February 25, 2011
February 15, 2011
Otopark & park shark
February 13, 2011
February 10, 2011
January 27, 2011
Another shish variation: shish ke-map
January 22, 2011
While I'm ploughing on through still amorphous mental land- and webscapes of research for a film about Europe, as seen from Baku, Azerbaijan, everyday life goes on in the streets of Istanbul. Yesterday morning I got to know these concrete little friends:
January 17, 2011
In november I've been in Tbilisi, Georgia for a week with Sara, visiting the young residency GeoAir and Center for Contemporary Art. It was a very nice week, we ate the most wonderful bread!
January 16, 2011
January 11, 2011
Back in Istanbul, food immediately fixes my attention once again as an ever generous source of inspiration. Mr. Murat is a small cheese I encountered in the dairy section of the Besiktas branche of Migros Market.
November 29, 2010
Low energy in cold low countries...
November 10, 2010
Temporarily back home, in the lands of EU vegetables.
October 31, 2010
October 17, 2010
Taksim square houses the main stage of the European Capital of Culture, with an evening program of music and dance of national character, accompanied by a spontaneous, folkloristically dancing crowd. According to a friend from Istanbul it's only recently that youths of Istanbul started dancing on the street in an improvised folklore style. It is quite surprising to see and I thought, being new to Istanbul, that this must be an old tradition.
October 15, 2010
October 9, 2010
October 4, 2010
Slowing down into the difficult part of the research for my new film (trying to turn intial ideas into a script...) I am looking out of my studio window more often. Next to a slice of view over rooftops and minarets a brand new Virgin Megastore is being built. A summery of the building method:
October 1, 2010
Everyday around lunchtime I'm trying to steer clear of the döner places on Istiklal (I'm sorry to say, but none of the döner stands here met the standards of the one on Mercatorplein so far) but still I end up eating... döner.
döner head:
navigator:
September 28, 2010
I know, it's not really a blog if you cannot post any comments, but if you want to, please send your comments by email, then I will (maybe) post them...
September 23, 2010
Istanbul is a sparkling and rich city where you can feel perfectly at ease as a European. There's enough of the exotic and oriental culture to enchant you and yet there are all the contemporary western comforts and luxuries available.
Being an artist, I ended up at gallery openings soon enough. Feeling happy and content about my well funded stay here, I joined some other foreign and Turkish artists to a couple of recently opened galleries just off Istiklal Caddesi, the main shopping street. We saw works at one gallery with a distorted portrait of Atatürk and with Atatürk as fallen angel. Back outside on the street, I asked a Turkish artist friend if this kind of work, making fun of Atatürk, would be provocative at all. She didn't think so.
A good 3 seconds later a fistfight started in front of us, and right after that there was a gang of insanely screaming and raving men, beating anyone they could lay their hands on and spraying pepperspray in people's faces. We had to run, and many people got beaten and seven people ended up in hospital with injuries like a broken nose and facial wounds from being attacked with a broken bottle. I had managed to flee into a stairwell which turned out to lead to another gallery on the 4th floor, where a small, well dressed crowd was calmly enjoying the last moments of an exhibition opening. Windows were broken on the street below, and after a while the police arrived and the situation calmed down again. When I wanted to go out in the street again, with a bottle of beer in my hand, a man told me to put it under my jacket. As it turned out, the blind rage was motivated by the starting gentrification of the neighborhood Tophane, with a largely Sunni muslim community with Anatolyan roots, and the excuse was to beat people up because they were drinking alcohol in the street.
There seems to be no real communication between often rich newcomers like art galleries and foreigners who rent apartments there, and the local community. Of course that doesn't at all justify a violent attack. It was the most shocking gallery opening I've experienced.
I didn't intend to start a news blog, but I think this incident could function as a starting point to try to understand more of the tensions and contradictions in Istanbul, Turkey and the region to the east, the south Caucasus. I'll post observations, thoughts and images that touch on the subject.
Have a look at one of the attacked galleries' website: Galeri NON
Read in Hürriyet Daily News about what happened
