Family Program
FIGHT CLUB SEMINAR
SALON ALEMAN- TOO DRUNK TO FUCK (BUT DRUNK ENOUGH TO TALK ABOUT ART )
by Julieta Aranda & Eduardo Sarabia
Using the ghost of a tequila bar as a starting point, Julieta Aranda and Eduardo Sarabia will host a domino tournament as the center point for a discussion about the natural handicaps of traditional discussions. Later on there will be a screening of Liam Gilick's informal bar talks from his seminar at unitednationsplaza in Berlin earlier this year. The screening will be introduced by Anton Vidokle, founder of unitednationsplaza. The format of the situation aims to keep the doors open to a free flowing, spontaneous and critical conversation with invited guests, blurring the lines between the artists and the audience and hopefully pushing all of the people involved to take risks within the discussion, instead of following the guidelines of traditional discursive models.
DJ session + drinking to follow!
LOOKING FOR HEADLESS
by Goldin+Senneby
Big Family Business is proud to present a book reading with the Gibraltar-based fictional author **** ****, arranged by artist duo Goldin+Senneby. **** will read from her forthcoming novel "Looking for Headless"; a murder-mystery exploring links between artistic investigations and the dark side of global finance.
After a professional career within the offshore consultancy business, **** **** recently turned to writing. Her debut novel Looking for Headless will be published in 2008, but already now she is doing a series of public readigs. Big Family Business hosts the first reading with **** **** in Turkey.
Goldin+Senneby is a collaborative framework between artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby; exploring notions of virtual economies and territories. For more info see: www.goldinsenneby.com
CRITICALITY FOR THE SAKE OF CRITICALITY
Speakers: Manray Hsu and Marysia Lewandowska
Critical voices and discursive arguments are folded in today's artistic and curatorial practice with diverse forms and in different levels of visual transformation, which is context-wise sensitive and strongly conceptual. As we try to stage curator Manray Hsu and artist Marysia Lewandowska's exhibition projects and artworks in a dialogue, BFB presents another space of criticality and makes an investigation and brainstorming for the language/form of critique in contemporary art. Good Gangsters will be moderating the session, as they also openly respond to the process of the BFB.
KEEP WORKING OR NETWORKING
Speakers: Annie Fletcher and Cevdet Erek
The main focus of this discussion is the dictonomy of choices in today's contemporary art: should artists/curators keep working or do networking? As contemporary art becomes more and more mobilized and globalized today, it is also functioning through the system of professionalism and careerism. So the basic question is: What about the relation between the speed of circulaton and the nature of our practices? Good Gangsters will moderate the discussion session that will start with Annie Fletcher and Cevdet Erek.
OFFICE ACTIVISM: AUTONOMY & ART PUBLICATION
Participated by Muhtelif (Adnan Yildiz, Pelin Tan, Ahmet Ogut), Parachute (Chantal Pontbriand), Flack Attack (Simon Goldin & Jakob Senneby), Site (Power Ekroth), Basso (Yusuf Etiman), Undo Magazine (Demetris Taliotis)
Is autonomy negotiatable in today's art publication business? How do art publications keep their critical stance while remaining a unique identity? How do they relate themselves with the art market and institutions with their power of media? Editors from various magazines are coming together to make a meeting to discuss and share their experiences to reflect their own roles and positions. The latest issues from them will be launched.
OPEN CHANNEL PRESENTATION
WHEN HUMOUR BECOMES CRITICAL
Curated by Lotte Juul Petersen
When humour becomes critical is a future exhibition project, which states humour as a serious criticality. The concept suggests humour as a potentially reforming and culturally more suitable when criticising societal issues. Different artists have been invited to show works in BFB project space such as Nevin Aladag, Fikret Atay, Lilibeth Cuenca, Dagmar Krøyer, the artist group Vibeke Mejlvang & Sofie Hesselholdt and Kuratör. Presenting the exhibition concept by curator Lotte Juul Petersen with some of the artists the intention is to have a public dialogue on the project before its realization in the future.
