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ONLY BE ISTANBULITE
Only-Be Istanbulite
The new Turkish cinema
Empress Theodora (501-548) is sad and significantly more famous for the scandalous and promiscuous sexual prowess bordering on the pornographic, without doubt relying on her past as a circus prostitute and actress, credited with clearly defamatory intentions of her contemporary Procopius of Caesarea in the Secret History which, due to her important work as a state woman and feminist legislator avant la lettre. Not only was she at the forefront of a decisive role in all significant developments during the reign of her husband the Emperor Justinian I. Moreover, among others, she pushed laws which forbade the punishment for adultery regardless of sex, governed the right to abortion, allowed divorce by women´s own decision as well as free marriage between different races, religions and social classes, imposed death penalty as punishment for rape, prohibited forced prostitution and regulated brothels so that they were under the control of women themselves. At least since her time, largely because of Procopius, the occidental imaginary of the Anatolia region is usually associated with hedonism and pleasures of the body. To this, the existence of a long, refined and successful tradition of erotic literature and the heady world of light perfumes, aromas, textures, colors, clothes, beverages, sounds and songs that somehow turned Istanbul into the place where the East begins to unfold its many sensory promises has undoubtedly contributed significantly in Minor Asia. Hence, perhaps, that since the early sixties until the coup of 1980, the erotic film industry representing more than two thirds of Turkish film production. At first, the erotic content is inserted more or less naturally in the romantic comedies and...
Animadrid in the Cervantes Institute in Istanbul
From April 4 to 30 the Cervantes Institute along with the Pera Museum in Turkey will develop a children´s film cycle named Animadrid festival to mark the National Day for Children and Youth in Turkey. The Spanish animation film series is intended for all audiences. Animadrid is an international animated picture festival that is held annually in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid) and is organized by the Municipal Board of the City of Pozuelo de Alarcón and Vice President and Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Community of Madrid, to promote audiovisual entertainment and provide a meeting place for artists and audience. The animation was born with cinema and the desire to bring realism to motion pictures. Background reports that Emile Reynaud spent 10 years projecting his images on the Grévin Museum of Paris, thanks to his invention of Praxinoscope in 1977. Since then and the invention of the Lumiere brothers, several lovers of motion picture ventured to develop the technique of animation. However, the splendor of the animation was achieved by the brothers Max and Dave Fischer when using the technique perfected by Earl Hurd in Koko the Clown (1920) and the representation of the sexy singer Helen Kane, Betty Boop in (1930) whose poo-poo-pi-do sounds became a classic of American society. Otto Messmer, avant-garde creator of the famous Felix the Cat for Pat Sullivan studies, revolutionized animation when giving personality and human features to animals, anticipating the creations of Walt Disney and other creators who gave life to cartoon animals. The success of his caricature lay in surreal fantasy Felix developed in his wild antics. In...
Paradise Lost in Istanbul
On the 23rd of March, Istanbul opens with “Paradise Lost,” a brilliant new exhibition centred around the notion of the innocence and purity of nature in the context of contemporary art. The work of 19 artists will form the examination of the conflict between nature and today´s technological society. A key element of the show is the idea of an ancestral nostalgia for “paradise lost” in the face of culture, industry and technology. The investigation into the concept of nature makes Romanticism as its starting point, placing special emphasis on the artistic point of view; and how it is effected by the artifices of todays culture, and the current postmodernism. With this in mind, some of the questions which the show asks are about whether natural innocence still exists in this day and age, or whether the notion is a purely romantic one. Unsurprisingly, there is also reflection upon the ecological future of the planet – and whether we have arrived at a point of no return in terms of the destruction of nature. And even if some form of natural innocence still exists – will the growing dichotomy between the natural and the technological eventually render it unrecognisable? This is an interesting project which has collaborated with some of today´s most exciting contemporary artists, such as Belgian Francis Alys, acclaimed video-artist Pipilotti Rist, Kiki Smith Bill Viola, Pae White, Ulrike Ottinger, Armin Linke, and Guy Maddin. More information about this fantastic work: http://www.istanbulmodern.org/en/f_index.html Heloise Battista This exhibition is on until 24th of July. The best option would be to rent apartments in Istanbul, and head down to...
