Back to the Bosphorus: the 2001 Istanbul Biennial was titled "Egofugal," a term invented by the curator to suggest diffusion of the individual ego into broader systems and networks - Report from Istanbul

Art in America, March, 2002 by Gregory Volk

What is it, alas, about the Istanbul Biennial's timing? The previous edition occurred just a few weeks after the devastating Aug. 17, 1999, earthquake in northwest Turkey, which killed some 17,000 people and injured thousands more [see A.i.A., Apr. '00]. This new biennial occurred against a backdrop of severe economic problems in Turkey, including mounting unemployment and rampant inflation, which raised the question of whether the exhibition would, or even should, happen at all. As if that weren't enough, the Sept. 22 opening was a scant 11 days after both the terrorist attacks on the United States and another suicide attack in Istanbul's famous Taksim Square, where a young Marxist bombed a police station, killing himself and two police officers.

All of which suggests that when the next exhibition comes along, the best course of action would be to hightail it in the opposite direction--which would be unfortunate, because the Istanbul Biennial has developed from humble origins into one of the premier events of its kind. Dedicated and extremely hospitable local organizers are principally responsible for this, and they work wonders with a budget, largely drawn from private contributions, that's a fraction of what would be available in acclaimed art-world centers. Then there is Istanbul's crossroads status as a city spanning Europe and Asia, an age-old cosmopolitan center where cultures and religions intersect. Such a setting fits well with today's self-consciously international large-scale exhibitions. Moreover, when it comes to dramatic and unorthodox exhibition venues, the Istanbul Biennial is in a class of its own. Most of this show took place in a trio of stupendous architectural sites: the Hagia Eirene, a 4th-century church, later a mosque, and now an exhibition space; the underground Yerebatan Cistern, which dates to the 6th century; and the 19th-century Imperial Mint.

This latest installment was curated by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in Kanazawa, Japan. She titled the show "Egofugal," a term of her own devising that carries suggestions of a flight from the self and the diffusion of the ego into systems of information or networks of quasi-musical interrelationships. Drawing on a heady mix of cerebral physiology, chaos theory, digital-era connectivity, artificial intelligence and doses of Zen transcendence, Hasegawa attempted to formulate an au courant exhibition of art at the cusp of what she optimistically terms "a new emergence," by which she means a progression from individualism and personal ego to collectivity and interactivity.

There was much to admire in Hasegawa's thought, and her exhibition included some socially minded, often refreshingly quirky projects dealing with consciousness per se, frequently in the form of genre-bending works that enlisted the viewer as an active participant. A good example, and one of the standouts of the show, wasn't a contemporary work at all, but Finnish architect Matti Suuronen's late 1960s modular living unit project, the Futuro house. Suuronen envisioned the mass production of these flying-saucer-like oval structures. Made of plastic, they were designed to serve as affordable homes, beach houses, ski lodges or just about anything else. The one on view here, which visitors could enter and lounge around in, featured a green carpet, blue chairs, a pink roof, circular tables and thoroughly thought-out activity areas. These futuristic structures, which really look like freshly landed UFOs, made an immediate splash in their day but then faded into obscurity when funding disappeared. An accompanying documentary film by Mika Taanila chronicled the Futuro house's advent and demise. Space-age visionary architecture in its own day, and now a lingering monument to a utopian future that failed, Suuronen's habitat also anticipated by several decades the host of art-as-living-environments that have cropped up in recent years.

From a work like that, you could segue to a citywide installation by Mexican Gabriel Orozco (Replaced Carstoppers, 2001). Throughout Istanbul one can find small concrete, vaguely mushroom-shaped forms placed to channel and control Istanbul's notoriously chaotic traffic. Orozco withdrew some of these traffic stanchions from their usual places and situated them in unlikely locales: outside exhibition venues, in indoor corridors or atop paved walkways. This minimal intervention was quietly startling. It navigated seamlessly between exterior and interior, public and private, spare sculptural elegance and unruly energy. American Rachel Berwick exhibited a homemade, climate-controlled aviary replete with two shadowy parrots (you saw them in silhouette, behind semi transparent scrims) flitting about on tree trunks and branches. Every now and then, the trained birds spoke words from the long-defunct language of a vanished tribe--the Maypure--from Venezuela. Berwick taught the birds Maypure words based on phonetic transcriptions made by German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, thus resurrecting this otherwise dead language while making an evocative environment that suggested fleeting eras and ungraspable phenomena.