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@spatialinstruments
by Sofia Gotti The exhibition The Missing Planet: Visions and re-visions of ‘Soviet Times’ from the Pecci Centre’s and other collections presents artworks from countries under Soviet influence—from the Balkans to Central Asia—spanning a period from just before Perestroika to the present day. The show examines how artists grappled with the legacies of failed …
The Missing Planet at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy.
Exhibition Display by Can Altay
The Way Beyond Art, Van Abbemuseum, 2017.
Permanent Collection Disposition by Can and Asli Altay, Future Anecdotes Istanbul
Tomorrow I will be talking about narrative devices and spatial instruments. Focusing on our work with @futureanecdotes for the permanent collection exhibition of @vanabbemuseum #thewaybeyondart #werksalon as part of @mekankonusmalari
Yarın Bilgi’de @futureanecdotes ile @vanabbemuseum sanat koleksiyonu için yaptığımız çalışmalar üzerinden ‘anlatı aygıtları’ ve ‘mekansal enstrümanlar’dan bahsedeceğim. Sergi tasarımıyla ilgilenenlere duyurulur ;) (Mimarlık Fakültesi) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvKJ250g8y2/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=14lvlofoc2mdb
At the pesoBar for Havana Biennial 2003, I was serving cheap cocktails and good quality moonshine rum in origami shot-cups. When unfolded, the cups revealed quotes from people of the ‘minibar’, the illegal street drinking scene of my hometown Ankara. #minibar #moonshine #havana #ankara #canaltay #2003 (Pabellón Cuba) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvAATpgAVFQ/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1rcvd0o5qmgri
FEATURED ARTIST: Can Altay, Distributed, 2012. Chrome door knobs. Courtesy Create, London, Frieze Projects East for the London Borough of Waltham Forest, and Arcade, London.
www.sculpture-center.org
FEATURED ARTIST: Can Altay, COHAB: An Assembly of Spare Parts, 2011. Installation view. Courtesy CASCO - Office for Art, Design & Theory and Arcade, London.
www.sculpture-center.org
carricola marketplace display unit #prototype from 6 yrs ago today #tbt #mataderomadrid (Matadero Madrid) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt3R27bgU8J/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1kv4p6ebmutsd
FEATURED ARTIST: Can Altay
Can Altay is an artist living in Istanbul. He investigates the functions, meaning, organization and reconfigurations of public space. His ‘settings’ provide critical reflection on urban phenomena and artistic activity. His work traverses sculpture, photography and installation, and is staged and manifested through the spaces, exhibitions and publications he produces.
Altay has had solo exhibitions at Arcade, London (2012), Casco, Utrecht (2011), The Showroom, London (2010), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2006) and Spike Island, Bristol (2007). His work has been included in Biennials of Istanbul, Havana, Busan, Gwangju, Marrakech, Taipei; and in museums and galleries such as the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), VanAbbe Museum (Eindhoven), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Artists Space (New York), and SALT (Istanbul). His public projects include: “Inner Space Station” (NewYork, 2013); “Distributed” (London, 2012); “The Church Street Partners’ Gazette” (London, 2010-13) and “PARK: bir ihtimal” (Istanbul, 2010). Altay is the editor of Ahali: an anthology for setting a setting, 2013 published by Bedford Press, AA Publications, London.
Can Altay, Another Empty Pedestal: after similar skids from recent pasts, 2010. Setting with concrete Lotus Leaf sculpture from the evicted Vietnamese Community Centre, Warsaw. Installation view. Courtesy Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw and Arcade, London.
www.sculpture-center.org
The art industry is not unpredictable.
The art industry is not unpredictable.
I don’t call it the art world because that would assume a totality.
I definitely don’t call it the art market because not everything (every work) produced gets circulated commercially. And because I’d rather foreground production of work as opposed to its speculative exchange.
An industry assumes (means?) that there are cultures and technologies of production and use (and consumption).
I am happy to include not only artworks but also other means of production that make the art industry possible; be it discursive production such as writing, or labour around institutional maintenance, or literally the fabrication of work (which is different to the artist’s work, since the artist’s work involves simultaneous projections and realization of thought, material, space).
An industry is inclusive of these layers; even when it sounds like or resonates to some kind of mass-appeal. Most industries don’t have mass-appeal; or even when they do, they don’t necessarily involve mass-production.
The art industry is not unpredictable; anyone in the know can tell they you what to expect to see in museums, biennials, fairs, auctions, and media. And do so periodically, according to the cycles within which this industry churns out content. As well as what work (or by whom) prevails, for the time being.
Many artists dive headfirst into fragile conditions, experience hardship, suffer, strain (not romantically but politically and literally). Only to be exposed to and utilized by the machinizations of the art industry.
Their reward, a limited exposure to an audience (that includes many that geniunely care, but also those that are wrapped up in the machinization, those that make the art industry work).
So many valuable artists give up, only a few enjoy a come-back.
An even fewer number of artists become industrialists, and claim their benefits.
January 2019
“Provisional Green Space” Bert Theis at AVTO, Istanbul. A review.
Taking the narrow steps down from street level into AVTO -occupying the basement of a building in the Genoese quarter of Galata- you get a sense of space expanding in front of you. A large-scale photomontage is laid covering the whole floor, multiplied by the gallery’s eminent mirror walls. The imagery employed here by the late Milanese artist Bert Theis (1952-2016) is that of the jungle, an image of re-wilding; of feral forests taking over the built environment, as a metaphor for life against design. The common post-apocalyptic trope of “non-human life taking over the city” is utilized to provoke a sense of resistance-as-potential.
