardly have been a more fitting location for “Welcome to Homeland,” Halil Altındere’s new solo show, than the Sadık Pasha Mansion. Located in a quiet part of the affluent neighborhood of Cihangir, this wooden neoclassical palazzo was built in the nineteenth century by a Polish émigré, Michał Czajkowski, who was sent to Istanbul to establish a colony for his asylum-seeking compatriots. A century and a half later, migration remains a hot-button issue, and it was central to Altındere’s exhibition.

  The lower floor offered a comprehensive showcase of Altındere’s most recent body of work,