CURATORIAL SUMMIT
The idea of A Curatorial Summit in Istanbul came from Vasıf Kortun as an open channel proposal. Adnan Yıldız invited his generation of curators: Borga Kantürk, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Pelin Uran, Derya Yücel, and Özkan Cangüven to produce a problematic question -related to their practice and work- in curating for a further discussion. The session will focus on these questions produced by the young curators. Başak Şenova and Halil Altındere will moderate the session whereas Pelin Tan and Vasıf Kortun will take care of the level of criticality playing the roles of judges.
CONTEXT-SENSITIVE PROJECTS
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MODERN CITY
by STEALTH unlimited
Stepping up for a discussion on the current flux around modernist architecture and contemporary city development in Instanbul, Stealth will introduce 5 short tales around the Modern city. Starting from Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, drifting south-east to Belgrade and Skopje, a section through each of these cities will be presented in images and short chronicles to highlight how the ideas of urban development as envisioned and implanted during the modernist period, from1950's to 1970's, currently are 'infected' or swiped away. While coming from a seemingly 'uniform' International Style, being brought in for different political and ideologic reasons in different societies, the current status of these plans tells us a lot about the status of society of today - but also about the sometimes surprising agility of visionary plans to absorb or allow for the viral infiltrations of radically different forms of society and architecture. Istanbul will - with the participants on this round table - add another layer of experience to this, and certainly one would expect this to be a tempting and complex one.
ARMY OF LOVERS / NAZAR
by Alikidd vs Basclassé
Geraldkidd is a Berlin based fashion designer and artist: who transformed himself into Alikidd.
In his collection - Army of Lovers -which is all made of own second hand clothes - he is inspired by nowadays Turkish fashion production; he is playing with the image of global player brands - translating them in Turkish to show of the ridiculous consuming of such brands: as well as showing of turkey that till today they came out to produce for all those brands and besides forgetting to create own fashion: His work is related to working class chic; hand sewing details; playing with graphic elements like deforming the Turkish flag.
For this project he collaborated with the Berlin/Istanbul based designer and artist Viron Vert, here turning into his alter ego Bas Classé, showing an artwork of illustration printed on leather.
The piece "nazar" is the first piece of the Bas Clas Series. It's a work that covers the specialties of the city of Istanbul focusing on the coexistence of it's large amount of cultures, which Viron's family is also assembled of and therefore have had a great influence on his life. Istanbul is a blueprint for a modern society where orient and okcident, Muslims, Christians and Jewish but also rich and poor live in a constant struggle and still have a long stony way to go to find respect each for other and leave each other the necessary freedom.
The city shows how hard it is to find peace in a globalized world, but also that it is possible.
I PIRATE MY OWN WORK
by Chen Chieh-Jen
The absurdity of pirated artwork can't even be compared to the unreasonable conditions of the contemporary Chinese art market. My video work Factory was auctioned for 120,000 US Dollars in the black market without my recognition.
I decide to make a performance to pirate my very own work and sell it at a crazily cheap price when my work is concurringly showing in the 10th Istanbul Biennial. The income shall be a donation for some philanthropic organizations.
Making a "legal" artist street vendor and pretending my work is again pirated, for me, are a kind of a cool response to the previous incident and the current art market.
WE ARE THE BASTARDS NOT FIT FOR OUR OFFICE
by 39,9
39,9 will participate in Big Family Business (BFB) in Ataken Factory, IMÇ. As the editors of the publication DICTIONARY our contribution is dealing with representation in relation to the commonly perceived understanding of the act of translation;
translate /træns'lert/ v 1 (sth) (from sth) (into sth) to change sth spoken or esp written into another language. 2 to be translated or to be capable of being translated into a another language: [Vadv] Most poetry doesn't translate well. 3 (sth) into sht to express sth or to be expressed in a different, esp a more practical form: It's time to translate our ideas into action.
