Looking at the time, leaving it to time
“What do skulls tell us?” he asks, “What does it mean to be human?” "When does the human begin?" What makes Homo Sapiens more “primitive” than its relatives who two million years ago shaped a stone into a knife, a hammer, a spoon, perhaps also to carve a horse on a cave wall? How white-skinned were the hunter-gatherers of six thousand years ago? Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, who have been working together for eleven years in addition to their solo artistic practice, ask questions about the colonial past of archaeology and the story of white civilization constructed through racist search for origins in their manifesto video “Dust to Data”. The narrator in the video talks about history as a fiction created by the domination of naming and categorization, the million-year journey of language. Then children's laughter comes from upstairs into the dark little hall.
Starting on October 4 and running until November 11, one of the venues of the Çanakkale Biennial is the Korfmann Library, one of Turkey's most important libraries focused on archaeology, and Ulrika Flink and Deniz Erbaş, who curated the selection here, have certainly made a wise and well-informed choice to include this video. But after climbing the stairs, finding six girls between the ages of seven and seventeen, the source of those laughs, in a hall full of archaeology books in different languages invented by humanity, and hearing one of them ask, “What is an archaeologist?” is one of those story-like moments that life sometimes throws your way and for which you should be grateful. Young residents of the Romany neighborhood where the library is located have come to visit. “Normally, places like this make me feel depressed, but I like it here,” says one of the elders, who looks like the goddess Asase Ya from “Dust to Data” because she has exaggerated her Instagram influencer-inspired eye makeup. Gül Yurun Mavinil, a librarian and a member of the Troy excavation team, explains her work in detail. The younger girls have Troy books for children open in front of them, and they are like squirrels jumping from one acorn to another among the ruins of the ancient mound. Love is the part of the Trojan War that older ones are most interested in; but did Helen really love Paris? Did she marry her husband against her will? Didn't they kill her later because she loved someone else while married? Truths of the times that are suddenly remembered while talking about the soldiers in the belly of the wooden horse: Sister, are you salaried, do you have social insurance?
Once upon a time, other children's voices once came from this floor. Before this building became a library dedicated to Manfred Osman Korfmann, who headed the Troy excavations, it was a tobacco warehouse, but it was originally built as the Infant School of the adjacent Surp Kevork Church, founded in 1669. In the new narrative of history that was to be constructed, there was no place for the non-Muslim and non-Turkish peoples of Anatolia. As the city's Armenians were driven into obscurity, first by the bombardment of World War and then by the deportation order, what remains of the Armenian neighborhood today is Zafer Square.
Against the fiction of the ruler
The intellectual partnership between David Blandy, who came to Çanakkale for the opening, and Larry Achiampong has an inspiring side. They met during a performance in Freud's study room when Blandy was trying to remember some hiphop songs. Achiampong came up to him and said “you have the lyrics but the beats are missing”. When he said, “I can only do this on my own,” they decided to be each other's beats. Since 2013, this middle-class white Briton and a black Ghanaian citizen of the same country from a working-class family have been making work based on their shared political concerns and tastes. Experimental videos, board games, performances that touch on the colonialism embedded in the root fringes of scientific knowledge and technological progress, and the racism embedded in avatars, emojis, video games, comics and the visual icons of popular culture...
In this corpus, some of which I had the chance to watch, which deals with the “fiction” of the powerful in a field ranging from archaeology to history, from gene research to everyday politics, another thing that touched me as much as the content was to see the course of producing together, giving rhythm to each other and transforming each other over time without fetishizing art-making. The meeting of one's more poetic and the other's more agitated language has led to what Blandy calls a kind of organic evolution, a comradeship that encourages and drives forward. Maybe this is how he was able to enter the story of his own grandfather. Like the impossibility of ethical consumption under capitalism, it is a partnership that is maintained by trying to stand in the right place as much as possible in the art “market”, by looking for ways to produce with public funds, and by enduring the prostration of supporting it with additional work. The trilogy, in which they pursue Fanon's lost works of fiction, ends with a poetic video featuring their own children, in which they exchange ideas about life, burdens and the future in a time of apocalyptic destruction.
Looking at twenty years
It is difficult to describe an international art event in Çanakkale and its environs, spread over thirteen venues from the Troy Museum to the Mahal, featuring the works of some fifty artists, by trying to describe everything at once. Looking through the prism of a single work and moment creates another fiction - my own. Through this prism, the title of the biennial also finds its meaning.
“Leaving it time” might be the worst idea in an age when the world is “on fire”; apart from the extinction of humanity, there is nothing left in this human-corrupted and human-built order that can be healed if left to its own devices. But leaving it to time here is more like a farmer doing his best and then waiting for the fruit on the tree to ripen. In the realm of art, which cannot remain free from the mechanics of capital, the shadow of oppressive powers, and the market spirit of time, there is an insistence on realizing this event for almost twenty years. An artistic activity that is thought together with geography and history, without being inclined to showcase only to those who move from outside the city, without entering into the periphery complex that wants to prove itself to the center; a cultural production that has lasted twenty years, not for the sake of “sustainability” as the fashionable term goes, but because it is preferred to continue and because effort is put into it. It is more like a point of view that does not fetishize the idea of making a biennial, that prefers the relationships that will be established while wanting to make a biennial, that prefers that work, and that believes in the evolution that will emerge from this, as David Blandy describes it. CABININ, the Çanakkale Biennial Initiative, spends the time between biennials producing culture in the city, trying to establish ties with local institutions, local capital and civil society, and pushing to create new spaces, ideas and financial resources.
There may be wrong choices in this process, but focusing on moving on rather than doing it for the sake of doing it, avoiding rushing, avoiding the light show, brings a caliber that is willing to risk making mistakes. This is how different forms of curating and institutional collaborations can be tried.
Maybe not working with a single curator is a weakness, but maybe thanks to this perspective, there are more young artists and youth-oriented activities this year. In this way, the generation that “grew up” with the Çanakkale Biennial is now able to take more initiative in the production process. Maybe this is why it was possible to dream of a museum that would physically embody all these twenty years of accumulation. Without fetishizing the idea of a museum, believing in what the adventure that will lead to it will bring and leaving it to time.
For more information about the 9th Çanakkale Biennial, whose General Artistic Director is Seyhan Boztepe: www.canakkalebienali.com
