Istanbul 2009. Photo Alice Sharp.
This website covers the different dimensions of Journeys With No Return, a project which was started in 2006 and where artists have been involved in a dialogue around contemporary art reflected by the last 50 years of Turkish migration to Germany and the UK.
Journeys With No Return includes sixteen artists and three curators and one exhibition organiser based in Istanbul, London and Berlin. The idea was conceived after working on a previous exhibition Strangers with Angelic Faces curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu and organised by Alice Sharp and Denizhan Ozer which took place in London and Istanbul in 2005/6. Journeys With No Return has involved working with many different partners in the three cities. The four major partners are the Arcola Theatre, A Foundation, Akbank Cultural Centre and Tiergarten Kunstverein. The results are ongoing, artists residencies have taken place in Berlin and Istanbul in early 2009 and an exhibition and conference took place at the Akbank Cultural Centre, Istanbul in September 2009. In 2010 an exhibition and conference will take place at Club Row, A Foundation, Shoreditch, London in February and Galerie Kurt Kurt Berlin in June. Please see here for details.
The project is multidisciplinary and involves the Arcola Theatre, London, who have a pioneering reputation in staging innovative theatre productions. The Arcola has a sister theatre in Istanbul and youth workshops and further dialogue are taking place in Istanbul and London.
This website provides a snapshot of the project, please come to the exhibitions and conferences in London and Berlin to experience the artworks and get involved in the debates. At a time when migration is raised often by the media with many wide sweeping statements and scare stories, this project seeks to look at the individual’s perspective and the fact that our lives are continuously changing and influenced by migration.
The following text is the background to the project ideas as set out in the exhibition catalogue kindly produced by the Akbank Cultural Centre and available at the exhibitions. It is written on these pages in English, Turkish and German. It gives a fuller history and depth to the concept and artists behind Journeys with No Return. The individual artist CVs are also in English and Turkish.
Alice Sharp, Peter Cross, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Curators
ANGINA PECTORIS
If half my heart is here, doctor,
the other half is in China
with the army flowing
toward the Yellow River.
And, every morning, doctor,
every morning at sunrise my heart
is shot in Greece.
And every night, doctor,
when the prisoners are asleep and the infirmary is deserted,
my heart stops at a run-down old house
in Çamlıca.
And then after ten years
ALL I HAVE TO OFFER MY POOR PEOPLE
IS THIS APPLE IN MY HAND, DOCTOR,
ONE RED APPLE:
MY HEART.
AND THAT, DOCTOR, THAT IS THE REASON
FOR THIS ANGINA PECTORIS - NOT NICOTINE, PRISON, OR ARTERIOSCLEROSIS.
I look at the night through the bars,
and despite the weight on my chest
MY HEART STILL BEATS WITH THE MOST DISTANT STARS.
NÂZIM HİKMET
[1948]
Inspired by the celebrated Turkish writer and political figure Nâzım Hikmet's book of poems Journeys With No Return, this project explores the influence of Turkish migration on contemporary art.
In this project, artists from Germany, Great Britain and Turkey uncover themes around this migration over the last 50 years.
Journeys With No Return is a project taking place in 3 cities: Istanbul, London and Berlin. The different identity of each city, their different histories and relationships to the phenomenon of migration, has resulted in three different but strongly interrelated exhibitions. A series of conferences, residencies and commissions are being produced in conjunction with each of these.
The project has three curators, each working in a different city. The dynamic of their collaboration, their relationships with the artists, the valuable input of the peripatetic Denizhan Özer, exhibition organiser, the specific contexts of the institutions and cities they are working in and their local partnerships have all helped to define the project as a flexible process evolving over time.
Most of the artists in this project have migrated themselves, or come from migration backgrounds. Migration is, arguably, a universal contemporary condition. But the history of migration is as individual as each person who sets out on their own journey. The journey can lead to political exile, for the poet Nâzım Hikmet or the philologist Erich Auerbach, or to new beginnings and new freedoms, for the women workers from former Yugoslavia who moved to Berlin in the 1970's.
In the past, migration was semi-structured and officially sanctioned, if not actively encouraged. After World War 2, migration patterns mirrored the European colonisation of the New World, in the “temporary” recruitment of workers from the South to Northern industrial centres. The first migrants were recruited in their own countries, their arrival had been planned and prepared for, and they came with high hopes for a new life.
