Following the exhibitions in London, the international art project Open Space Istanbul, which aims to bring together the artists, curators and art professionals, launches in Turkey with Genco Gülan and Aslı Dinç. This event will also serve as the unofficial pre-launch of Open Dialogue Istanbul that will start in July 2015, initially as a collaborating project to Open Space Istanbul. The curators of the launch are Billur Tansel and Huma Kabakcı.
The video installation Newist that the artist Gülan (known for his multidisciplinary conceptual works) has been working on for more than fourteen years will be exhibited in Suma Han for the first time on the 11th of June. Newist, in which the real and fictional events interlock, sets off from a text consisting of the notes taken by Genco Gülan in New York at the end of Summer 2001.
The main headings in the text consists of “writings, readings, recording actions, the city, the underground, museology, New York and Istanbul”. The short notes and details, which seemed to be irrelevant with each other at first points out the atmosphere of New York in the month beforeSeptember 11.
Newist has been shot in New York, Istanbul, Brazil and Russia since 2001. The movie includes the shootings carried out in the construction site of Istanbul Metro and Basilica Cistern. The casting of the movie includes Genco Erkal, Ayça Damgazı and Ulgar Manzakoğlu.
Aslı Dinç will meet with the audience in the launching of Open Space Istanbul with her work entitled “Echo of a distant time”. The artist talks about her project as follows: “I came across the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus during the psychogeographic tours that I took during the Casa Dell’Arte Rezidans program. It is a mausoleum built for the King Mausolos by the order of his wife and sister Artemisia. It is an open air museum which is also defined as one of the Seven Wonders of the World and is currently composed of just a great hollow. It is exactly this great ancient hollow where I discovered a time tunnel. There were channels opened to enable the blood to shed and to feed the entire mausoleum and the king in the other dimension in the offering ceremonies organized for the King Mausolos. While walking within the channel, I experienced being the gift offered to the King and making a short journey to a distant time.”
