Neighbors: Contemporary Narratives from Turkey and Beyond

You know where this is going, from the exhibition’s title alone. Take a map and a compass. Put the center on Istanbul and draw an arc with a 2,500-kilometer radius. See which cities the circle covers. Thirty-five artists from 17 countries—Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Russia, the Middle East (Lebanon to Iraq), Iran, Egypt and Israel (not Palestine, however)—were allocated space in “Neighbors: Contemporary Narratives from Turkey and Beyond,” which opened at Istanbul Modern, in January, under this dubious, neo-Ottoman sense of geography, rationalized with the rather euphemistic claim that they all “share historical, political, and cultural ties with Turkey.”

Yet “Neighbors” is not an exhibition about those historical relationships. Far from it, in fact, as the storied 20th-century conflicts between, say, Turkey and Armenia, or Turkey and Greece, are not addressed. Instead, curators have conceived of relationships around a different, more nebulous set of pretexts and tautologies. Works are yoked together for pertaining to “themes of storytelling and travel” and showing a familiarity with “the vernacular of today’s art practice.” The former are no more specific to this region than to any other part of the world, while the latter is something that any contemporary artist can be credited with.

In these regards, “Neighbors” is entirely perfunctory as an exhibition. Thirty-five completely different artists from those same 17 countries, and from perhaps a dozen others—Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and more—could have been displayed together, with the same effect. This is a shame, and an example of curatorial indolence. What any exhibition organizer should be doing is making a case for the relevance of the particular artworks on view, and enriching each artist’s practice by placing it in a context that somehow illuminates both the individual work and the assembled pieces at large.

That’s not to say there are not interesting artworks works in “Neighbors.” These speak for themselves. Nil Yalter’s Nomad’s Tent (1973) is a fabric-draped yurt modeled on those that the artist observed around the city of Niğde, in central Anatolia. She covered the burlap exterior in painted animal skins and texts, in Turkish and French, about the roles of women in the nomadic Yörük culture. An adjacent video monitor shows black-and-white digital footage of Yalter, shot when the piece was first installed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 40 years ago, playing the hybrid roles of shaman and sculptor, anthropologist and artist. 

A more distanced perspective comes from Rena Effendi, whose documentary photographs of remote villages in the Khinaliq area of northern Azerbaijan are remarkable depictions of communities seemingly living in another time. Frontier Blues (2009), a film by Babak Jalali, explores four lives in Golestan, a similarly remote, poverty-stricken province in northern Iran. At times, “Neighbors” comes very close to romanticizing the still un-modernized corners of the region.

Many of the curatorial decisions seem awkward and simplistic. The inclusion of Turhan Selçuk’s original drawings for the Abdülcanbaz sci-fi comic book series, Voyage to Funjistan, first published in 1972 in the Istanbul newspaper Cumhuriyet, was interesting to those who know the comics. But why the curators chose only this particular object of popular culture for display in this exhibition of contemporary art is not explained. Other works seemed to be in conversation only with themselves, such as Maja Bajevic’s To Be Continued / Steam Machines (2011), a slideshow of political slogans “shouted during social and political upheavals around the world in the years between 1911–2011” that is gradually obscured by steam released into the room. The work seemed to have no relationship to the curatorial themes of narrative, popular theater or folk forms, and would have been better served by inclusion in a different exhibition. Similarly, as a stream-of-consciousness-style work, Yehudit Sasportas’s dreamlike animated film Vortex of Separation (2013), which melds images of exhibition spaces with nocturnal wilderness scenes, deviated far from the central premise.