Güher Gürmen & Mehmet Kahraman
Istanbul, the meeting point of cultures for centuries, now has a flourishing contemporary art scene. The European Union declared Istanbul 2010’s European Capital of Culture, which raised the visibility of contemporary art, gave artists opportunities to participate in international events, and led to the establishment of new galleries.
Istanbul’s galleries and art institutions are focused around the Beyoğlu district, including İstiklal Avenue, the busiest street in the city and the center of culture and nightlife. In the recent years, they have spread to other parts of the district and gradually changed the fabric of neighborhoods like Tophane, Karaköy, and Galata. Galata, one of the oldest quarters in the city, was initially home to European colonists and their banks, schools, and embassies, and after the establishment of the Republic in 1923, the district continued to be a center for culture and the arts until mid-century, when the area began to stagnate. In the 1990s the pedestrianization of İstiklal Avenue shifted the city’s entertainment center back to the area again, and low real estate prices attracted a young, middle-class demographic.
By 2000, Istanbul was becoming well-known as an arts center, largely due to the success of the Istanbul Biennial, founded in 1987. Established in 2004, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art on the Bosphorus shore of the district is an archive for Turkish contemporary art and an important patron for Turkish artists. In the Tophane neighborhood near the Museum, there are now contemporary art galleries one after the other up to the İstiklal Avenue, holding simultaneous openings during the Tophane Artwalk on Sundays.
The variety of art spaces, contemporary and not, is representative of the chaotic identity of the Beyoğlu district. Many large non-profit spaces on İstiklal Avenue are founded by banks or corporations, which also organize exhibitions and collect artworks. These spaces include Aksanat, Borusan, Garanti Platform, Yapı Kredi Kazım Taşkent Art Galler, and Arter. The nearby Pera Museum, although not a contemporary art space, hosts an Orientalist painting collection and travelling exhibitions from other museums. The Doğançay Museum, also nearby, shows the work of Burhan Doğançay and his father Adil Doğançay.
The majority of the district’s residents, however, are from Anatolian villages, creating tension with the new arts communities. This tension has a direct influence on artistic production – contemporary art in Turkey has had a political or economic perspective since the first biennial. The scarcity of international art critics and leaders is still a disadvantage for the district’s contemporary art scene, though we assume that the district will increasingly attract the attention of the international art scene.
An Artist-Run Space: Sanatorium
In the middle of the traditional galleries and art institutions, a different kind of art space is inside a 19th-century Catholic church on one of the side streets of İstiklal Avenue. Called Sanatorium, its name is a multilingual play on words: the Turkish word for “art” is “sanat” and the Latin suffix “orium” creates the meaning “a place for art.”
Guido Casaretto, an Istanbul-born Italian, and Tunca Subaşı, an artist from the Aegean region of Turkey, founded Sanatorium in 2008 after graduating from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Academy in Istanbul. With the addition of Can Ertaş and Feza Velicangil, the core team now consists of four artists, although they don’t define themselves as owners so much as artistic collaborators. Artist-run spaces are rare in Turkey and artist initiatives are mostly non-profits founded by artists focused on their own artistic production. Sanatorium owns a gallery with the aim of financing itself and realizing art projects with other artists. They also represent artists from galleries in New York and Beijing, producing Turkey’s first Chinese contemporary art exhibition.
Sanatorium is an example of the new dynamism in Turkish contemporary art scene. They say, “At the beginning, what we had in mind was to establish a platform to create and exhibit our artistic production together with other artist friends. Then it became something more than that. We do not have a manifesto and we are not tied to a specific framework. We believe that the most efficient thing to do in our situation is to gather around production and functionality rather than around a rigid set of rules.”
