In Ali Kazma's first solo exhibition in Germany, TANAS presents eight works from the artist's video series Obstructions. The videos are closely observed portraits of people pursuing their occupations day after day, producing things, making repairs, making things function. Kazma goes to different locations such as a clockmaker's workshop, a brain surgeon's operating room, a steel mill near Istanbul, a slaughterhouse, a jeans factory, and a ballet studio. Complex actions and fields of activity from the workaday world - cutting, punching, piercing, drilling, heating, sewing, drawing, cleaning, testing, labeling, classifying - are documented through precise long-term observation and keenly honed images.

The work "Brain Surgeon" shows a doctor prepping and operating on a woman suffering from Parkinson's disease. "Slaughterhouse" begins with a butcher's knife being sharpened and documents the traditional method stipulated by religious dietary law: the animal is killed by a single clean cut. In "Clock Master", the artist observes a clockmaker's dexterity as he restores a 19th century French clock, while "Jean Factory" follows the complicated process used to mass-produce a garment.

The element linking all the videos is the human drive to counteract threats to the fragile equilibrium between order and chaos through unremitting hard work. When the brain surgeon attempts to heal the body or the clockmaker repairs an antique clock, analogous skills are involved. Likewise, the work of the butcher in the slaughterhouse and the seamstress in the jeans factory have a common purpose, the satisfaction of basic human needs. The juxtaposition of videos of different lengths creates an additional level of content, for the coincidental interplay of images and sounds from the individual videos continually offers new perspectives and insights.

Ali Kazma's video work "What Remains", recently shown in the TANAS group exhibition "Not easy to save the world in 90 days", accompanied the Galatasaray soccer team from melancholy hotel rooms to glamorous trophy matches, portraying the whole gamut of their everyday life. In the series Obstructions, Kazma's fascination turns to how people constantly endeavor to shape and maintain the environment through their own efforts.

Ali Kazma on his work:
"I am very interested in the passing of things. In Clock Master I enjoy the multiple ways the issue of temporality is approached - time as change, as decay vs. the constant struggle of man to possess and control it; by intellectualizing, systemizing, form-giving, caring, etc. Ultimately, of course it is a lost cause. In the case of the clock master, a man working to fix a representation of time; a clock, on and through which time has passed. Human Will as Local and Temporal Obstructions against Temporality and/or Temporality as the Ultimate Obstruction against Human Will/ Desire. Obstructions for me is a code word for the complicated co-existence of both."

Ali Kazma lives and works in Istanbul.

Halil Altindere, Fikret Atay, Köken Ergun, Ali Kazma, Servet Kocyigit, Ahmet Ögüt, Erkan Özgen, Sener Özmen, Cengiz Tekin, Nasan Tur

Turkish contemporary art is heading in a new direction. The steadily growing reputation of the International Istanbul Biennial, the regular presence of Turkish artists in important international exhibitions (documenta, Manifesta, biennials, the Carnegie International), the establishment of internationally-oriented private art museums in Turkey (Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul Modern, SANTRALISTANBUL, Pera Museum, Sabanci Museum) and the dialogue between German and Turkish artists promoted through a variety of grants (DAAD, Transfer) have established a very positive profile here in Germany for the as yet little-known “art scene in Turkey”. Political developments, the still unresolved Cyprus question and the problematic discussions between the EU and Turkey on Turkey’s entrance into the European Union lend increasing topicality to the Turkish art scene.

Outside Istanbul, an interesting young art scene has formed around the art academies and educational institutes in cities such as Izmir, Ankara, Eskisehir and Diyarbakir. The conditions of artistic production are even more challenging there than in Istanbul. Nonetheless, in Diyarbakir, the most important metropolitan center for Kurds living in Turkey, a lively and exciting art scene fueled by multicultural diversity has developed in recent decades. A driving force behind that scene are the activities of Anadolu Kültür, the arts and cultural foundation founded in 2003 at the initiative of entrepreneur Osman Kavala. The foundation is committed to fostering cultural understanding between Kurds and Turks. It supports the Diyarbakir Sanat Merkezi (Diyarbakir Arts Center), cooperates with European cultural institutes and has formed a regional network with private cultural institutions in neighboring countries. The successful project work of this hub has facilitated a cultural transfer between the Anatolian countryside and the urban centers of western Turkey that is unprecedented in the history of the Republic. These activities have freed local culture from longstanding isolation and ushered in a new era, especially in the field of contemporary art. The new art scene is defined by some 40 Kurdish and Turkish artists who work predominantly with new media, mainly video and photography, and are either employed as public secondary school art teachers or still studying art education at Dicle University.