Turkish migration has mainly taken place over the last 50 years in a triangle between Turkey, Germany and Britain. In Germany, Turkish immigrants are the largest and longest-standing ethnic group to have settled following the “Gastarbeiter” programmes of the 1950's, 60's and 70's, in which migrant workers were recruited by the Bundesrepublik to play their part in the “Wirtschaftswunder”, the economic miracle that was post war West Germany. They were part of a wider network of immigration which included Italians, Portuguese, and former Yugoslavians. The slippage between government plans for the temporary and strategic injection of cheap labour and the human reality of living and working in a new country is the history of the “Gastarbeiter” programme in Germany. 2,7 million Turkish people currently live in Germany of which roughly 127.000 are in Berlin.
In Great Britain, Turkish people were relatively late arrivals in the post war history of immigration. Many Turkish people living in the UK have lived in Germany previously, particularly those arriving in the 1980's. At this time, posters in Turkish areas of London were written in German and Turkish to attract the Turkish community; Turkish supermarkets in London still stock German goods and a large number of Turkish goods are packaged in Germany. Today, London has the largest Turkish population of any city outside Turkey with 200.000 out of the 300.000 Turkish people living in Britain.
Today, another discourse exists in parallel with the expanding borders of modern Europe and new, hybrid and flexible ideas of nationhood. The old idea of migration, planned in the expanding economies of the North, is no longer sufficient to describe the contemporary global situation. Polarisations of economic opportunity, between North and South, between developed and “developing” nations, have widened and information on the differences is more widely available. The economics of globalisation have generated movement on a previously unimaginable scale. A contemporary map of migration would reveal only turbulence: people travelling in all directions, for many reasons, some forever, some for a few weeks, and in hardly imaginable numbers. In 2002, there were 175 million migrants estimated worldwide. The figure will be much higher today.
The gap between “local” or “normal” life and the worldwide forces that shape it gets ever wider. The emotions these forces generate in us are just as polarised, somewhere between a sense of dizzy inspiration and moral panic. We know we live in global societies, but our attachments are still local. Our social affiliation, political loyalty, and our sense of communal responsibility have not stretched to cover the key events of our times.
Like all histories, migration has generated archives. This project began with research at the Kreuzberg Museum, in the heart of Turkish immigration in Berlin, a “neighbourhood” archive including the records of local commercial photographic studios, newspapers and mosques; records of a living, ordinary community. Artists whose work refers to migration can use research as a fundamental element in their practice, or they can quote traditional European genres that celebrate difference-in-togetherness, such as the double portrait. The project's Residency programme has encouraged this tendency, giving artists the time and space to go beneath the surfaces of the cities they are visiting. In a strange city, gender can have unexpected prerogatives, as when a British Asian artist casts her woman's eye on the thriving barber's shops of Istanbul, traditional places of exclusive male bonding and grooming, the modern survivors of ancient traditions of ablution in Turkey.
The artists in this project ask us who we identify with, what are our alliances. To West European eyes, for example, Turkish culture seems to have a more traditionally gendered sense of space, a more rigid separation of the male and female, the family, the public and private. But without these qualities, many immigrant communities would not survive in the alien, atomised inner cities of international capitalism. Many young artists, on the other hand, have multiple identities, histories spanning radically different cultures. Their work suggests that new generations bring new perspectives to the politics of identity and integration surviving from the 1960's and 70's, combining new forms of expression and freedom with longings for almost lost traditions.
The 16 artists that participate, in different combinations, in the three exhibitions of Journeys With no Return all work within this turbulent, fractured area of human exchange and desire. Their work is based on poetic, human emotions and real experiences, as opposed to a deconstruction of media stereotypes. The instability and multi-faceted quality of their experience informs their work, which is why Olaf Nicolai's choice of Ernst Auerbach's Mimesis as a touchstone is so apposite. Writing in exile, he was not able to access all the books he needed, and so… the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing (Auerbach).
The artists share a conscious and critical interest in the borders of different areas of knowledge, skills, and languages that do not traditionally belong to art. Using popular music, rap, cinematic conventions, comics, anthropology, documentary, tagging and graffiti, they exploit archive images, cultural stereotypes and information systems. Using video, film, photography and installation, they reach out with methods of communication that echo mainstream and popular cultural forms.
