New Museum Jazzes Up Istanbul Art Scene
Rana Ozturk
Courtesy of Istanbul Modern
The recent opening of the Istanbul Modern unveiled a collection tracing the artistic movements and achievements of Turkey from the beginning of the 20th century. Istanbul–which with approximately 15 million inhabitants is the largest city in Turkey–is also the country’s cultural and artistic capitol. Yet, despite an increasingly prospering visual arts scene in the last decades, the city lacked a modern art museum with permanent access to its outstanding artistic heritage.
That has now changed. The Istanbul Modern has been established as an autonomous institution under the umbrella organization, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, a foundation that has been active since 1973 and which now organizes major international festivals of music, film, theatre and jazz and the biennials. Its founder, the Eczacibasi family, owner of a leading industrial group of companies, also provided the basic funding as well as the initial art collection for the museum. The museum was a dream of the family since Istanbul’s 1st Biennial in 1987.
The museum is established in an 8000 square-meter warehouse building at the Galata Quay, located in one of the oldest districts of Istanbul with a history that goes back to the Genoeses. It is located right by the Bosphorous, a symbolic meeting point of east and west, and a point of international trade. The mission of the museum is to become a meeting place for local and international art, to be a bridge between the local culture and the universal movements, as is stressed by the chief curator of the museum, Rosa Martinez, a Spanish art historian who is also curator of the Venice and Moscow Biennials.
The museum opens with an appropriate attempt to visualize its own position in history and the context in which the artworks are to be seen. The opening exhibition of works from the permanent collection is entitled "Observation/Interpretation/Multiplicity." The show attempts to present the basic tendencies in Turkish art within the last century in a thematic arrangement of around 180 paintings by 100 painters. The ground floor of the museum is designed as a cultural complex that consists of the gallery of periodic exhibitions, photography gallery, video works, new media area, cinema and library. The periodic shows will focus on artworks geared at bringing forth the relationship between the modern and the contemporary. This will provide viewers with the opportunity to see the artworks in historical continuity, from the past to the future, in an international context. Here, the opening exhibition entitled "Towards Istanbul Modern," is a documentation of the establishment of the museum. It presents the transformation of the warehouse into a museum and traces the historical and geographic context of the museum.
It seems that Istanbul Modern will soon become a dynamic and lively place with a variety of activities for viewing, understanding and discussing art. We an hope that its future exhibitions and growing collection will also provide a more comprehensive look upon Turkey’s the artistic history. With a very limited written history of modern art, Turkey also needs the discussions and reconsiderations of modern art history that inevitably arise in the context of this new institution.