Not easy, to save the world in 90 days, the exhibition curated by René Block, examines the various levels of reflection engaged in by a young generation of Turkish artists. It shows artists whose central themes are the contradictory aspects of their own background and the circumstances of life in Turkey and in the diaspora. Questions of individual identity are intimately linked with politics, religion and gender roles, but also with statements on the globalized art system and its market mechanisms. These artists move between the parallel spheres of public and private life, between being observed and escaping notice, and develop their critical works in a charged arena between assimilation and autonomy. The participants represent three different groups, each highlighting different aspects of the emerging generation. Halil Altindere and Ali Kazma are among the group that lives and works in Istanbul. A second group consists of artists living abroad (Köken Ergun, Nasan Tur, Ahmet Ögüt, Servet Kocyigit). The third group lives in the city of Diyarbakir (Fikret Atay, Sener Özmen, Erkan Özgen, Cengiz Tekin). Most of the participating artists are chiefly of Kurdish descent. It is important to emphasize that the works on exhibit make pointedly direct and ironic reference to political subjects and pose a legitimate question about “cultural identity”. The artists in Not easy, to save the world in 90 days explore the complexities of their socialization, a blend of western European and Asian worldviews and life experiences. They approach the country with a degree of detachment and investigate the meaning of rootedness and being uprooted, of familiarity and foreignness.

Curator: René Block
Text: Necmi Sönmez

top:Halil Altindere Mirage, 2008, C-Print auf Alu-Dibond, 80 x 120 cm

middle:Fikret Atay, Batman vs. Batman, 2009 (Video Still), Video, 15:00 min, Courtesy: The artist, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Outlet Gallery Istanbul, Copyright: Tanas Berlin

bottom: Sener Özmen, Kavsak/ Kreuzung, 2009, C-Print auf Dibond, 80 x 120 cm, Courtesy: The artist, Outlet Gallery Istanbul, Copyright: Tanas Berlin

Esra Ersen works with various media, from video to installation and to photography. Her works mediate the domain of the social through intimate encounters. Ersen's practice lies in the heart of the encounter and dialogue that she triggers. Ersen shares time, space and experience with the subjects of her pieces where the social phenomena she chooses to focus flourishes. In other words, notions such as integration, regeneration, gentrification, rehabilitation, social democracy and sustaining power are put into question through relating to the communities who are under the influence. After investing a period of research on the issues and the conditions Ersen wants to reflect, she approaches to individuals and brings in individualities, who belong to that community she chooses to work with. The idea of community, its foundations and conditions sparkle through the verbal and the visual, leading the emergence of social, political, economic, psychological, sensual and physical aspects of such formation.

In her first solo exhibition in Berlin, Ersen will be showing four works, one of which has been specially commissioned by TANAS. Passengers (2009) places 'a' social conditioning in Istanbul on display. Influenced by a newspaper clipping that informs about people who have been living in Istanbul for the last forty years and yet have not seen the Bosporus, Ersen starts to investigate the foundations of such conditioning. She approaches to a group of women who have been living in Istanbul for more than thirty years and who have not stepped out of their district. Ersen takes these women accompanied by their children and some male relatives to the Bosporus. The piece is composed of two screens, one of which displays the route that the bus takes to the planned spot, whereas the other shows the streets of the district and brings significant details to the front. The piece is produced in the pre-election period in Istanbul where flags and banners of parties occupy the public space and are specifically massively visible in districts where the social habitat is enclosed in its territory. Hence the piece is a metaphorical journey taken to the sea where the political and social tensions are revealed through the visual. In the exhibition, Ersen is exhibiting three other consequent works, which she has been commissioning for international biennials such as Liverpool Biennial, São Paolo Biennial, and for the project In 2052 Malmo will no longer be Swedish at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö.
Perfect/Growing Older (Dis)Gracefully (2006) is a one-to-one encounter of Ersen with Helen who is a long-term resident of Liverpool.

Ersen investigates the notion of regeneration through working with Helen and introducing her to 'newnesses', which gradually leads to a change of Helen's usage of the city and her relating. For the course of her work, Rehabilitation (2006) Ersen displays eight jackets that have been produced in São Paolo with members of an active gang, which is put under the rehabilitation process by the State. The jackets display sentences by members of the gang with which reads what they want to say to the society they live in. The jackets have been produced in double so that each jacket is also in use by the members Ersen has worked with; whereas other jackets become objects of art that also represent the process. Parachutist in Third Floor, Birds in Laundry (2005) is an outcome of a two-year research and case study Ersen has surveyed on the functioning of social democracy and its control mechanisms as well as their approach to the immigrant communities. The piece composed of three screens focuses on the imaginary that is created to formulate communities and to found the norms of belonging as well as the expected future of the immigrants living in the housing blocks, which were once planned for Swedish working class families in the 60ies. The exhibition puts a variety of works on display where the methodology of Ersen and her practice becomes visible from various perspectives and through working various socio-political conditions.

