MASA

26 September 18 October 2008

On the 2th anniversary, MASA that will be hosting Merve Şendil’s exhibition DDR Discography from September 26 to October 19 at Apartman Project

Until 2007, Şendil has been working on the archives about the amateur music bands, under the name of "Underscene Project". As a part of this project, she will bring objects and documents together about a İstanbul based post-rock band named DDR for the exhibition called "DDR Discography". The exhibition will consist of the documents belonging to the group DDR and the objects that the artist produced for the group on Masa.
Merve Şendil will try to investigate individual and collective productions made for music and other productions about music by the workshops in different places and times.

Since 1997, besides from the KunstRai, where you can find a yearly overview of commercial galleries, the Sandberg Institute wanted to create an art fair showing other kinds of art i.e. non established art. Here artist initiatives from the Netherlands were invited to represent themselves with their best work. Dutch contributors were invited to introduce a foreign colleague next to their own presentation. This year Kunstvlaai A.P.I. / Amsterdam, a large selection of Turkish artist run spaces as well as some Chinese ones will be showing.

“Things that due to their permanent presence in everyday life appear negligible, become almost invisible. Foundation of Isabel Schmiga’s artistic engagement are shifts in context of insignificant elements from familiar situations. So far, the artist concentrates on transitions, idiosyncrasies of her everyday surroundings, collisions of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, substances and their emblematic qualities, the form, the word.
The rhetoric of the material, the multilingualism of familiar things and symbols, and the relationship of body and space contour the artist’s view in a double sense: they are literally motivation and motive of her enterprise of engaging with the ambiguity of familiar signs, thereby bringing to the surface firmly inscribed, hidden potentials of meaning:
For example, the board game Ludo became visible in the Swiss national flag (MENSCH ÄRGERE DICH NICHT, 2003), Robidogbags (bags for the disposal of dog excrements in public spaces) turned into a disposed fur of a greyhound that ran away (GREYHOUND, 2005).”

Isabel Schmiga, born in 1971, currently lives and works in Paris. Studies at the Academy for Fine Arts Braunschweig (MFA), studies in Art History at Basel University. Several scholarships and residencies, among them DAAD for Switzerland, Basel, iaab for Platform Garanti, Istanbul in 2006 and iaab for Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2008. To get more information about her work, please go to: www.schmiga.de.

http://artforum.com/archive/id=19892

There can therefore be moments of community- not those festive moments that are sometimes described, but dialogic moments, moments when the rule laid down by Gregory of Nazianzus is contravened, when an impertinent dialectic is created by those who have no rights in matter, but who nevertheless assert such right in the junction between the violence of a new beginning an the invocation of something already said, something already inscribed…

Jacques Ranciére

"I Wanna Hurt I Wanna Love" is an exhibition composed of the objects which remain from the actions of a non-existent music band that carries the same name as the title of the show. The history and places of these objects coincide with the important breaking points in the musical and political history that are often referred to by the anti-culture and thus create for themselves a quiet existence beside these fundamental historic stations. This work also examines the notions of partnership and community which have arisen after the occurence of a series of events during those times. It tries to create a community which is imagined as the partnership of those who are terrorized by what has happened, requestion it and then produce a counter stance using the historical structure of a music band.

The short film "Les exclus" appropriates figures, settings und texts from the Robert Bresson movie "Le diable probablement" (1976). The film continues to discuss the events in the French suburbs in November 2005. Together with friends, filmed in one day, it discuses the language of politics. Who and what determents an event? What kind of ability motivated the young people in their action? And if the real, that else wise seams to be invisible, got visible for a short period of time?

The narration of the second film "nowt/sooner" goes back to a short novel by Marguerite Duras "Ah! Ernesto" and tells the story of a child, that refuses to continue to go to school, because it doesn't want to learn what it doesn't know yet. The adaptation examines the relation between subjective and objective language use, between voice and language by the means of different speeches (rap/classic), to make use of the poly-lingualism of one's own language, to oppose the oppressive quality of language, to find points of non-culture or underdevelopment - linguistic "Third World zones" by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things.

