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that make visible the unseen tensions within the city and its urban fabric (PATTU
and Thiel
2011
). As part of the ISEA2011 exhibition UNCONTAINABLE it was
also an official parallel program to the Istanbul Biennale.
The Istanbul Biennale is part and parcel of the urban development plan for the
Beyo glu district of Istanbul, and our artworks reflected on the Biennale both as
a site and on its role - and the role of art exhibitions in general - in the official
development plans of the city government. Some commented on the Biennale itself,
others reflected on the urban space that the Biennale occupies and yet others drew
a larger circle to place the Biennale area within the overall context of the Beyo glu
district.
The theme of the 2011 Istanbul Biennale also attracted my attention, as the
curators Pedrosa and Hoffmann based their concept around the works of Félix
González-Torres and his method of creating politically charged artworks by invest-
ing small, banal objects from daily life with very personal conceptual significance.
This method, and the curators' emphasis “on works that are both formally innovative
and politically outspoken” (Istanbul Biennale
2011
), spoke directly to how I want to
work with augmented reality and presented an excellent point of departure for my
own investigations.
Our intervention “Invisible Istanbul” consists of two parts, both of which used
AR to place virtual artworks within the real physical space of Istanbul and the
Biennale, creating surrealistic and poetic juxtapositions between real and virtual
within the context of the hidden urban dynamics of Istanbul. Both begin with
Tophane, the former military barracks and munitions factory where the main
Biennale buildings are now located.
My works for “Invisible Istanbul,”
Captured Images
, took as a point of departure
the displays of military power during the Ottoman Empire on the site where now
the Istanbul Biennale celebrates its power in the contemporary art world. This work
series was inspired by photographs of Tophane taken at the end of the 19th for the
last Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, showing displays of military might: soldiers lined up
for drills; rows of cannon captured from enemy armies; shells of different caliber
ordered by size; cannonballs stacked into pyramids. (U.S. Library of Congress
2013
)
In the 1950s the barracks and factories were replaced with faceless warehouses and
the rows of ordnance replaced with rows of goods. Today, these warehouses have
been turned into exhibition spaces for art and the rows of goods have made way
for rows of artworks. My artworks continue this transformation, using objects from
daily lives as their munitions and appropriating the main Biennale exhibition spaces
as their venues, especially the group exhibitions “Untitled (Death by Gun)” and
“Untitled (Passport)” (Thiel
2011a
).
My works also reflect on tensions in Turkish civil society between tradition and
modern, between military, political parties, opposition groups inside and outside of
the political system, propaganda from all sides, the power of the journalist's pen(cil)
to reveal and protest and uncover, but also of the political bureaucracy to define laws
and jail sentences that are powerful weapons of intimidation. The Gezi Park protests
of 2013 have only made the works more relevant.