Ersen lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul.


Exhibitions:
2006 Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (solo),
2005 O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz (solo)
2001 Moderna Museet, Stockholm (solo)
2006 Liverpool Biennial , Liverpool 2006 27th Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo
2003 Poetic Juctice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
2002 Manifesta 4, Europan Biennial of Contemporary art, Frankfurt
2002 Pause, 4 th Kwangju Biennial, Kwangju
1995 Orient/ation, 4 th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul

Curator: René Block
Text: Fatos Ustek, independent art critic & curator

"The most hackneyed communist platitude has more hierarchies of significance than contemporary bourgeois profundity, which only ever signifies apologetics."

Walter Benjamin, Letter, March 7, 1931.

The exhibition 'Red Thread' is conceived as a 'prologue' to the 11th International Istanbul Biennial (September 12 - November 8, 2009). The Biennial is entitled 'What Keeps Mankind Alive?', which is the English translation of the protest song 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?' from "The Three Penny Opera", written in 1928 by Bertolt Brecht, in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. 'The Three Penny Opera' thematises the process of redistribution of ownership within bourgeois society and sheds an unforgiving light onto a variety of elements of capitalist ideology. Brecht's assertion from this play, that 'a criminal is a bourgeois and a bourgeois is a criminal' is as true as ever, and the correspondences of rapid developments of liberal economy on disintegration of hitherto existing social consensus in 1928 and in present times are striking.

The concept of the Biennial proposes not to go back to Brecht as a classic that needs to be rediscovered and shown to new generations, but rather to reflect on latencies of the past in the present and investigate possibilities of art to re-examine old and open new relationships between social engagement and aesthetic gesture.

The 'Red Thread' exhibition presents artistic positions related to Biennial themes and process of its inception, creating fragmented narratives dealing with questions of auto-histories, self-positioning, post-colonial context, dataesthetics, corporeality, religious hypocrisy, reinterpretation of (art) history and critical artistic engagements in non-central zones of Western project of modernism.

The title 'Red Thread' refers to the continuity of an aspiration to imagine in reality the consequences of a new possibility repressed by the dominant state of affairs, as the guiding principle that threads and circulates through times and places. The thread may stretch, meander or bifurcate, but it never breaks. The 'Red Thread' is a metaphor for invisible but vital relations that in continuo link up different endeavors and explorations regardless of their spatio-temporal determinations.

The work by Runo Lagomarsino (b. 1977, lives in works in Malmö) "If You Don't Know What the South Is, It's Simply Because You Are from the North" problematizes the space between universalism and the post-colonial realities defining the present day. In the 'Red Thread' that in-between space quite literally frames all other works.

The Installation "Learning to See Less. Lebanon a protracted civil-war" by Walid Sadek (b. 1966, lives and works in Beirut) takes exile as a starting point for dealing with impossibility of containing and describing the limits of loss, alluding to that which is not possible to name.

Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, lives in works in Oakland) takes us on a road trip through the world of state secrets, hidden budgets, covert military bases, and disappeared people. Paglen uses different strategies to show us how the internal contradictions of this 'black world' give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

In the "Presidential Elections", Marina Naprushkina (b. 1981, lives in works in Minsk and Frankfurt) investigates the political landscapes of the countries that become sovereign states after the wreck of the USSR, and underlines the limitations of 'democratic choice'.

Lisi Raskin (b. 1974, lives and works in New York) explores the fears and the ever-present paranoia of Cold War rhetoric in Reagan-era American politics as well as different aspects of land use and its relationship to the architecture of war and nuclear power use.

"Pages (Spread)" by Vlatka Horvat (b. 1974, lives and works in New York), questions the potentials of reorganization of physical and social space, by starting with an empty A4 page that is 'spreading' out, and conquering the space around it, not without allusions to territorial politics.

In a few moments showing a cat desperately attempting to enter inner space through a glass door, the video "Direct Negotiations" by Shahab Fotouhi, (b. 1980, lives and works in Tehran and Frankfurt), refers to a political reality of Iran and its international relations, declaring the uselessness of the incessant discussions, speculations and conspiracies surrounding the subject.