They highlight the specific qualities of migration and the experience of colliding with new cultures. Kiran Kaur Brar notices similarities between her native Punjabi and modern Turkish, revealing ancient connections along the old Silk Road between Asia and Europe, while Jürgen Eisenacher finds disturbing links between the contemporary global traffic in people and the old African slavery routes of colonial times.
Adam Chodzko's White Magic shows the exchange of red and green second-hand clothing between two charity shops in the UK and USA through a silent video of 80 still images. Margareta Kern's anthropological research into her own family's migrations opens up hidden historical narratives while simultaneously revealing that the artist's own identity, as she says herself, is “under construction”. She avoids cliché and received ideas, as does Maya Schweizer, whose work on the Senegalese street sellers of Florence is oblique and quiet, without sacrificing detail and strong political content.
These invisible non-citizens of Florence must conduct their business in the non-time offered between police patrols and check-ups, a state of suspended being similar to the experience of time when travelling, or waiting at a border crossing point. The video works of Clemens von Wedemeyer and Zineb Sedira both deal directly with waiting, crossing and borders, giving off a dreamlike feeling of amnesia and rootlessness that is nevertheless charged with life-transforming drama and longing. The border, once crossed, will lead to a promised land; reaching it has cost years of preparation, sacrifice and effort.
An artist perpetually on the move, Denizhan Özer portrays the harshness and difficulty of the life of migrants, who suddenly change from being family members, fathers and granddaughters, to nameless statistics, permanently in flux in the “new” country. Melanie Manchot takes a traditional European painting genre, the double portrait, and through photography, restores connections between people separated by migration. By asking her participants in London to nominate their counterpart in Istanbul, Manchot's project suggests that the portrait resonates in the space between the two people.
For second and third generation “immigrants”, born in one place, with parents from another, questions of identity and identification are more complex, and known since childhood. They have two, three or more identities, often conflicting. But the world looks increasingly similar, wherever you are. Nevin Aladağ balances traditional Kurdish song with the contemporary global sounds and gestures of rap, mapping out precious territory where some kind of “authentic” expression may be possible; Nasan Tur somersaults through neutral city spaces that are identical in Tokyo or Istanbul (a historic monument occasionally materialises which we, as world tourists, can instantly identify), in a kind of vertigo of displacement. For Aslı Sungu, the social rituals unthinkingly enacted in one culture seem absurd in another, or unexpectedly explode with poetic equivalences that only an outsider could create.
The clash of cultures on city streets can generate anger, prejudice, strong feelings which Olaf Metzel deliberately provokes in his politically charged works. Nostalgia and loss can create a need to commemorate something that may never have existed. Mike Nelson's installation, commissioned for Istanbul, records a fast-changing old city district and seems to parody the artist's own longing to catch and hold a memory of a city he loves. Olaf Nicolai's pair of gold rings, which read MUNDUS TOTUS EXILIUM EST, “the entire world is as a foreign land”, quote 12th Century Hugo de St. Viktor, a key reference for Erich Auerbach and Edward Said, evidence that human displacement is as ancient as it is contemporary. Or we can find that what inspires our creativity also results in loss and separation, as in Ergin Çavuşoğlu three channel video installation Silent Glide, where the dynamics of a couple's unravelling relationship are played out in a landscape dominated by a cement factory and freighter's port.
Whatever their cultural background, contemporary artists must balance the local with the global, their subjective sense of identity with cultural dissemination that potentially knows no borders. Media services and popular cultures are instantly channelled through satellites crossing vast distances and affecting forms of daily intimate exchange at opposite ends of the world. Global commodity industries have created status and identification symbols equally familiar in Shanghai, Reykjavik, or Nairobi. Perhaps this international, digitalised commodity culture represents, on some level, contemporary reality itself. This media saturated worldwide conformity is, for many, where you begin.
Of course contemporary artists themselves are the essential migrants, travelling endlessly around the world from Biennial to Art Fair to Documenta, in the restless currents of a system over which they have no control. Or, less fortunately, they are trapped in poverty in the world's great cities.
But, as Auerbach writes in Mimesis: “Life has always long since begun, and it is always still going on. And the people whose story the author is telling experience much more than he can ever hope to tell. But the things that happen to a few individuals in the course of a few minutes, hours, possibly even days - these one can hope to report with reasonable completeness.”
Peter Cross
Levent Çalıkoğlu
Alice Sharp