Sour Times
By Erden Kosova

It is needless here to revisit the accounts about the advance of reactionary politics on the globe in the aftermath of September 11, and to reiterate the details about the ways in which the administrative configuration named as nation-state, whose stability was being undone by the intensifying forces of globalization, found the opportunity to reinstate and enhance its authority in various ways. Different forms of nationalist ideology have been implanted for that purpose. Similar to countries whose administrative machinery envision the prospect of advancing towards the higher ranks of the world hierarchy, constitutive actors of the Republic of Turkey have been indulged in a schismatic state of mind which easily shifts from an eagerness for recognition from the prioritized Other to an acrimonious isolationism,
from flirtatious uses of narcissism to organized resentment. Nationalism remains here as the leading medium but it operates mainly through two different, to a certain extent conflicting, modalities.

Being fed by mutually stinging clashes being experienced in the process of EU membership negotiations, the first one of these modalities remains strictly tied to adjacent segments of conservative politics, and the authoritarian tradition and bureaucratic machinery of the imposed modernism. Suggesting the suspension, and in some cases the abandonment, of the mission of integrating into the stage of ‘contemporary civilization's’ this isolationist world view maintains an aggressive alertness on any possible subversions targeting the national unity. A contemporary art scene strongly defined by a critical engagement with political matters and social issues has no place within the scope of this perspective. The ultra-nationalist (just to avoid the f-word) raid into an art space, which recently organized an exhibition of photography on the pogrom targeting the Istanbullu religious minorities in 1955, or legal persecutions against exhibition catalogues with anti-militarist content are among the symptoms of this increasing intolerance.

The second modality of nationalism is premised upon the sense of fair competition between the nations within the rules of game of capitalism. Obsessed with national interests, economic rationalism and organizational efficiency, this sort of thinking imports patterns of cultural codifications from the geography-cultures that are taken as models. Contemporary art has recently received a sudden, and to a certain extent surprising favor from the actors of this view, in which it is conceived as the most recent ornament on the costume of contemporariness. New art institutions have emerged by the support of prominent bourgeois families who crave a false image of rootedness in the city of Istanbul, and corporate companies that want to have some sophisticated entry in their portfolios to advertise
to their European counterparts. The aesthetics that is propagated by this new establishment is tied to visual pleasure, psychologism, the myth of artist as a genius, and the conception of art as the compensator of the daily trivial.

The practice of contemporary art in Istanbul has been so far staunchly anti-nationalist. It has pursued various ways, inhabiting critically specific positions without being trapped by the already specified. In other words, the constellation of artists who brought up a coherent discursive field in the last decade maintained their engagement with the social context surrounding them but diligently avoided any association with essentialist identities. The tie with the urban experience has been an alternative route of relating to one’s location. Foregrounding the belongings to a city or a neighborhood, affiliating with subcultural formations, reflecting upon the urbanistic problems, tracing urban myths, making transversal connections between cities that are far from each other but share similar frequencies, have been strategies employed in that field. The remaining task is to differentiate this mode of acting and producing from the emerging ideology of Istanbulism, which reduces the urban experience into a brand name to be marketed. This entails a resistance to PR-led institutional objective of constraining the art practice within the privileged core of the city as
yet another subcultural chic, a quest for forcing the physical and mental limits of artistic activities towards the margins of the city, courage to have encounters with the dynamic social formations that are not allowed into public visibility, and to conceive aesthetics as ‘common feeling of experiencing’ and experiment on it in order to produce blueprints for
alternative ways of being common. I am pretty aware that I am asking too much.
 
This essay appears in the exhibition catalog of "Rejection Episodes", which is curated by Basak Senova. For more information on "Rejection Episodes" visit: 
http://www.nomad-tv.net/rejection_episodes