During the 1970s KP Brehmer (1938 - 1998) developed the method of critically interpreting contemporary social and political developments by using color and form in the mediation of statistics revealing consequences and failures of political decisions. His reworking of the imaginary of pop culture, infiltration in the structures of art world, its commercial exploitation, and his interest in educational impact of visual interpretations of political and social reality attempted to utilize art as a tool for political action.

The violence against sexual minorities in post Yugoslav context becomes a substitute for violence against ethnical minorities. The project “East Side Story” by Igor Grubic (b. 1969, lives and works in Zagreb) takes recent violence against Gay Pride celebrations in Zagreb and Belgrade as a starting point in exploring the topic of the violence against the other.

“Nisai” by Canan Senol (b. 1970, lives and works in Istanbul) is a book consisting of miniatures and calligraphy that all refer to the statements in Koran-i Kerim under the title “Nisa”, showing the downside of the role of a woman shaped under the strict statements of sins and shame.

The fabric collages of Nilbar Güres (b. 1977, lives and works in Vienna) probe into the recent fights over the representation of female sexuality, by challenging the everyday enforcement of femininity and its request for well-mannered adherence to a set of structured behavioral rules and beautification procedures.

By staging the youth brass band playing in a bedrock of an abandoned swimming pool emblematic Richard's Strauss's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", most famously used in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", the video "Zarathustra" by Jesse Jones (b. 1978, lives and works in Dublin) conveys a sense of modernity undecided if it is from a doomed past or a time yet to come.

A series of collages by Vyacheslav Akhunov (b. 1948, lives and works in Tashkent) shown at 'Red Thread' are part of artist's exploration of current incapacity of global society to project itself into the future, which results in a clash between a need to move backward and a wearying anticipation of change.

The 'Red Thread' exhibition in Tanas continues the open research process of the 11th International Istanbul Biennial, started through a series of round table and public lectures under the same title, organized in Istanbul in 2008 and 2009. The 'Red Thread' in Istanbul included a number of artists, cultural theorists, curators, architects and urbanists, in an effort to initiate discussions and critical examination of social, temporal and spatial limitations of representative 'event' culture, in the field of contemporary art paradigmatically exemplified by phenomenon of biennale exhibitions. The loose structure of different formats stretched over time attempts to uses discursive, analytical, and explicative possibilities of contemporary art, to see if it is possible to construct conditions that would enable rethinking the hegemonic understanding of culture. Today not only art as material product, but also its promotion and the very system of presentation, have become marketing tools and ideologically lucrative products. As the curators set of on an ambitious, and even presumptuous task of rethinking the conditions of art production, that has seemingly already failed on so many occasions, they state that they are aware that: "In art there is a fact of failure, and a fact of partial success. (…) Works of art can fail so easily; it is so difficult for them to succeed.(…) Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should not conclude from them there should be no more struggles."

Bertolt Brecht, in: "Against Georg Lukacs"

top left: Lisi Raskin, Control Room, 2008, Courtesy die Künstlerin und Milliken Gallery
top right: Igor Grubic, East Side Story, 2006-2008
middle left: Vyacheslav Akhunov, aus der Serie Lenjinijana, 1977-82
middle right: Canan Senol, Nisai, 1999
bottom: Exhibition view Red Thread, Tanas 2009 Photo: Uwe Walter / Berlin

In their new co-production “UNEMPLOYED EMPLOYEES – i found you a new job!” the artists question the meaning of work by means of an expansive installation. While some people are occupied with folding and unfolding clothes at an endless assembly line-like table, perfume is sprayed in another corner of the space like the sales tactics in department stores and drugstores. The employees were signed up for these jobs after an application procedure; they have a break room at their disposal, which is also meant to be a room for communication and discussion with visitors. In a “Guide” that is applied to the walls, the artists formulate their thoughts and questions about the theme of economic, social and artistic production under headings such as displacement, emancipatory creativity, schematization, positioning, hierarchical relations,

freedom, organisation, communication, identity, proletariat and “precariat”, participation, control, alienation, representation, sacrifice or discourse. One of the central questions in this guide is: “Is it a matter now of interpreting the world, or changing it?”

On May 1 a demonstration by the artists on the theme of the exhibition will take place from 3 to 5 pm. Afterwards, the new publication of the monographs by Aydan Murtezaoglu & Bülent Sangar will be celebrated.

May 01, 2 – 9 pm, May 02, 11 am – 8 pm, May 03, 11am – 6 pm
Closed on April 10 and May 21, 2009

Aydan Murtezaog(lu & Bülent S,angar, UNEMPLOYED EMPLOYEES – i found you a new job!, Ausstellungsskizze, 2009

Exhibition View Tanas 2009 Photo: Peter Anders