> translation /-'lerfn/ n 1 the activity of translation: errors in translation.
The four members of 39,9 will litterally dress in translation. We will do business with a local tailor by who we order copies of the outfits that we are each wearing. The tailor will copy the outfits into her translation and understanding of the four different everyday garments. The outfits - pants, shirts and blouses - might originally have been produced in Rumania, Thailand, Turkey or in another country where wages are low and the circumstances under which the tailors are working unacceptable in the contexts where the products will later be worn.
The Emperor's New Clothes
"If Your Imperial Majesty will condescend to take your clothes off," said the swindlers, "we will help you on with your new ones here in front of the long mirror."
"Don't hesitate to tell us what you think of it"
"How well Your Majesty's new clothes look. Aren't they becoming!" He heard on all sides, "That pattern, so perfect! Those colors, so suitable! It is a magnificent outfit."
"This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all."
In collaboration with other local vendors will we will engage in big family business, asking for favours and giving something in return: (sth) (from sth) (into sth)
At Ataken Factory we will perform dressed in translation as hosts of a reception. The room will be 39,9 square meters.
We hereby invite the local environment including the eager art crowed
- our partners in crime and business.
Project Coordinator: Didem Yazici
STUDIES ON ECONOMY AND GEOGRAPHY OF ARTIST PARTICIPATION
by Minna L. Henriksson
The series of drawings aim at illustrating the geographical focus of the artist participation in the international Istanbul Biennial in its history and present, as well as of the parallel events of the 10th Istanbul Biennial. My special interest here is in the existence of national funding structures for exporting contemporary art, and how artists coming from countries where such support structure exist, can perhaps be in a privileged position to others when selection for the artists to the biennial is made.
LIGHT BULBS / AMPULLAR
by Nancy Atakan
In 1976 using 5533 5th Block of Istanbul Manifatura Carsisi (IMC, an office space he inherited from his mother) as his office, my husband founded the Atakan Company and began to represent and sell West German Durkkopp industrial machines to the Turkish garment market. During the 1980s and 90s the company grew and moved to a larger space in another part of Istanbul. After the 2000 economic crisis, the spaces in IMC became a depot for old or left over machines and files. With only minimal changes, these offices have been transformed by Esther Lu and Adnan Yildiz into Big Family Business, an open space for use during the 10th International Istanbul Biennial.
During the early months of 2007, as a project for Big Family Business, I visited several factories in Istanbul that use Durkkopp sewing machines to produce readymade clothes. Atakan Company representatives made appointments with the factory owners for my visits and I spent time in the boss's office explaining my project. As an authority, a stranger, an outsider, a spy, a public voyeur, someone that everyone wanted to impress and please, I entered the factories to take 'candid' photographs. Without explanation to the workers, factory owners lead me through their realms and allowed me to photograph.
From over one hundred photographs of factory spaces, workers, and owners, I selected 21 portraits of the female workers to manipulate and present as digital portraits in BFB. Most of the women I photographed were young, clean, attractive, dressed in colorful harmonious clothes as they seemingly ignored me and concentrated on their work. Since I came from outside, since I did not interact with them, for me, the whole experience became only 'make believe.' On this trip to the unknown, a place I have never worked, a place I avoided, a place viewed as degrading, a place I feared (my father was a textile worker), I imagined the female workers to be like light bulbs that are used as long as they perform brightly and are discarded when they start to fade. But, perhaps this is only my projection; perhaps I am describing myself.
ANIMAX REMIX
by Hongjohn Lin + Hao Yi Chen, Wan Jen Chen,
Pei Shan Tsai, Ya Ling Yang
Animax Remix opens the dialogue of animation cultures in the traffic of globalization where the local reinvents and endows new cultural meanings. Utilizing performance, presentations, and multi-approaches of researches and investigations, Animax Remix is an attempt to share the collective memory belongs to those of 70's and 80's, when the animation industry went globally and in the fashion of post-Ford production. Starting from the local perspectives of animation culture of the 70's such as《Gotcha man》,《Candy Candy》,《The Smurf》 reincarnated in Taiwan's unique card game(an'ya biao ) , the work initiates the possible sociocultural scenarios of different places and nations such as Turkey, Japan, Australia, and France to display individuals' memories as a way of communications, and therefore a new meaning from our negotiations from the without.