Both films question the institutionalization and the non-institutionalization of young people. nowt/sooner asks questions around compulsory education and a school system that doesn’t give information, but allocates coordinates and reproduces class hierarchies. And Les exclus originates from the events in France, when it became obvious that institutionalization young persons in schools or in workstations is not demanded by the rest of the society and where the institutions account for the phenomenon of exclusion.

Elke Marhöfer makes films, drawings and performances. She searches for emancipative moments, contemporary and historical, to investigate the relationship between history and politics. She has an appetite for militancy. Leaving the distanced critical role behind, she follows through on temptations fraught with contradiction - health regimes, representations of dead or undead political actions all to root out new communicative strategies. By joining others in collaboration, she has become a medium against the notion of the producer. Forgetting how 'to make' in order to better learn how 'to practice'. Practicing to be alive together. Against the death blows of advanced capitalism, 'to practice' becomes 'to struggle'. What does the art world do with this? Some works have been shown in festivals, biennales and museums.

http://www.whateverbeing.de/

7 -31 December 2007

“Dating from 1987 and considered as the pioneer of postmodern cinema, the film ‘Der Himmel Über Berlin’ begins with the poem “Lied Vom Kindsein” (Song of Being a Child) by Peter Handke, whom the director Wim Wenders has worked with in many of his films.

The feeling of void we, as the reader, share with Handke is so intimately personal yet at the same time can be so easily empathized with that it perfectly describes the solitude of today’s metropolitan beings.
In ‘Himmel Über Berlin’ Handke’s poem is rewritten, moreover the monumentality of the image points to a structure that works through the means of the act of writing. During this reproduction phase, due to the cinematographic elements such as the moving image and the sound, the effect of the text multiplies in manifolds.
Now it is time to rewrite Lied Vom Kindsein, as if they were our own words …” [Çağrı Saray]

5 September - October 2007

The word “Bahname” is a noun comprising “bah,” the Arabic word for sexual desire, sexual potency, and lust; and “name,” the Farsi word for book or booklet.

The texts featured in the works of this exhibition are excerpts from the 17th century bahname of Tabib (Doctor) Mustafa Ebu’l Feyz, “Tuhvetü’l Müteehhilin.”

“Tuhvetü’l Müteehhilin’I,” which roughly means “The Natural Impulse in the Desire for Sexual Intercourse” in today’s language, has been translated into modern Turkish by Prof. İtler Uzel as “Evlilik Armağanı (Wedding Gift).”

……The Republic of Turkey was founded after renovating itself at the end of the Empire’s century of destruction. Meanwhile, the language of its multi-layered sexual culture was unfortunately abandoned. Islam had never banned love-making outside of the male hegemony; instead had encouraged this. However, the Islamic language for this topic was now being locked behind closed doors.
…The first chapter of “Evlilik Armağanı (Wedding Gift)” explains the qualities of beautiful women. The second chapter classifies the female organ, or rather “ferç...”
…Ferç means “opening, cut” in Arabic. It is said that “if the mouth of the beloved is small, then her ferç is narrow; the redder her tongue, the drier her ferç shall be.” This is how the ferç has been classified and named by male doctors centuries ago.

2 April - 1 May 2007

Şeref Erol wants to describe the Masa as a space, which is, sterilize and defined. He puts soil, grass, and a tree and build a structure on the Masa. He tries to problematize that what is the space in one's imagination and how describe in their mind.

