23 Sep 2013

Joyful Wisdom at Rezan Has Museum, Istanbul

How to avoid institutional routine and academic rigor is a question emerging time and again in current discussions on the topic of artistic research. Therefore, the project Joyful Wisdom intends to address the original spirit of the field, that is, artistic research as a radical, experimental playground. From that perspective, the project presents artistic research as a topical interpretation of Nietzsche's reflections on Joyful Wisdom (Gaya Scienza): an untimely plea for a different form of thinking detaching knowledge from the leveling tendency of classification and reinvolving speculative and symbolic forms of understanding. Pending questions then are: how can artistic research as a situation-based thinking process escape from the disciplining logic of knowledge production? Should the strategic form of an epistemic guerrilla be deployed?

Taking this as a starting point, Burak Delier's project Art Talks defeats the force of institutional frameworks by staging the artist-as-researcher as a street vendor: an artist aware of the current condition of existence who offers his specific contribution to knowledge production in the public space of the city of Istanbul.

Pavilion of Distance II (Cross Roads and Hazy Maze), Tiong Ang's collective production, is a confrontation of two film projects where artistic thinking processes dissolve into public space: a rhythmic montage of a modernistic, impersonal suburban scenery versus the narration of a temporary formation of a group of young artists within an urban setting. A singular, performative event will juxtapose the moving, pre-recorded images with their real-life counterpoint. (Cast: Sebastian Gonzalez de Gortari, Eduarda Estrella, Adriana Ramirez, Robert Wittendorp, Hiroomi Horiuchi, Frans van Lent, Heleen Langkamp, Sobia Zaidi. Crew: Ryan de Haan, Marina Stavrou, Zeynep Kayan, Efrat Gal. Director of photography and Editor: Alejandro Ramirez).

Mick Wilson's video-text work The Seminar rehearses a process of artistic enquiry in a laconic and downbeat manner that moves across themes of mortality and public-ness to reveal a tragi-comic incompletion. Woven through the text are anecdotes and philosophical references but the overall effect is of a workaday failure to achieve seriousness because of a disconnect between intentions and actions.

Point of departure for Marion von Osten's research project The Route of Friendship is the illusion of a globalized modernism. The project focuses on the utopian, visual imagery of a public sculpture project at the time of the 1968 Mexico Olympics. The Route of Friendship shows a cosmopolitan imagination that seems to continuously provoke protests in the public domain because of its inherent contradictions.

Sleep, a project by Jan Kaila, also departs from public space. In a series of images, Sleep shows citizens embodying in an almost sculptural sense the silent knowledge of the urban interior. Through an ontological investigation emphasizing the presence of absence and a post-medial translation into moving images, the work demonstrates a novel artistic and intellectual perspective on what seem already to be established facts.

In researching spatio-economic conditions, Aglaia Konrad's Iconocity deals with the physical quality of photographic reality in the form of a wall-size collage charting a worldwide series of urban landscapes through a fluid taxonomy of affective associations and artistic probing. At the same time, the outcome becomes spatially integrated in the exhibition context.

Jalal Toufic's mixed media Vertiginous Variations on Guilt and Innocence Witnessed in 39 Steps through the Rear Window consists of the video Variations on Guilt and Innocence in 39 Steps and two conceptual film posters titled Rear Window Vertigo. 'Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo may best be viewed as one film, and his The 39 Steps may best be viewed as an entangled trilogy.'

Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan's film project Episode of the Sea has a strong materialistic approach. By deploying an undisciplined research perspective and a drifting studio practice, the impact of a continuous flexibility forced on primary professions by the world market is articulated and a presentation evolves negotiating between the act of making and the process of making.

Joyful Wisdom is made possible by the support of: Netherlands Consulate General Istanbul, Embassy of Finland Ankara, ifa (Institut fuer Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Germany), Kunsten en Erfgoed (Belgium) and MaHKU/Utrecht School of the Arts.