Uncensored: Art And Politics Converge At Istanbul Contemporary Art Fair

While the predictable “anyone who is anyone” was heading off to Miami to suck up the de rigeur art scene chic of Art Basel/Miami Beach last week, everyone with a more adventurous rebel streak was dashing about the cobbled alleyways and 24-hour-a-day energies of Istanbul, discovering the new and chic-to-be  at Istanbul Contemporary, Turkey’s increasingly-popular international fair for contemporary art.

Now in its sixth year, Contemporary Istanbul stands as something of a symbol for the changes that have overtaken this city in the past decade, not just culturally, but socially, as well.  To visit the fair is to watch an entire country change, at times for better, at times for worse, as the vicissitudes of the region’s political realities press in.

Unlike other Middle Eastern fairs like Art Dubai, where from the beginning Western galleries swarmed in to take advantage of Middle East wealth and a longstanding interest in buying Western art, Contemporary Istanbul has only in the past three years found interest among European and American dealers – just as only recently have Turkish collectors begun to show an affinity with European and American art.

That development was even more on show at this year’s edition, from November 24-28 at the Istanbul Convention Center.  With 90 galleries participating, about half were from abroad, luring in over 60,000 visitors – a twenty percent increase over last year’s attendance.  And in a country that only opened its first museum of contemporary art ten years ago, sales were brisk -- though many of the fair participants expressed skepticism over the organizer’s claim that 75 percent of the works on view found buyers (for a total of about $30 million, according to the fair’s directors, though no one else seems to believe that sales reached even half that amount).  Pi Art Projects’ Yesim Turanli  and Galerie Baraz, for instance, both had to re-hang their booths after opening night, thanks to strong sales from the start – though Turanli should be used to that by now: works by Gulay Semercioglu, one of her most popular artists, tend to fly off the walls faster than Turanli can hang them up (which would explain the long waiting list for Semercioglu’s captivating “wire paintings,” studies of texture and light created 0f tightly-strung steel threads that sell for about 15,000 euros.)  And Azade Koker’s complex, massive photo-collages (which can bring as much as $125,000 at auction) also sold well at Galeri Zilberman, another Istanbul gallery.

Yet despite these successes, it was hard to miss the fact that non-Turkish art did significantly less well – a worrisome concern for a city that aims to become n international art capital. While major Turkish artists such as Haluk Akakçe, Tanner Ceylan, and Burhan Dogançay have all achieved auction prices in the six- and seven-digit range, the audience in Turkey for non-Turkish art (be it Western, Asian, or Middle Eastern) is extremely small and scarcely growing.  Though art schools of Istanbul are overcrowded and women (especially) are flocking to careers in art, few art students or young collectors have ever seen a painting by Picasso, by Rembrandt, by Warhol or Pollock or van Gogh outside the pages of a book.

This is where Contemporary Istanbul can – and is beginning to – truly make a difference in the burgeoning Istanbul art scene: as more international galleries flock to the fair, more  Turkish collectors will have an opportunity to view international work. More important, so will Turkish artists, who for the moment are limited largely to the holdings of the city’s first contemporary art museum, the Elgiz Museum in Maslak, which features the private collection of its founders, Can and Sevda Elgiz and includes works by David Salle, Tracey Emin, Eric Fischl, Gilbert & George, Jan Fabre, and others.

And the hard truth is that Turkey’s artists desperately need that exposure. At the moment, most of their output relies either on decoration – large, colorful canvases with pretty designs that hold no reference either to Western or Eastern art praxes nor to Turkey’s own magnificently rich cultural traditions;  on sensationalism (Rasim Aksan’s oversized black and white hyper-realist image of labia exhibited at Istanbul’s Galerist’s booth, is a prime example); or on gimmickry, like the 3-D paintings of Bedri Beykam.  Despite the energizing passion that drives the art scene in Istanbul now, the excited clamoring for art that this year, for the first time, brought even crowds of headscarf-clad women into the fair, the Turks are largely naïve about what art -- contemporary art – actually involves: an immersion into a global zeitgeist, and the embrace of art history itself.

At the same time, Turkey deserves significant praise. It is, after all, inconceivable that works such as the humongous vagina (which sold  for 7500 euros to a private collector)  or  Wim Delvoye’s “All American Girl,” a tattooed pigskin (on view at Galeri Artist ), would have survived an art fair in the Middle East: think only of the censorship controviersies at this year’s Sharjah biennale or the 2010 Art Dubai.

All of which is why, in effect, Contemporary Istanbul came off as a microcosm of Turkey in itself: efforts to highlight contemporary Iranian art, for instance, fell absolutely flat in a country whose intelligentsia is resolutely turning away from the influence of Islam and – especially – Islamism; and yet the country is not yet committed entirely to the aesthetics and ideals, either, of the West – or, hence, of Western art.  In the throes of its own identity crisis, Turkey now sits staring largely at itself.

Still, call me utopian, but I honestly think that it is through precisely such events and interminglings as the Istanbul biennale and the annual Contemporary Istanbul fair that the country may still find its place – and its identity – again, no longer trapped between two worlds, but, instead, uniting them.