Timeless Curiosities at Istanbul Modern reflects on how the advent of technology has altered the fundamental relationship between bodies and places, memories and histories
Jutting out from the centre of a large facade of green rock is a wizened face. Animated and able to speak (in Italian no less), the rock recounts its 70 years of bearing witness to the hypocrisy of politicians. It offers sage advice through its wry observations on global and local histories; one such example is a recounting of the violent expropriation of land native to the Lenape people (what is now New York City). Sometimes the rock even sings. It, we learn, is part of the serpentinite stone that forms the backdrop to the speaker’s podium at the United Nations General Assembly Hall in New York, and it is tired of what it witnesses. Painstakingly reproduced in CGI and animated by artist Cihad Caner in his videowork I, The Green Marble; The (Hi)story Of My Witness and Memory (2020), the piercing gaze of the stone face is the first thing that visitors encounter at Timeless Curiosities.
Focusing on 16 early and mid-career Turkish artists and collectives working in digital media, the show presents keen observations about the ways in which the production of historical and social narratives are enabled by technologies that reconfigure how memory is documented and disseminated. Also reflected upon is how the digital world functions as an effective index of changes that would otherwise be too rapid and ephemeral to be observed. In Caner’s work, for example, the eponymous green marble’s ruminations highlight the limitations of the kinds of history-writing and narratives that are subsumed under populist politics. Accompanied by a poster of a quote that Caner encountered in Crete (‘The only good nation is imagination’), the work challenges both the efficacy of the United Nations as an institution and the nation-state as a social unit experiencing unprecedented crises.
Meanwhile, works such as Beste İleri SENTIMAP İstanbul (2024) and Coincidence (2024) by Yasin Arıbuğa-Toprak Fırat examine Istanbul’s urban landscape and the different cartographic possibilities for capturing information that is otherwise difficult to record. İleri uses artificial intelligence to scan and analyse newspaper articles from the 1970s to the present day in order to distil a map of specific emotions associated with the city by sifting through key words denoting public sentiments through the decades. Arıbuğa-Fırat developed software that creates a dynamic collage in real time from footage taken from traffic and tourist camera feeds across 50 different locations in Istanbul. Their work puts into perspective the complexity and diversity of the city’s cultural and visual landscape. Specific locations also become focal points of artistic investigation: the municipality of Kadıköy, a commercial district located on the Asian side of the Bosporus, is the subject of Alican İnal’s 3D sonic sculpture and video Museum for Disappearing Sounds (2024) and artist-collective oddviz’s Diasec collage print Kadıköy I (2018). Both of these installations examine the role played by sound and urban furniture, respectively, as substrates of the city.
Moving beyond the boundaries of Turkey, Ebru Kurbak’s Reinventing the Spindle (2023) traces the history of flax as one of the first plants to be grown in outer space. Presenting video and photographic documentations of her experiments in spinning yarn from flax during a parabolic flight administered by the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Kurbak positions textile production as a technology whose sophistication is under-acknowledged due to its associations with craft, domestic labour and the feminine domain, and in doing so, critiques the gendered biases associated with how histories of technological development have been written.
Taking its namesake from the cabinets of curiosities that were precursors to contemporary museums, Timeless Curiosities reflects on how the advent of technology has altered the fundamental relationship between bodies and places, memories and histories. In engaging with the technologies of communication, the function of the museum as a site where notions of history, politics and society are negotiated becomes all the more crucial. Between the immutability of the timeless and the accelerating urgencies of the time-less, this exhibition serves as a local relay for a continual, global conversation on the multiple ways that technology has allowed us to redefine our surroundings, and also drawn attention to the necessity of negotiating our collective and ongoing relationship with technology in turn.
Timeless Curiosities at Istanbul Modern, through 11 August