2 February - 15 March 2007

This film was shot near the Zeppelintribüne in Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer, ‘chief architect’ of the Third Reich. The 360-metre-long structure is part of a larger architectural complex called the Zeppelinfeld, which the National Socialist used for their marches and rallies. The Zeppelintribüne was immortalised in Leni Riefenstahl’s filmpropaganda masterpiece The Triumph of the Will, a record of a 1934 Nazi Party rally. The Zeppelintribüne was destroyed by degrees, beginning as early as 1945, when the Americans, who held a victory parade there, blew up a large swastika on the roof. In the 60s, the columns and side-reinforcement were removed, further stripping the ruin of embarrassing architectural allusions to the past. Zmijewski: ‘This is a place of pilgrimage for tourists – it’s in every guidebook. It is at the same time the most neglected, dirty, and ruined place in all of Germany. They rarely clean, and reluctantly. You could say the whole nation works in solidarity to destroy these remnants of the past. Yes – dirt and litter are welcome here.’ The film features fragments of fascist newsreels from the 1930s, mixed with Zmijewski’s own footage of a pair of Turkish artists-in-residence in Germany, dubbed the Arbeitsmänner (‘workmen’), shovel in hand, parodying the ritual of military drill. ‘If these places are still “alive,” why not return to the historical forms. This is a film about impersonation, about memory. But about memory so perverse that leads many tourists standing on Hitler’s old balcony to raise their hand in the gesture of the Nazi salute.’

Zeppelintribüne
Format: DVD, Master: DV
2002
Duration: 10’

Born in Istanbul in 1982, Asli ÇAVUSOGLU has been carrying out her studies in Istanbul Platform Centre for Contemporary Arts as a participant in Visitors of Istanbul Program. Trying to investigate the effects of text upon memory, Asli ÇAVUSOGLU has a book printed by BAS, a non-profit institution in Istanbul, under the title of "Takip / Poursuite." The project realized in the frame of Backyard Residencies Program at Vector Association, Iasi, is conveying
the 2-month period she has had in Romania as a modest tourist in the form of a book, "Caiet de Geografie" a socio-political exploration of the private ways of resenting and responding to cultural differences which resembles a diary.

It is the night of July 9, 2006. One soccer player, a legend. He inevitably demonstrates a sudden, harsh reaction to his opponent over a provocation before the eyes of millions. The reason for this reaction was associated by the media with his root ond otherness. However, we are, as usual, faced with story of revenge. The photograph of moment, which was featured in the world media, almost as advertising material.
The Audience, of course, accepted the event in the way the media portrayed it, preferring its sensational approach. As the audience, we are forced to evaluate that moment in which Zidane furiously butted this opponent as the other "bad boy's attrack" though the perspective of the media, which associated the event with Zidane's otherness an his root as well as using Zidane and the incident as advertising and rating material. Can we perceive or accept Zidane by keeping him away from the prejudices created by media, which associated his identity with his being Algerian as if it were something bad? Or let's imagine that the origin of poem, art and wine is not in the centre of Europe - France - but in Algeria, which has Zidane on its national football team. Let's create an image in your mind about Zidane, who is eliminated from all kinds of prejudices, silent and resistant to being a promotional piece for media. Can we withness his story for a moment?

15 September-15 October 2006

Monumental architectural structures don’t only refer to memories of significant people and historical events, but can also appear as phenomena of totalitarian political ideologies: monument doesn’t only refresh memories but also can gain an aura that intimidates and dominates one’s mind. Iconographic strength attributed to monuments, is parallel with orthodox attitude and political fanaticism. In this context, “Untitled” is a critical / humorous gesturess of transcendental political ideologies. This work problematizes the danger of reproducing practices and forms dogmatist and conservative movements consciously or unconsciously even whilst defending democracy and a diverse society. It also refers to subjectivity and canalization of documentation methods. [Erinç Seymen]

MASA (lit. Table); Space for Contemporary Art

In today's world of Turkish Contemporary Art, Masa will stand as an alternative to big budget projects, institutionalized art, galleries that work with only a group of well established names, and it will head for a younger production overall. In this context Masa will serve not only Plastic Arts but different disciplines as well.

"As an extension that excludes art created for the system, as an environment that aims to compose an area with no boundaries for the Artist, MASA welcomes everyone!"

Adress: PLAN Tasarım ve Danışmanlık Hizmetleri
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