Yao Lu. The New Landscapes in Istanbul
The Istanbul Modern is presenting the work of Chinese photographer Yao Lu with new exhibition Los Nuevos Paisajes, on until the 22nd May. Lu´s aesthetic is based around ecology and industrial waste – and with landscapes created to look like classical Chinese paintings. Yao Lu was born in Beijing, China in 1967. Though he studied engraving at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Lu chose to explore the photography medium, becoming a professor of design at the Griffith University´s Queensland College of Art. Yu developed his personal style, mixing the techniques of photography, painting and design. Whilst Lu bases himself in conceptual art, many of his paintings are also reminiscent of both expressionism and traditional Chinese art. His works, on one level, possess the harmony and beauty of the pastoral landscape paintings of the Chinese medieval period, but also, upon closer inspection, themes of violence, and protest against the destruction of nature, and natural beauty. Lu has travelled round China photographing different signs of societal destruction – it is a complex, time-consuming project which is carried out in three stages. First, he covers mountains of rubbish with green fabric, photographs them from different angles, and then finally loads the images onto a computer, adding digital effects to give them an element of the classic Chinese water-colour landscape paintings. Lu´s skill as a photographer helps him to observe nature, in order to be able to transfer its imagery, beauty and impact onto the canvas, and combine them with a powerful conceptual message. He directs his criticism at the damaging effects of industry on the environment. His apocalyptic mountains of...
Haci Muhiddin Piri oglu Haci Mehmed’s enigmatic atlas
History is always the present history. A fiction story that must be supported by rigorous methods of experimental science to work (otherwise, we should never forget it, we´re not even talking about history), but belonging by right to the battlefield in the history of ideas, always located, as is well known in the Middle Ages, in a literary region beyond genres. History is produced by tracking values of our time in past periods that have as principal aim to legitimate and pass them off as needed. In this exercise of justification of the present, everything that does not fit is misrepresented, omitted or quieted. Impressed by his massive and heterogeneous nature, when Flaubert visited Istanbul in 1850 he wrote a famous letter in which he predicted that the ancient Constantinople would be the capital of the world a century later. According to Orhan Pamuk, what occurred, therefore, within the prescribed time was that after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul had become a city possessed by bitterness, poverty and ruin. Among the ruins of a glorious past there was a magnificent and disturbing world atlas of 1513 during the rule of Atatürk, which, despite being from the first moment it was found out one of the great national treasures of the modern and laic Turkey, whose representation decorates even today the Turkish notes, has since then continued strictly away from public display. Even scholars who want to examine it directly often meet, despite its excellent state of preservation, some insurmountable bureaucratic difficulties. Somehow not surprisingly it is so, as the map in question has a number of questions...
30th International Istanbul Film Festival
Between the 2nd and 17th of April the Istanbul International Film Festival will be taking place, under the organisation of the Istanbul Arts and Culture Foundation. The 30th edition of the event will be dedicated to four fundamental figures of Turkish cinema: director Yusuf Kurçenli, director of photography Ertunç ?enkay, and actors Metin Akpinar and Zeki Alasya, who will be awarded the Cinema of Honour Prize. The film started out as week of exhibition of cinema that took place during summer. In 1984, they started to separate the activities, and devise what is today known as the Istanbul International Film Festival, with its date fixed in April – and in 1985 the programme went international. Sponsored by FIAPF (International Federation of Cinema Producers Association), the festival is a space for the development and discussion of international cinema – as well as for showcasing the best new Turkish cinema. On the bill this year, just as with previous years, will be the International Competition for the Golden Tulip, as well as the national Turkish Cinema competition which includes documentaries as well as movies. The jury is made up of directors, screenwriters, actors, film historians, academics and other eminent figures from the world of cinema. Turkish cinema has been affected by the political climate of the country and the global changes to movie production. The fundamental strength of Turkish cinema has always been the ability of its directors to express in a sensitive and realistic way the human experience, and the vitality of life in Turkey. Amongst those contributing to the internationalization of Turkish cinema who will be awarded the Cinema...
