It seems peculiar to brag that I made my way to interview David Elliott, the newly anointed director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (Istanbul Modern) by public transport, but the journey was swift, comfortable, and in terms of a carbon footprint, was moccasin-like as opposed to the hobnail boot option of hailing a taxi. I felt better for it -- more upbeat, more equalitarian, ready to face the world -- and if I am not mistaken, just the sort of punter David Elliott wants to see in his museum. I have to confess, however, the notion of an Istanbul possessed of an infrastructure that works -- that can get you from A to B with high-speed efficacy -- is not the city of my imagination. A city of its size and stature has long been capable of attracting the best and the brashest -- a good sushi chef off Istiklal, Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky’s production of “The Queen of Spades,” Madonna in a bustier. But these always seem rare, elitist treats
Of course, Istanbul has long lived with the notion that there is an alternative city to that preserved on the historical skyline, one populated by in-migrants from the countryside and the three or four generations they begat. The prejudice is that this modern Istanbul may have great vitality but that its very size pulls and tears on the cultural fabric of the city rather than makes it stronger. But of course the Istanbul Modern itself is an institution that has built on its own, if not immigrant, somehow “transient” past. The current building is a converted late 1950s dockland warehouse that was briefly occupied by the Eight Biennial in 2001. It was handed over as a permanent home for Turkish modern art and may soon be at the heart of a whole redevelopment of the vast acreage of what has become known as the Galata Port.
“Istanbul certainly has the longest and densest history of any place I’ve lived in,” said David Elliott, but its clear that he is not one to squat in the ruins of empire. He described his visit to the Fourth Istanbul Biennial in 1995, famously curated by René Block, as what opened his eyes to the modern city but was not attracted to becoming part of its future.
The intervening years have changed everything. “Istanbul has everything to play for,” he said. In just over 10 years Istanbul has acquired a new geography. It has shifted in cultural and geopolical terms. It has acquired new standards, not just in the artists it produces, whose works are shown all over the world, but in the expectations of its audience. They have learned not just to consume, but to “consume in a new democratic way” and “to take delight.”
“Delight,” and “pleasure” are important concepts for a man whose opening exhibition as director of the private Mori Art Gallery in Tokyo was titled “Happiness: a survival guide for art and life.” You sense Istanbul Modern under his watch is not going to be Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul of nostalgia, melancholy and regret. His first job it seems is to make the city aware of its own capacity for change. His first exhibition is to be a retrospective of a century since 1880 of Turkish modern art and then to bring the story up to date by looking at the two decades since the first Istanbul Bienniel in 1987.
There is, David Elliott confesses, a hunger to see great art and fantastic things. The Istanbul Modern has to find a balance -- not just “dumping from outside” things that might be good and improving, but helping the city to find its own voice, “to play to its own strengths of what is here and what is around.”
David Elliott is a member of an international “art-ocracy.” Prior to Tokyo he was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm for the five years before that. His work as a curator and international jurist has taken him from the Turner Prize in London to the Triennale in Delhi, from Poland to the Alternative Miss World in his native UK. In Istanbul terms, however, he is a familiar figure -- Ingiliz David Pasha -- the émigré welcomed for his skills and imagination, the latest in long lines of renegade soldiers, architects, musicians and the odd painter who see an Istanbul its own inhabitants do not.
