For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

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One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions. more »

In Amerika, Kafka’s unfinished novel, the sixteen-year-old Karl, after being seduced by a housemaid who then becomes pregnant by him, is sent to America, according to his parents’ wish. In New York, the boy, who has been cast out by his parents, begins his social downslide. In search of belonging, he experiences a world in which one only looks after oneself and which is calculated towards one’s emotional needs.

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He can only gain social acknowledgment and emotional intimacy at the price of subjugation and self-exploitation. In the last chapter of the never-completed novel, Karl discovers a poster for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma on the streets of New York, which promises work and a home for everyone. Karl signs up and heads west with the theater. According to Max Brod, who published the novel after Kafka’s death, the theater was planned as a place where Karl could participate and thereby find a home and himself. more »

As the artistic duo SIGNA, Signa Soerensen and Arthur Koestler provide our world with replicas of itself. They install reproductions of the original, three-dimensional parallel worlds, habitable cartographies: a run-down flophouse is the setting for the hopeless world of six Eastern European prostitutes who are ruled by their social degredation and the brutality of their pimps — a mystical nightmare universe consisting of forty areas filled with religious, political and social rituals. The wing of a closed-off psychiatric station, led by the female doctor, Dorine Chaikin, and her team, subject amnesia patients to a procedure that includes welfare service and discipline.

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The parallel worlds of SIGNA are replicas which have lost their historical and geographical attributes. The colors, costumes, furniture, in their tiniest details: these seamless properties offer temporal and regional associations, but the where and when remains indefinite. more »

In Heinrich Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionettentheater”, a discussion takes place between a layman and the principal dancer of the city opera. The layman, impressed by the presentation, wants to know what kind of technical mechanism has made it possible for the puppets to dance so convincingly that it seems as though dance itself has been shown in its most perfect form. The dance professional considers this for a moment, then gives an answer: When we see a “perfect” dance presentation and ask how it was done, then we’re already missing the point. It does not depend on the mechanics, nor on the perfected techniques with which the individual limbs of the puppets are handled with the most precision.

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If one wants to understand why a dance appears “perfect”, it is much more effective not to focus so much on the technical perfection, but rather on the mechanisms of the representation of the dance. If these mechanisms are perfect, then the viewer who sees a movement corresponding to the represented one has to call this movement “dance”. more »

Art can be critical of media and media criticism can be fun—that’s the message anyway from “dream manufacturer” Götz Bury’s art. In his Traumfabrik (“dream factory”), the artist produces prototypical works from the image landscapes of the media world, whether they be turkey-serving presidents in combat gear as the protagonists of the “axis of evil”—with or without AK-47s, holidays under palm trees, documentations of Neanderthal life, or things happening otherwise elsewhere in the world.

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These props that are inspired by stereotypes of reality in the media are developed from sheet metal, pasteboard, and wood in the workshop of the artist and are reimagined by visitors to the Traumfabrik through extreme gestures and impersonations. These compositions of “reality images” are thereby experienced as the scurrility of exaggeration, thanks to the omnipresent one-dimensionality of media-presented reality itself. more »

This beautiful song annihilates, at least since the group Fuckhead has been celebrating its progressive deconstruction in a big way. Already captivated in recent years by the adrenaline kick of the mosh pit, the musicians and performers Aigner, Bruckmayr, Strohmann, Kern, Jöchtl, and Pittermann got their start originally as a noise-rock band. Along with their music and audience members, who are integrated onto the stage, Tableaux Vivants-type held-pose ending scenes have allowed Fuckhead to differentiate themselves from the authenticity-oriented hardcore punk generation at end of the eighties. Their ironic handling of political and masculinity-related themes in their “authenticity pictures” is still relevant for them today.

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However, irony must be understood in order to be noticed. This was not always the case. At the beginning of their career, Fuckhead’s role as a projection surface often ended up being a bad call. The left-wingers found Fuckhead to be too right, the right-wing found them to be too gay, the underground felt they lacked political objectives, and for the art world, Fuckhead was too nonconformist to be integrated into either art theory circles or the art business. more »

“Mankind” consists of two female artists. As in every other civilization, this one also has its prehistory. One half of Mankind is D. Kimm, a poet and musician originating from Montréal. Already before joining Mankind, Kimm was organizing literature festivals and was the leader of “Les Filles électriques”, which performed poetry in its written, spoken, and electronic forms. The other half of Mankind, Alexis O`Hara, a musician from Ottawa, was already examining the human condition through sound experimentation, Onomatopoea, and Poetry Slam performances.

Mankind performs live electronic sound samples, mixed with their own voices set to sound loops, poetic conversations, and spontaneously produced noise bytes, creating a kind of “sound cinema” rich with images, sounds and content. In their own words, Mankind describes themselves as a “supersonic cinema with a visual bonus”. The public gets a cinematic experience minus the rewind button. The improvisatorial character of their performances constantly creates something new to view and breaks through the glass fourth wall, which in conventional theatre, normally separates the art from the audience. more »

The job description for Marten Spangberg encompasses many terms. He got his start as a dance critic, writes on theory, is active as a performer, dance dramaturge, a curator, and a choreographer, and is considered a stage producer in quite a positive sense. Spangberg has been collaborating with the Swedish architect, Lindstrand Tor, since 2004 under the name International Festival.

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Their collaborative work explores perceptions of concepts related to body and space, and has gained international attention. At the present and in the last year, they have been invited to the European Arts Center in Cologne, the PERFORMA 07 in New York, and the Steirischen Herbst 07. For the festival in Graz, they developed “The Theater”, a multi-faceted enterprise which simultaneously describes a venue for stories, characters, and illusions, the performances that take place there, and the actual spatially-adaptable theater that was constructed from freight containers. more »

Under revolving pastry plates with star motifs, cut-outs from pictures of bygone eras appear. Shadows of hands form letters over photographs and textiles throw folds over 16-millimeter film loops, which gradually go up in flames. Rotary pumps from aquariums propel multicolored oil droplets on water surfaces in a circular motion, instrumental sounds get mixed in with vocal experiments.

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Visual and acoustic echoes bounce off the walls, flowing, climbing, covering, and piling over microphones and slide, overhead, and rattling film projectors. The projected collective spectacle succeeds in flooding the viewer with an overflowing variety in the form of a broad audiovisual image, creating a kind of audiovisual synergy. 4shrooms consider themselves the participants of such audiovisual performances. What they have in common is innovation, experimentation, and analog collaboration. more »

She produces films every year. She stands before the camera. She directs—in recent years, together with Chris Haring. It was a blessing that she met Chris Haring, explains Mara Mattuschka. He is generous. He has an open system of working that integrates people and their respective points of view.

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Haring stages his productions in bare spaces, from which Mattuschka makes films which correspond to cinematic rules of setting and dramaturgy. She extends her perspective as a painter into her cinematic approach. Up-close views of the body, from below, from above. Views which distort perspective. With digital retouching, she designs places, architectures, and spatialities. The films resulting from their collaboration are called: “Legal Errorist”, “Part Time Heroes”, and “Running Sushi”. more »