Ardışık

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a video programme created by contemporary Turkish artists, featuring works commissioned by the SALT Contemporary Art Centre — with sites in Istanbul and Ankara — to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the institution. Under the title Ardışık (The Sequential), the programme sketches the scene of the most salient recent art in Turkey and is set forth as a reflection of the major debates taking place in the country.

At its site in the Galata neighbourhood, the original project included a series of solo shows by participating artists — Barış Doğrusöz, Deniz Gül, Volkan Aslan, Fatma Belkıs and Onur Gökmen, and Aykan Safoğlu — to present their new creations. The basis of the project is the generational link between these six artists, who all grew up in the 1980s and were young people in 1990s and thus share experiences and sensibilities. This is a generation that has experienced the thwarted promises of Westernisation and the autarchic Islamist shift that has shaped recent decades in Turkey. The works share a series of themes, such as the consideration of who writes history and from where, the debate between language and representation, the effects of symbolic power, the influence of advertising as unlimited exhibitionism and a questioning of modernisation as a manifest destiny.

On this occasion, Ardışık is presented as a touring video programme which seeks to enable the circulation of works between different museums, advocating their connection and debating hybrid models of production in contemporary art. The ultimate aim is to support artists’ practice given the potentially adverse effects in such turbulent times, and to examine with these formats the relationships and habits that could be established between artists, museums and audiences.

The programme is part of the actions emanating from L’Internationale, a confederation of seven major European institutions — including SALT and Museo Reina Sofía — which articulates and fosters these collaboration spaces.

Organized by

Collaboration

Programme

Friday, 21 January 2022 – 6pm / Second session: Saturday, 22 January 2022 – 6pm

Barış Doğrusöz. Sandstorm and the Oblivion
Turkey, 2017, colour, original version in Turkish with Spanish subtitles, DA, 8’

Deniz Gül. Kartpostal (Postcard)
Turkey, 2017–2020, colour, original version, sound, DA, 12’ in 3 fragments of 4’

Volkan Aslan. Best Wishes
Turkey, 2019, colour, original version in Turkish with Spanish subtitles, DA, 9’

Fatma Belkıs y Onur Gökmen. Alakadar (The Connected)
Turkey, 2021, colour, original version in Turkish with Spanish subtitles, DA, 30’

Aykan Safoğlu. Hundsstern steigt ab (Dog Star Descending)
Germany and Turkey, colour, original version in German with Spanish subtitles, DA, 12’
Co-produced by the 11th Berlin Biennale and SAHA

―First session presented by Meriç Öner Güven, associate director of SALT, and a post-session talk between artists Fatma Belkıs and Onur Gökmen.

―Second session presented by Meriç Öner Güven, associate director of SALT.

As part of his trilogy Locus of Power, Barış Doğrusöz examines in the Sandstorm and the Oblivion the archaeological site of Dura Europos, a huge ancient city, through an economic and political history in which the colonial discourse is confused with archaeology. The screening of Postcard is interspersed in the programme is a compendium of audiovisual fragments filmed by Deniz Gül in different countries; moving images which consider quotidian aspects as a visual alphabet and a modest attempt to reinterpret the aesthetics of postcards in a digital environment. Volkan Aslan’s Best Wishes is a letter addressed to the future, to anyone living in any part of the world, in which the recipient has no address, gender, race or age. It represents the variety and mundaneness of violence caused by state policy and how it subtly filters into our daily lives under the state of emergency. In The Connected, Fatma Belkıs and Onur Gökmen analyse the anxiety and fragility of the desire for modernisation, a recurring theme among the Turkish intelligentsia from the Ottoman Empire to contemporary Turkey. Finally, Dog Star Descending narrates, in a dynamic animation, the artist’s experience of alienation and queer identity through a personal archive of photographs.