Istanbul Street Style

Back again after a long time, but i had one very good reason to go missing, and its called istanbul street style!

About a month ago, by the power given to me by google search and email, i met an amazing person named Dano Alexander.

In a nutshell, for Dano everything about this project started with his blog, www.istanbulstreetstyle.com, on which he featured photographs of the many interesting figures on the streets of istanbul. He really captures the uniqueness of these figures without getting caught up on who they are, where they come from or where and how they get their clothes. The most important thing is that these people are capable of freely expressing themselves all the superficial details aside..
To make the long story short, the idea behind the blog gets bigger and bigger and ends up becoming a monthly event called Sahane* in which i as well am involved as a curator/art director.
Our first Sahane* event happened recently at the Hall. Now that I have mentioned the Hall, I need to give a little more detail about the space cause its even more sahane… The Hall is an event space located behind Emek Sinemasi, which used to be a church. Magnet Istanbul took this beautiful structure and turned it into an amazing event arena with multiple rooms, gallery space, main dance floor and etc.. So we really had to give its worth to this space and i truly believe that we did. Within the show, there were two catwalks that 12 extremely talented emerging fashion designers displayed their collections. Along with that the gallery space featured 25 new and established artists (photographers, illustrators, painters, stylists, painters, conceptual artists), which added up to about 200 pieces of beautiful artwork. Besides all the art and fashion, there was also Ari Alpert’s stencil performance, a live cooking show by Dilara Erbay, the creative showcase Magicbox and many more!

There is a lot I can say about this event but it wouldn’t do the justice.. Istanbul has been longing for events like this for a long time.. Come visit us at our May 12th show and share the experience…

If you are an artist reading this you can contact us at istanbulstreetstyle@gmail.com, preferably with a link to ur portfolio.

Those of you who missed this show, please see the continuation of this show at the Levi’s Gallery in Beyoglu.

banu-n-between

London: Art Galore!

This weekend a short detour, from the edge of the European continent to the big island that is (in a special way) part of Europe but above all, its British. Why did I go there? To consume vast amounts of art together with some friends from Holland and Belgium. Besides the Frieze Art Fair there are lots of exhibitions running at probably the 100 plus gallery’s that London counts. So we rented some bikes -yes, we’re Dutch, so what!- and hopped from gallery-to-gallery-to-fair through central London. After so much art, in all its shapes and sizes, you don’t know anymore what art is or supposed to be (even if I ever did before). Especially after wondering around on a crowded, pressingly warm fairground, walking from stand to stand, gallery to gallery. They we’re all there from New York to Hamburg and Beirut trying to sell some artifact.

I wonder if Walter Benjamin could have predicted this phenomenon when he wrote ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in 1935. At least ‘the exhibition value’ is something that gets an whole other dimension on fair than in a museum. Perhaps Rem Koolhaas’ remark in the talk show at his Serpentine Pavilion (designed together with Cecil Balmond) together with Jeff Koons and Hans Ulrich Obrist last weekend (wasn’t there though but Sam Jacobs was).Koolhaas replied after a list of what art did according to Koons, “Are collectors a fair representation of mankind?” There you have it, problem number one, which is even more present in an art fair than any other exhibition venue.

But lets not go into the ‘what is art’ elaboration, that’s more something for a PhD topic. So just some general observations about the arts.

art work by Julian Opie

There are always a fair share of art that revolves around the play/remixing/twisting with popular imagery and mainstream culture. Often effective I think, especially accessible for non-connoisseurs, although this ‘trick’ is wearing out, it has been around since the Andy Warhol.

There is also a some craftsmanship returning, very hard to capture in a photo, but I have seen some small surrealist oil paintings with a level of detail, and expressive use of the medium which echo’s the renaissance painters. But also innovation of the classic overwhelming sublime paintings of Romanticism. (image above)

And than the object, the immaculate shiny object is always close and attracts people like magpie. From Jeff Koons ‘Cracked Egg’ to this one that I liked most the hammer and sikle lying on a mirroring cube pedestole. Ambiguity of the ideal materialization of a fallen ideology, like a the Platonian shadow in the cave finally gets to see its original from the realm of the gods.

Finally one of the art works that made the biggest impact was one where you totally got immersed in the hidden world of outcasts. The ‘Iron mill’ in London was converted in a overpopulated shabby hotel with rooms populated with prostitutes, refugees, einselgangers, illegals, an electronics dismantling factory hall and some odd excavation site. Only all the inhabitants had left, and the art lovers were poking their nose into a world which blurred the boundaries between reality, the absurd and life in the margins of our society. Imagine yourself flipping through the agenda and checking the working hours of a prostitute’s bedroom.

Closer to home there is still enough inspiration in daily reality for art to protest, revolt and be critical. Gallery Sfeir Semler based in Hamburg as well as in Beirut showed work addressing war-struck Lebanon. The audience was walking over the art (after the first hesitation) which was the urban plan of Beirut cut from foam. This piece by Marwan Rechmaoui, combines the feeling ‘that it is inappropriate to walk on a piece of art’ with destroying a city through bombing it, through sharing the perspective of the bomb or rocket striking from above.

In the future more on Turkish artists for now enjoy the photo report of the London art circus