The desire to mobilize desire against the brute operational forces of capital (in the shape of real estate development), runs wide among artists and activists in the urban context. This exhibition of Theis's work, curated by Angelo Castucci (in collaboration with Isola Utopia - a continuation of Theis’s Art Center project) tells the story of the Isola district in Milan, and Theis’s engagement in the struggle process during its reconstruction as the new ‘design neighborhood’. As a city with its share of similar urban struggles in the last decade and more, the questions presented in the exhibition are still vital for Istanbul. Even at a time when most struggle appear to have been subsumed (or suppressed).
This not-so-hi-res bird’s eye view of Isola, as inhabited by a seemingly uncontrollable forest, serves as the basis of the artist’s imaginary in the fight against that (now globally familiar) story: how certain big chunks of cities are taken over by large-scale real estate developments, with tag-lines such as 'art' and 'design' districts. In the gallery, a few mats are thrown above this image-surface asking you to lay down and browse the books provided on the story of the Isola Art Center project that Theis directed from 2001 through to 2009. A dreamy soundtrack for this setting, representing the “aggloville”; a compact mass of flora and fauna plays discretely. Meanwhile, in a dark back-room the video “Isola Nostra” by Mariette Schiltz and Bert Theis, a documentation of the struggle as well as the multifarious exhibitions and art interventions at Isola, demands a full hour.
The exhibition feels fixed on a particular moment, introspecting on the resistance, the imagination and desire towards an art center to overcome the pressures of gentrification (or rather destruction) in massive scale. Yet it does not reveal much of the tragic (or expected) ending of Isola Art Center, when the building and its surrounding were evacuated and demolished. A second chapter to such a narrative feels imperative, considering that rather than let plants (and life) take over and occupy the space, the real-estate developers invited the architect Stefano Boeri to design the ‘Bosco Verticale’, a residential tower titled 'vertical forest', which employs the exact same trope of flora overtaking the built environment, albeit for a high-end clientele. The irony hurts.
“They offered [the craftspeople] money to make them go away, and many went away. And then there were some associations here, who split the movement, they were offered other spaces - alternative spaces - so last week they moved out. Now we have the problem that here downstairs some spaces are squatted by … drug dealers.” When you read Bert Theis speaking from 2007, in the accompanying interview publication, you can’t help but notice a feeling of being left alone, in Isola (meaning Island), as opposed to the request for being left to one’s own devices, as a community of inhabitants, human and non-human. This resonates with the tension in the name of the space that is now hosting the story of Isola here in Istanbul. One can’t help but think that in Turkey, the words gallery and gallerist are commonly used for automobile dealerships, while “avto” also clearly nods towards a desired autonomy.
AVTO is a not-for-profit space run by a young artist-curator collective, now programming their second season, in a very central part of Istanbul that has been undergoing drastic cultural changes and turmoil via both real estate investments and commercial use for a good 20 years. The Galata area, which was for a while under the scrutiny of the critics of gentrification, seems like it’s renegotiating with its fluctuating and confused inhabitants, now composed of an even more complex mix of local day-tourists, a shrinking body of craftspeople, immigrants, few affluent residents, seagulls, feral cats and a lessening number of European visitors including young Erasmus-folk. After all, not all ‘plans’ work in forming and transforming a city.
This underground mirror chamber of a gallery now acts as the site for such indirect commentary, on both it’s own place in a city and a country subjected to similar top-down attitudes towards the way a city, or even a society can be formed. Bert Theis and Isola show us how one’s utopia becomes another’s dystopia, and vice versa. The tactical existence of Isola is well-documented in a publication by Archive Books titled “Fight-Specific Isola”, with a pun on site-specificity. Yet no site seems that specific, and in all such sites the fight seems to be in dire need of strategy, as much as its love of tactics; and to reconsider ‘closures’ to build upon, as much as it loves open-endedness.
Can Altay, November 2018
Focusing on a process where a designer embeds herself in craftspeople’s workshops with the intention of ‘learning from inside’ and ‘making together’; this paper proposes pathways for considering collaboration between designers and craftspeople via digital fabrication and weaving. The tension of forces that make weaving possible, act as an analogy for this collaboration as well as providing the title of the project as ‘One Over, One Under’. The project proposes a mode of working and a spectrum of outcomes where the designer has a first-hand experience of production techniques, engages in a serious and continuous dialogue through making, and develops an intervention that also brings forth her own skill set (introducing digital fabrication and structural variations), thus transforming the conventions and boundaries between established roles and manufacturing techniques. An experiment that resulted in a series of objects considering both the technologies of production and the input of the designer, this process not only increases the potentials that crafts hold for the field of design, but it also offers possibilities of collaboration and a further articulation of the design act.
(2019). Dialogic weaving: a favorable tension between design and craft. Digital Creativity. Ahead of Print.
Can Altay, Threshold at P! New York, November 2016
"Ürün Tasarımı: Üretim ve Kullanımda Yeniden Anlamlandırmalar" Can Altay Sanatçı, Tasarım Araştırmacısı 08/05/2018 Türkiye’nin önde gelen tasarımcılarından B...
Threshold, 2016 at P!
Manifaturacılar Çarşısı Plakçılık Sunar, 2017 Can Altay ve Saz Arkadaşları
(view from the Altr.Wan recording session)
