Journal: “Silence” at ArteEast Quarterly

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Arte East ‘Silence’:
Winter 2010 Online Quarterly

arteeast.org/pages/artenews/Silence

ArteEast invites you to celebrate the launch of this issue on December 14, 2010 6:30 p.m. at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP)
1040 Metropolitan Avenue
Brooklyn, New York, 11211 (L train to Grand Street)

Silence Launch & Panel

Presentations by
Aslihan Demirtas (Architect, New York)
Regine Basha (Curator, New York)
Cevdet Erek (Artist, Istanbul)
Micah Silver (Artist, Cambridge, MA)

Moderated by Hakan Topal (Artist, xurban_collective)

ArteEast is pleased to announce the launch of the Winter 2010 edition of its online quarterly journal, featuring guest editor Hakan Topal‘s issue Silence. With contributions by Defne Ayas, Anne Barlow, Regine Basha, Dan Cameron, Aslihan Demirtas, Cevdet Erek, Tony Chakar and Micah Silver, ArteEast will kick off this issue on December 14, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. with a panel discussion by a number of the featured contributors at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP).

In the pages of the quarterly the authors discuss the possibilities and limitations of the condition of silence by examining its presence in art and music across a number of global socio-political contexts. Several authors tackle the concatenation of sound, history and nation, working towards an understanding of the dynamics and power of silence. Defne Ayas discusses the recently realized Blind Dates curatorial project, which aimed to outline the challenges of engaging issues fraught with the multi-layered histories of the Anatolian landscape and its overlapping nationalized contexts. Aslihan Demirtas, who took part in the Blind Dates project, discusses the ancient Armenian city Ani—a charged historical site that reflects the tensions between contemporary Armenia and Turkey. Meanwhile, Anne Barlow considers the absence of specific ‘cultural indicators’ in Antarctica as a means to reveal the potential for a non-nationalized space.

The next group of essays offer a more self-reflective look at silence, working through personal narratives and collective memory. Regine Basha‘s video essay navigates YouTube videos to trace instances of the song ‘Fog il Nakhal’ as it transforms through various voices and instruments. Similarly, Tony Chakar knits together religious and literary sources to form a personal narrative, duly influenced by his experience of his home city of Beirut. Dan Cameron directs our attention to various works that activate our auditory senses by visually addressing our collective memories; by giving a philosophical account of the notion of sound-scape and its relation to our bodies, he points to its intrinsic importance in the acts of listening and thinking.

The remaining artists in Silence take on the mechanics of sound and its relationship to the body and performance: Micah Silver weaves through the history of music to offer viewers a rich chronicle of silence in sound-based practices, while Cevdet Erek addresses tinnitus, the perception of a ringing noise in the ear that often occurs after extreme exposure to a loud sound. Erek draws our attention to the creative possibilities of tinnitus and provides various sound tracks of his recent work to accompany his text. Together, the writers, artists and curators in this edition of the quarterly frame silence as a rich terrain in which questions of subjectivity, memory and nationalism are probed and explored.

Also featured at ArteEast Online:
Gen70, curated by Kristine Khouri with profiles of Basim Magdy and Manal Al Dowayan
Shahadat, curated by Alex Ortiz, featuring “Him, Me and Muhammad Ali”, a short story by Randa Jarrar
Virtual Gallery: “how to make (nice) things happen” Curated by Mirene Arsanios

arteeast.org/pages/artenews/Silence

Show: Tactics of Invisibility

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TACTICS OF INVISIBILITY

Nevin Aladag, Kutlug Ataman, Cevdet Erek, Ayse Erkmen, Esra Ersen, Inci Eviner, Nilbar Güres, Hafriyat, Ahmet Ögüt, Füsun Onur, Sarkis, Hale Tenger, Nasan Tur, xurban_collective

An exhibition project by TANAS/Berlin, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary/Vienna and ARTER/Istanbul
Curated by Daniela Zyman and Emre Baykal

Duration: 11 September 2010 – 15 January 2011/ admission free
Closed 24 + 31 December 2010 and 01 January 2011

Tactics of Invisibility is a collaborative project developed by TANAS Berlin, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, and ARTER, Istanbul. Conceived as a survey exhibition, the project presents fourteen positions from the contemporary artistic production of Turkey and its diaspora that deal with the concept of invisibility in different ways – as “being-under-the-surface”, as the presence of absence, a tactic of withdrawal, refusal and resistance, of camouflage and disguise, as a symptom of disappearance, as a residue of the spectral and uncanny. Discourse around these artistic tactics emphasizes the potentialities of invisibility while also drawing attention to the implications of (voluntary or symptomatic) exclusion from the regime of the visible.

Tactics of Invisibility focuses on the potential of artistic practice to inhabit the liminal zones between the visible and the invisible and to call them into question through interference and disruption. In the process, it highlights the repressed and silenced, as well as inconspicuous phenomena that can be seen as symptomatic of pathologizing and “Otherness” but also understood as manifestations of marginalization or resistance. To invoke the unseen beneath the surface, or to produce it by means of camouflage and disguise, offers a strategy for intervening in processes of transformation and establishing new or imaginary linkages.