Frida Kahlo in Istanbul
Istanbul´s Pera Museum in Turkey exhibits the work of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for the first time ever. The exhibition, which is open until March 20 2011, has an extensive collection of works from the Gelman Collection, including the best self-portraits by Frida Kahlo and rare paintings by Rivera. The exhibition consists of 40 paintings from the renowned collection by Gelman Twentieth century Mexican art, and includes the retrospective works by Frida Kahlo presented in Berlin and Vienna in 2010, so the curator Helga Prignitz-Poda. The xhibition will also include side events that document the life and the historical moments that influenced the work of this important painter, by Salomon Grimberg, an expert on Mexican artists. Also, the program Viva la Revolución will be shown, with screenings of films on the Mexican Revolution. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderon was born in Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1907. Her deeply personal and original painting , with a strong emotional and metaphorical content of her life, let the father of Surrealism André Breton consider her a spontaneous surrealist, a label that she refused by responding “I never painted my dreams, only I painted my own reality”. Indeed, her life had been a chain of pain that lodged in her body until her death. In 1926 she suffered a traffic accident that left her with irreversible damage to the spine when a tube embedded in her hip and pelvis, which also left her sterile and unable to conceive children. This accident marked her life and the intensity of her work. She began painting during her convalescence and it required body efforts that set...
Restoration of the Santa Sofía
Though there are always exceptions, lovers of Istanbul could generally be divided into those whose tastes lean towards the Blue Mosque, and those who, if pressed, would have to choose Santa Sofia instead – just as in the times of Hippodrome, it would have been equally difficult to sit on the fence between the green and blue factions. There are few places quite like Istanbul and Bosforo, with their seductive aromas of the Orient – to use an old proverb. Despite it´s conversion to a mosque in 1453, despite the four magnificent minarets flanking it today, despite the stunning caligraphy under the seductive name of Allah and the eight prophets of the immense medallions suspended in the interior, despite the fact that the crusaders plundered the temple, taking to the Sainte Chapelle in Paris the gold from the mosaics, the crown of thorns of the Nazareth – Santa Sofia will always remain in the Western imagination as the most powerful example of the extraordinary wonder of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor (between 527-565) Justiniano, in the attempt to strengthen his public image, not only communicated with God in a sophisticated courtly ritual which ended up being adopted by the Greek Orthodox church, but, wishing to be the central point for all politics, as well as religion, he also constructed a grand imperial palace, and a church – the Santa Sofia of Constantinople. The Santa Sofia promoted a close identification between Christ and the emperor, who saw himself as his representative. The emperor had an unusual, bold approach to architecture – the combination of basilica columns, a central, circular-shaped building, the...
Sukran Moral. Amenus Interruptus: Controversy in the Casa Dell’ Arte
Adopting the perspective of a foreigner has always been a literary technique for revealing the absurdity of all those daily habits and customs that we carry out mindlessly, because we are so used to them. Journeys into the imaginary world help us to gain the perspective needed for acquiring a new view – one which is capable of opening new panoramas, and types of reality – whilst also serving as a form of criticism of the stupidity or unfairness of much of our fundamental and ingrained social behaviour. One mustn’t underestimate the value of stories such as Gulliver’s Travels or Brodie’s Report; those books which are considered anthropology just as much as they are science and art. Sometimes we might wonder, in these staid times, where there seems to be an alarming, puritan attachment to censorship, what a hypothetical alien would make of a society that regulates behaviour almost constantly, sending messages of incivility, aggression, brutality, despotism, subordination, sexism and war (often to the point of exaltation) – whilst indignantly prohibiting (not to mention the chauvinistic practises of the commercial world of the subordination and restriction of workers) for example, the most basic expression of sexuality. Following perhaps this same “logic;” in London it was ordered that the genitals of a nude by Lucas Cranach be covered up in an exhibition of the German renaissance painter – and on Facebook, the public campaign of a Scissor Sisters CD was banned, because its cover reproduced a beautiful photograph in black and white taken by Robert Mapplethorpe where you could see the bottom (covered by tights, of course) of ballerina Peter...
