Amira Akbiyikoglu

Conference Report. November 2023

Joining CIMAM Annual Conference in 2023 in Buenos Aires was a great opportunity for me. Getting to know the Argentinian and Latin American art and culture scene as well as learning from the experiences of different archives such Queer Indonesia Archive, the Trans Argentina Memory Archive, and art institutions was so fruitful.

In my written report I will focus on a specific presentation that was scheduled on the first day of the conference: Elvira Espejo Ayca gave a talk titled “YANAK UYWAÑA – Mutual Nurturing of the Arts”. Ayca is an artist, weaver, documentary filmmaker, and oral storyteller from Oruro in Bolivia. She served as the director of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz, Bolivia until 2020. She speaks Aymara and Quechua —the former is spoken chiefly in Bolivia and the latter in Peru —. In her presentation, she shared her community’s understanding of the arts, which can simply translate as “art exists everywhere”. This elementary yet powerful statement is empowered by the linguistic point of view: the indigenous languages speak of mutual nurturing, instead of taming. Uywaña, in Aymara and uyway, in Quechua means mutual nurturing. The terms don’t imply the human domination of earth and nature. In that sense, they don’t use male-oriented terminology. This inspiring presentation pushed me to read more on the subject. I believe that every problem is in fact, at its core, a problem of language, word use, and word definition. In a text published on the website of Malba, Ayca elaborates further on the concept and delves into the ideal of creating an artistic and cultural environment based on intersectionality and connects deeply to the raw material as well. This intersectional approach can give us a tool for meaningful engagement with our times and issues.

The day before I took the Buenos Aires flight, it was the opening night of Handan Börüteçene’s comprehensive solo exhibition at Salt Beyoğlu. I have worked with the artist for the past two years and the outcome was a long-overdue survey that spans her entire oeuvre including sculpture, installation, and collage from the early 1980s to today. Upon listening to Ayca’s talk, I felt very much in synch with this idea that “art exists everywhere”, which is also connected to the (natural) material. In her presentation, Ayca told us to listen to the wind and stones and pay attention to what we inherited from plants, seeds, fellow sisters, and abuelas. This is exactly how Börüteçene has been producing works for the last 40 years. So it was very refreshing to be able to draw parallels between here (in Turkey) and there (Bolivia).

One critical point that I’d like to question is the idea and format of the conference. Although every morning session ended with a round-table discussion, I strongly believe that CIMAM should be a platform more open to “mutual nurturing of ideas and arguments”. A setting based on dialogue rather than on the delivery of monologues is needed more than ever. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to become part of this environment.

Bio

My story in the contemporary art field dates back to 2009 when I started to work in a young gallery as an assistant while I was writing my MA dissertation in sociology. I've had a keen appetite for research, and soon I developed a desire to work on art, making exhibitions and having an influence on the local scene. Throughout my life I believed in being persistent, productive and self-disciplined; on top of that, the art world and the challenges of our times taught me to be a facilitator.
In 2018, I joined the Research and Programs team at Salt—the Istanbul-based institution which has been at the cutting-edge of constructing transdisciplinary cultural histories of Turkey and the surrounding regions since 2011. At Salt, my first project
was a humble group exhibition that dealt with the weight of history and the pressure of producing images. A dialogue between two Turkish collections—Ayşe Umur and Tansa Mermerci—, and dominantly featuring women artists, the selection included high-profile artists such as Iman Issa, Haris Epaminonda, Laure Prouvost, Mark Dion, and Kader Attia.
Then I embarked into a more challenging project: the first-ever retrospective of Nur Koçak, who is one of Turkey’s first photorealist painters. Opposing the strict rules set forth by her academic training during the 1960s, Koçak insisted on making photorealist paintings early on in her career. Her determination in this preferred technique and medium, as well as the feminist viewpoint that continues to inform her practice today, helped transform the local art historical narratives that often overlooked or entirely disregarded female identity. This exhibition struck a chord with me because I felt that I was capable of inserting the artists’ work into a narrative and coming up with fundamental questions that not only concerned their work but also that of their contemporaries. It also set the tone for a large part of my upcoming curatorial journey: contemporary women artists’ whose oeuvre is largely under-studied in Turkey. I, then, worked on Ipek Duben’s retrospective “The Skin, Body and I” together with Vasıf Kortun, my colleagues Farah Aksoy and Sezin Romi from Salt.
Meanwhile, the museum confederation L’Internationale’s new program titled “Our Many Europes” had been launched: a four-year programme focusing on the 1990s—the decade contemporary Europe was born. I was already familiar with the work of some of the well-known artists of the decade. More importantly, I was a 90s’ kid. So it was no surprise that I was the programmer assigned to the research on performance art in Turkey during the decade. “The 90s Onstage” was the outcome of a two-year research-in-depth. It was fantastic but trying: working on an exhibition that employs archival materials during the Covid times, finding a balance between works and archives/ between art and popular culture as well as avoiding to be superficial because you work on a decade analyzing exhibition. I learned a lot and I may say that I delivered an exhibition with a very expanded public programming that I could be proud of. I also contributed to one of L’Internationale e-pubs: my article “Fragments of a Co-op Festival” on the trailblazing Assos Performing Arts Festival (1995-1999) was published in “Performing Collections”.
Back on the track, I'm now working for the most comprehensive exhibition of Handan Börüteçene. Her sculptures, installations, photographs, and texts establish unexpected connections with Turkey’s cultural heritage. We compiled a near-definitive list of works and exhibitions, and we began discussing work groupings across floors, in addition to options for the reproduction of lost works. The exhibition will open on October 2023.