Moving Museum's Third Round Opens Its Doors In İstanbul

After holding major exhibitions in Dubai and London, the Moving Museum, an artists' initiative supported by the Vinyl Factory in London, opens in İstanbul in its third round. Launched on Oct. 28, the Moving Museum's exhibition can be visited until Dec. 14 at Şişhane Otopark, with many side activities, performances, artist talks and lectures accompanying the exhibition.

The Moving Museum has been constantly expanding its portfolio with new artists. Over the last three months, starting in August, the Moving Museum, curated by Aya Mousawi and Simon Sakhai, included 11 local artists to its already 35-artist portfolio and invited them all to a period of intensive research, production and public engagement, ending with each artist creating a new work for the İstanbul exhibition.

The Moving Museum explains the collection of artists as follows: “The artists represent a generation of practitioners working seamlessly across disciplines and borders, displacing aesthetics and redefining best practices against a backdrop of constant change. The exhibition serves to articulate these approaches through the locus of İstanbul, a city echoing this artistic flux, and whose questions and promises embody a microcosm of compatible concerns.”

The venue, in this framework, greatly helps to achieve an overall effect of this artistic flux. Spread across three floors of the Şişhane Otopark, consisting of five central halls, a metro level mezzanine and the public outdoor park, which add up to 80,000 square feet, the Moving Museum offers one of the most interesting exhibition spaces İstanbul has seen. The initiative mentions the venue's importance in the exhibition text: “Recently completed this year, Şişhane Otopark is an important urban planning project, a rare example of a public space in İstanbul situated in the heart of the city directly beside Galata Tower. With a direct link to Şişhane Metro Station from within the complex, the exhibition will embed itself within the fabric of the city and public circulation.” As explained by the initiative again, the venue brings a lot to the whole idea of the exhibition in İstanbul.

Bringing 46 national and international artists together, including names that are familiar to the İstanbul audience like Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Larissa Sansour, Leyla Gediz, Burak Delier, Volkan Aslan, Güneş Terkol, Nilbar Güreş and many more, the Moving Museum is also significant in its reach of a wide range of cultures and media usage. The exhibition includes various pieces that range from photography and mixed media installations to videos and interactive artworks. For a show that is as wide as the Moving Museum's İstanbul edition, it is important to dedicate a few hours to the show in order to give each artist enough time.

There are many works that stand out, like Çavuşoğlu's marble sculpture in the form of a tombstone, with its title “Kadın şapka giye ki asıla?" (“A woman should wear a hat to be executed?” -- which, reportedly, were the last words of a chador-wearing woman who was hanged in 1926 in Erzurum on charges of opposing the Turkish Republic's newly introduced Hat Law) encrypted on the stone, and her series of drawings titled “How to teach transformation,” which are all on the mezzanine level. Zach Blas' explorations of Contra-Internet from social media users' perspective also presents an interesting topic for further discussion. Gediz's “Jump Cut” installation, which consists of nine individual pieces, and Sansour's digital prints that have a dystopian touch like her other works offer different interpretations for the urban experience, just like Amalia Ulman's photo-works of İstanbul as a city of luxury and indulgence. Another interesting work is a video by Ming Wong, who is almost an official impersonator of Turkish classical music diva Bülent Ersoy. In Wong's video, he performs a wonderful cover of the old classical Turkish song “Yüz Karası” (Disgrace). Aside from these works, the show hosts many more artists and works that talk about the life in the city, various experiences that can be faced in the city and encounters with city-dwellers.

With its vast space and its potential to take the audience underground in a car park where people normally look forward to leaving immediately after parking their cars, the Moving Museum presents a unique opportunity to discover and re-discover urban spheres through the perspective of a wide range of artists from different backgrounds and artistic disciplines. Overall, the Moving Museum with its wide scope and interesting location that hosts almost 50 artists and hundreds of artworks seems like a must-see experience for art enthusiasts in İstanbul.

Rumeysa Kiger (Cihan/Today's Zaman)