SHARE WIDELY!
DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE ON THE WEB -- THE SHAPE OF COMMON EXPERIENCE IN A TRANSITORY ECONOMY
by Marko Stamenkovic / CCC - Critical Curatorial Cybermedia / Geneva, Switzerland
The Virtual Wall Papers project focuses on creative expression and alternative art discourses using digital art for the Web. A broad range of Virtual Wall Papers, designed by an international group of artists, is offered to participatory platforms of their choice. Virtual Wall Papers are conceptual/activist works using quite consciously the shared culture in the knowledge economy. Among the knowledge environments, the e-participation environments offer an opportunity to construct shared knowledge on a non-profit base, opening critical perspectives in the field of Internet networks.
They deal with a new type of media practice defined as 'post-media practices' that offer an alternative to the regime of mass media. Post-media practices are characterised by small, diverse, distributed networks of operators who make use of the new, digital means of production and distribution. Post-media practice relays to a critical attitude towards the media in use, acting in lateral rather vertical configurations, and an acceptance of the processuality and continuous transformation of context and practice.
The Virtual Wall Papers project takes part to the concept development of the Contrasted Working Worlds project (CWW) that aims to lead to a comprehensive understanding of the capitalist transformation into knowledge economy. The emphasize on participatory cultures, couple with a critical approach to the history of neo-liberalism, is a condition to find out ways to introduce gift economy in the labour market, as the Open Source movement did in software economics.
LOVE & DEATH IN AMOROUS ART
by Antonios Bogadakis
The aesthetic intention and its fascinating sense of new conditions and new dreams that creates drives art to a practice that denies the sentimental ideology within which the artist is the monster - this Flaubertian instinct that preserves the pre-manufactured position of an artistic disposition, which in its turn consumes the artist himself but leaves his logic intact.
Driven into a world of possibilities, where we usually see the artist's self-contained and flamboyant projection of reality, one wonders what becomes of all these remnants of love and death, of all this anxiety that breaks the glass of life and scatters wounds to be depicted and objects of ego to be found while one awaits to be cherished by the pure love that art is for its speculative vision of death.
Love and death make up the space within art's perspective that reconstitutes with unusual precision the structure of a social world whose function is to remind - to the artist first and foremost - of his insecurity, his loneliness, his daydreaming and his inertia. These short moments of hesitation and lingering create the gigantic illusion of a world in which love and death is the beginning and the end of life's magnificent review.
This is a presentation of two artists that both concretise the elements of such moments and whose honesty might as well function as the frustration and bitterness of our best memories...
SOME OF US TRY SO HARD TO BE SOMEBODY*
by Öykü Özsoy
We are looking for who we are. This is one of the main motives of our lives, searching for our identity. Maybe art is the only way to see ourselves from somebody else's eyes. While we face artists' works, and try to understand them; at the same time we also intuitionally attend to find a clue to understand/describe/analyse ourselves. Searching for a mirror which reflects ourselves, seeking an answer for our questions about being. But how do artists find something that reflects themselves? How do they deal with the complexities of everyday life? How do they develop their relationship to time, space, others? The video screening programme "Some of us try so hard to be somebody" aims to investigate the various strategies that have been used by artists to deal with identity, language, changing human behaviours in different surroundings, mis/communication. During the video screening programme, the visitors will have a chance to participate a discussion with the artists in an informal communication platform.
*The title of the screening is taken from the lyrics of the soul classic "Is it because I'm black?"(1970) by Syl Johnson. Additionally the same song was used by David Blandy for his video work titled Hollow Bones (passage of the soul part II), 2001.