Vienna exhibit brings together multiple perspectives on ‘geopolitical topology’

The collection is on display until this Sunday at the Open Space Zentrum für Kunstprojekte in Vienna.

Gülsen Bal, the Turkish co-curator of the exhibit, who is also the director of Open Space, says that this collaborative project with Walter Seidl came about with the aim of exploring “new ways of thinking about the ‘multiplicity of subject-positions’ in which ‘identity-form’ can be re-evaluated beyond the ‘I-other’ dichotomy and beyond representational boundaries.”

Questions of geopolitical topology find themselves addressed in specific cultural conditions, Bal explains, adding, “Revealing the rapid transformation of several turning points in pursuing a nexus that constitutes new forms of life within the framework of different topologies is the starting point for the exhibition project.”

The exhibition raises questions about trans-cultural forms of geopolitical and economic conditions, which lead to a “new mapping of terrains on a visual and discursive level,” she notes.

According to Bal, the curator’s position always resides in questioning what the exhibition is doing and what claims are being made for what it is doing. “This is where the potential of today’s curating lies. In this [particular] setting, artistic positions have been selected in pointing at a contemporary turn toward discursivity to one another, and they provide a level of access to the unexpected,” she said in an online interview with Today’s Zaman.

To address how artistic practice is situated in its reference to an experimental dynamic, Ersen, Knorr and Konrad focused on addressing specific cultural conditions reflecting the respective representational politics that acknowledge cultural production for the rearticulation of external forces to generate, Bal explains.

Ersen’s artistic practice, which is mostly built around interaction and making “demographic politics” visible, has been a significant aspect for the pre-production of this particular work. “In her video ‘Brothers & Sisters’ Ersen tries to challenge the usual debates on the migration issue by taking a deeper look at the daily lives of African refugees who were not able to realize their plans for traveling to central Europe and lived illegally in İstanbul in early 2000,” Bal says. “In this context, İstanbul becomes the exit point where the city functions as the emergence of transit conjunctures for the temporary state of immigration beyond the precarious political agenda of the status quo.”

Knorr takes up issues related to the urban transformation of Bucharest in “Architecture Bucureşti 2001/2005,” which consists of 26 unique photographs that are made with an old-fashioned plate camera, Bal explains. “The photographs deal with the urban wasteland and the construction, as well as deconstruction, of new and old buildings, showing how difficult it is to meet the EU standards for a city,” Bal adds.

Konrad’s work, in the meantime, dwells on the “issues of geopolitical fragmentation and normalization processes,” explains the curator. “She focuses a direct gaze on cities such as Cairo, Alexandria and the Anwar al-Sadat [administration]. Her way of seeing things is unadorned and draws our attention straight to the history of the real setting. The photographs show the application of ‘modernist’ principles to architectural development in desert landscapes,” Bal says, adding: “Yet, many of these new housing projects from the 1990s are already falling into ruins and abandoned; raising questions about the necessity for such grand endeavors far from traditional traffic routes. How do deserts attract attention and how easily are the dreams of utopian places destroyed?”

The art center project Open Space was initiated by Bal around three years ago with an eye to creating cross-border dialogues through art. “The idea emerged in mid-2007 with the urge to build and create interconnected routes concerned with European space with a particular focus on Eastern Europe and the Balkans,” she explains. “As the founder of Open Space, I decided to establish it in Vienna, owing to the city’s gateway position between East and West,” Bal says. The initiative is aimed at bringing diverse creative practices together, as well as at creating a real and virtual collaborative forum and opening spaces to encourage exchange and joint projects between artists to explore the future.