VASIF KORTUN TO STEP DOWN AS DIRECTOR OF SALT IN 2017
Vasif Kortun, the director of research and programs at Turkey’s SALT—a cultural institution comprising three venues in Istanbul and Ankara that house galleries as well as a theater, library, and archives—will step down in 2017 but will remain on the institution’s board of directors, HG Masters reports for ArtAsiaPacific. Kortun said that an official announcement with further details will be made by the end of the year.
“Kortun is an unabashed power broker on the Istanbul scene,” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote upon the inauguration of SALT’s Beyoğlu space in 2011. Kortun was the founding director of the Project Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art, and in 2001 he established the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. He served as the chief curator and director of the Third Istanbul Biennial and codirector of the Ninth Istanbul Biennial. From 1994 to 1997, Kortun worked as the founding director of the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He also curated the Turkish pavilions for the 1994 and 1998 editions of the São Paolo biennial as well as for the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Founded in 2011 with the support of Garanti Bank, SALT was the brainchild of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center, and the Garanti Gallery, resulting in the new contemporary art venue, which is spread across three locations—SALT Beyoğlu, SALT Galata, and SALT Ulus.
Among other changes at the institution, SALT may be reopening its Beyoğlu building as early as mid-2017. The government shuttered the space in January due to “technical reasons,” one of which may have included a complaint filed against the renovation of the historical nineteenth-century building. It is currently undergoing construction that will bring it up to code.
