An opening note from Andrea Phillips
September 15 2013 at the Istanbul Biennial writing workshop :
On Sunday afternoon we sat on the terrace of the Galata Greek Primary School to discuss Networks of Dispossession, the collective data compilation project made by many contributors that maps networks of power and money in Turkey’s rapid and violent urban transformation projects exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial. http://mulksuzlestirme.org/ We tried to find ways to describe what had happened in Turkey since we last met in May and how the modification of the Biennial public programme could be understood as a response – or what could be the right response? Most of you had been in Istanbul during the occupation of Gezi Park and the sustained and repeated resistance in Taksim Square to Turkish urban transformation in the summer. I had been watching and reading from London, laboriously translating tweets and blogs from Turkish to English to try and understand. As the co-curator of the public programme, I felt like we needed to discuss the questions openly as actors in a situation that was cultural and political: is it true what the protestors who attacked the public programme said, that a Biennial, particularly one that has such a wealth of sponsorship engaged in the destruction of the city, has no right to take that very subject as its theme? That in so doing a hypocrisy and an erasure (a double violence of its own sort) is enacted? Or is this prohibition imposed upon the Biennial by its critics another type of censorship? What of the act of parrhesia that Foucault speaks about, the addressing of truth to power? Can those with power find ways to withdraw from their own power? What power does a Biennial have?
Networks of Dispossession seemed to bridge this opposition with its aesthetic graphic organisation of data into what Doreen Massey calls ‘cartographies of power’ (and I am told that within the group at the centre of its development there was heated discussion about participation in the Biennial). Networks of Dispossession seemed to me to utilise the tools of abstract conceptualism to demand that its readers engage with their own role in topographies of contemporary capitalism in the tradition of early Hans Haacke, Alan Sekula, Renee Green. On Sunday I asked if a work (of art, or anything else) could find ways to exist within these two realms, that of global and high profile art exhibition and collective, online political dissemination. We talked about sites of writing in Turkey; how writing, sometimes anonymous sometimes authored, could serve to extend the work done by Networks of Dispossession. Some of you felt the work almost physically as an impact on your lives, a visceral recognition and anger at the overwhelming scale of the problem and the Biennial’s small but undoubted role within it.