Tactics of Invisibility assembles a variety of artistic positions from three decades, enabling the exhibition also to pursue lines of connection and topical approaches to an aesthetic of invisibility. Works by pioneering figures such as Sarkis, Füsun Onur, and Ayse Erkmen paved the way for the dynamic and sociopolitically engaged Turkish art of the 1990s, in which questions of multiculturalism, identity politics, migration, and minority politics came to the fore. While the works of Inci Eviner, Kutlug Ataman, and Hale Tenger evince ties to the discourse of that period, their current work develops that discourse in very specific ways. Their projects query terms of “reality” by generating conceptual breaks or analytically dismantling and rearranging semantic structures, which links them to the artistic positions of the younger generation, as represented by Cevdet Erek, Esra Ersen, Nilbar Güres, Nasan Tur, Nevin Aladag, Ahmet Ögüt, xurban_collective, and the artists’ initiative Hafriyat.

Exhibition catalogue with contributions by:
Meltem Ahiska, Murat Akagündüz, Gudrun Ankele, Gülsen Bal, Emre Baykal, Aysegül Baykan, Margrit Brehm, Dieter Buchhart, Levent Çalikoglu, Barbara Heinrich, Nataša Ilic, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nermin Saybasili, Basak Senova, Necmi Sönmez, Pelin Tan, Jalal Toufic, xurban_collective and Daniela Zyman.
219 pages, 15 Euro/ available at TANAS

FURTHER EXHIBITION VENUES

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Himmelpfortgasse 13
1010 Vienna
www.tba21.org
16 April – 15 August 2010

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary was founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg. The foundation is based in Vienna, where it maintains an exhibition space whose temporary exhibitions are open to the public at no charge. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary has dedicated itself to the task of actively supporting, commissioning and disseminating the production of contemporary works of art. Its programmatic focus lies in recognizing the regional breadth and diversity of artistic forms and intellectual disciplines that challenge and expand modalities of perception and experience.

ARTER
Istiklal Caddesi No: 211
34433 Beyoglu
Istanbul
www.arter.org.tr
from March 2011

Home Works 5

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Rulers and Rhythm Studies

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HOME WORKS 5

A FORUM ON CULTURAL PRACTICES

Exhibitions, Lectures, Panels, Performance, Dance, Theatre, Music, Film, Video, Publications

Beirut, April 21 – May 1, 2010

Exhibitions will run until May 22nd, 2010
Curated by Ashkal Alwan
Ruanne Abou- Rahme & Basel Abbas | Contingency
Ayreen Anastas | Thus I spoke, and ever more softly: for I feared my own thoughts and hinterthoughts
Marwa Arsanios | All About Acapulco
Vartan Avakian | ShortWave/LongWave
Broomberg & Chanarin | Chicago
Decolonizing Architecture | Oush Grab (Crow’s Nest)
Cevdet Erek | Rulers and Rhythm Studies
Shahab Fotouhi | Direct Negotiation | Can I Speak to the Manager?
Ghassan Halwani | Cumbersome Machine: Between the Nonsense & the Archive
Amal Issa | Never-eat-y of the Fallen Rifle
Bengü Karaduman | In Place of Silent Words
Hassan Khan | CONSPIRACY (dialogue/diatribe)
Maha Maamoun | 2026
Christodoulos Panayiotou | Prologue: Quoting Absence
Marwan Rechmaoui | C60
Raed Yassin | Disco Tonight
Ala’ Younis | Tin Soldiers

Show: Tactics of Invisibility

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above, installation

below, sketch

Sky ornamentation with 3 sounding dots and anti-pigeon net

Sky ornamentation with 3 sounding dots and anti-pigeon net

Site specific installation
Courtesy of the artist
Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna and Vehbi Koç Foundation, Istanbul

Presentation by Gudrun Ankele:

Cevdet Erek’s commissioned installation in the courtyard of the baroque Palais Erdödy-Fürstenberg in Vienna combines sound and architecture as to means of organizing space as well as of decoration. One reference for his work is Adolf Loos’s notorious essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908), in which he explored the idea that the progress of culture is associated with the deletion of ornament from everyday objects and architecture. The clear grid of the net floating above the small courtyard is being combined with three white squares, which contain extremely flat loudspeakers. This material ornamentation is being punctuated by a 3-channel sound piece titled 3, which is structured by basic variations on a ¾ beat. Each of the directional speakers thus produces an immaterial soundspace of its own, which overlaps at its edges with the following one. By walking through the courtyard, the audience can experience an ever-changing, progressing space that combines visual and auditive levels of the sensible, striped bare of all referential signs. Sky ornamentation with 3 sounding dots and antipigeon net is using the presence of music and the materiality of the pigeon net to produce an aesthetic experience which can be understood as an (ironic) experiment in non-referential, non-representational beauty.

Cevdet Erek, 1974 born in Istanbul, lives and works in Istanbul

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Magazine: Nowiswere #6

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Nowiswere Issue 6 is out.

In this issue:

/Maze/ by Fatos Ustek; /Zero Panorama/ by* *Maartje Fliervoet; /Notes
On Dashed Lines/// /(In Their Relative Importance)/ by Manuel Singer;
/After Talk/ by Manuela Zechner;* */Nature Morte – The Cycle/// /The
Autobiographical Show/ by Tatia Skhirtladze; /The Time Between the
Two: Simon Popes A Common Third/// Danielle Arnaud, London by Lisa
Skuret;* *Psycho Studies by Daniela Paes Leão;* *Old Ideas – Museum
für Gegenwartskunst Basel Curated by Silberkuppe by Adeena Mey;
DeLorean dream back to life in a gallery /Sean Lynch, DeLorean:
Progress ReportKevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin by/ Rana Ozturk;
/Mirror Montage/ by Eline McGeorge.

Cover is commissioned by Cevdet Erek, cover layout design by Veronika
Hauer.

Please visit the website www.nowiswere.com to collect your issue.