Sinopale, International Sinop Biennial for Contemporary Art, Turkey
in collaboration with Corner College, Zürich
present:

COLLECTING THE FUTURE

2014–2006–2016

A SINOPALE EXHIBITION

13 February to 14 March 2015

With Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Quynh Dong, Benjamin Egger, Esther Kempf, Franziska Koch, Petra Koehle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, Daniel Marti, Garrett Nelson, Cat Tuong Nguyen, RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), Romy Rüegger, Riikka Tauriainen, and works from the collection of Sinopale by Alpaslan Baloğlu, Nezaket Ekici, Shilpa Gupta, Ashley Hunt, Emre Koyuncuoğlu, Monali Meher, Lerzan Ozer, Adrien Tirtiaux, XsentrikArts (Bahanur Nasya & Yılmaz Vurucu), Eşref Yıldırım.

Curated by T. Melih Görgün, founder and artistic director of Sinopale, and co-curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Sinopale Newspaper (printable as PDF 3.35MB).


Opening Hours during the exhibition / Öffnungszeiten während der Dauer der Ausstellung:

Monday closed. Montag geschlossen.
Tuesday closed. Dienstag geschlossen.
Wednesday: 3 pm - 7 pm. Mittwoch: 15 - 19 Uhr.
Thursday: 3 pm - 9 pm. Donnerstag: 15 - 21 Uhr
Friday: 3 pm - 7 pm. Freitag: 15 - 19 Uhr.
Saturday 2 pm - 6 pm. Samstag 14 - 18 Uhr.
Sunday 2 pm - 6 pm. Sonntag 14 - 18 Uhr.


The exhibition collects in a non-linearly organized display at Corner College reflections, documentation, archive and research materials as well as some art works from the five editions of Sinopale – International Sinop Biennial, in-between its past, present and future. Especially for this exhibition, the Swiss participants in the past two editions reflect on their work at Sinopale in contributions between archive, research and art work.

Friday, 13 February, 19:00h Opening with the performance Exercice d’Isolation (Tagblatt) by Petra Elena Köhle and Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, continuing into the next day’s activities

Saturday, 14 February, 16:00h Talk, screening and performances

16:00h Presentation of Sinopale by T. Melih Görgün, founder and artistic director of Sinopale

18:00h Screening of The Sea in Me by XsentrikArts (Bahanur Nasya & Yılmaz Vurucu), 2012, Sinopale 4, documentary, 60ʹ

20:00h Performance My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays by Riikka Tauriainen

Throughout the afternoon and evening, the performance Exercice d’Isolation (Tagblatt) by Petra Elena Köhle and Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, continuing from the opening night



One can say that Sinopale is a peripheric and young biennial of contemporary art on the map of the International Biennials of the art world system, and rather alternative to the so-called “biennial phenomena” and their genre. If it has been in a position of weakness with respect to the center and its political, economic and aesthetic dominance, indeed it mobilizes personal and collective collaborative efforts on the creative edge, where crossing over local and global perspectives, south and north and east and west, it analyzes and re-signifies the biennial discourses dominated by a logic of globalization, traveling art lovers and the shipping of expensive art works.

With its less spectacular exhibition and more humble project, it embraces a rather pragmatic approach to its structures, which in its generosity functions in the mode of new institutionalism rather than institutional critique, and even generates a rupture with the representational models of the big-scale art world projects from the center. It has the advantage to re-invent the relevance of the relation between contemporary art practices and daily life, and re-define the paradoxes of the creation of the value and status of art on the limit. It re-situates and re-articulates the notion of art and its institutionally driven formats and betrays the established network of distribution of art, such as the art markets or the circuit of commercial galleries. Where art, in a real situation, can be seen as an object that acts as ambiguous support or medium or catalyst of existential change and new ways of transference of relations, i.e., art practices can be seen as transversal tools for social change that can dissolve in the existing context as they externalize and modulate it and can productively cast new bridges to reconnect the land-space-town, with responsibility towards relational and new ecologies and their potentialities that engender the conditions for creation.

This transversality is not given, but a matter of a pragmatics of existence, a kind of openness and progressive deterritorialization from existing modelization. “Transversality still signifies militant, social, undisciplined creativity” (Félix Guattari), where art practices work as urban guerilla. [1]

Sinopale puts a finger on the painful points and dynamics in the post-industrial and neoliberal conditions of living in-between urbanized and rural environments in which the commercialization and permanence of the economic crises threaten the communities and challenge daily-life existence. Sinopale is a Biennial for all, with its broad and open stage for an aesthetics and politics of art that can empower the quality and quantity of life and bring new experiences in which the present memory and historical past interweave towards the future, with the social and cultural commitment and self-valorization.


[1] Hou Hanru emphasized at the beginning of the 10th International İstanbul Biennial manifesto that “We are living in a time of global wars,” and stated that “In such a debate, artistic actions, including the Biennial itself, can certainly find their roles in prompting cultural and social changes through innovative forces of intervention – a form of urban guerrilla.” 10th International İstanbul Biennial, Hou Hanru, “Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War” (Istanbul: İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2007).





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