Les Anonymes / The anonymous / Die Anonymen / Sine nomine / Ανώνυμος - Day 2

2pm - Praxis

Slavs and Tatars: Service Industry

(40min with Q&A)

Served with fruits 

"Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric and as such are an offense to democracy: is not publicity a democratic principle?”– Norman O. Brown

Our languages fail us when they don’t offer various way-stations between anonymity and exposure. How do we hang our hat on the privy, the confidential, or the secluded? What if instead of privacy and the personal, anonymity gained in accessibility, it lost in subjectivity? That is, not the personal or oneself but rather the more elusive ourselves were gained in becoming anonymous. From Slavs and Tatars’ founding région d’être to its recent works such as Aşbildung (2021, KH Osnabrück and Portikus, Frankfurt), the collective has redeemed collectivity, participation, and more recently, the service industry, as means to reclaim not so much anonymity, but rather the deflection of our collective human soft spot for the personal, the individual. Among other things, the collective discusses the relative strengths of fruits and flora vs fauna when it comes to questions of authorship. How can we write our world and universe without relying on anthropomorphic navigation? 

Slavs and Tatars is an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly distinctive form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Albertinum Dresden, amongst others.  The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. The collective has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently Лук Бук (Look Book) with Distanz Verlag.  In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin.

3pm - Memento

Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun: Saturday Mothers

(40min with Q&A)

Served only with water

Mustafa Emin Büyükkcoşkun’s photo installation titled Repetition (2015 - ongoing project) centers around the Saturday Mothers / People sit-ins, which have been held in Galatasaray Square since 27 May 1995 and was banned after the 700th meeting which was held 25 August 2018.

Since 2016 Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun lives and works in Karlsruhe, focusing more on media archeological aspects of moving images and various archival practices. He developed the project Images From Past Future with Rayna Teneva, revisiting the film archive of the former nuclear research center of Karlsruhe. His last project, which includes oral history, visual memory, and documentary film To Go is about the journey of a group of youngster who travel from East to West Turkey, to help the reconstruction city of Kobane, where they lost their lives in an ISIS suicide attack. Mustafa is now developing his debut film with Semih Gülen, telling the story of a female athlete using an unorthodox doping method, at the crossroads of fiction and documentary.

4pm - Agora

Hou Hanru: Daziboa

(60 min)

Served with nuts

Selected images from Hou Hanru`s exhibition history with anonymity, from Daziboa – a mobile video projection project initiated in Paris for Nuit Blanche 2004 and developped in Istanbul Biennial 2007, to Ataturk Culture Center, AKM, the conversation is based on the dilemma between diverse methodologies of exhibition-making, and authorship. As Hou Hanru points out in one of several essays, Dazibao refers to posters with large letters printed by the working classes against China’s elite during the Cultural Revolution. A major difference, however, between the Dazibao rhetoric used in Mao’s time, its Romanized appropriation in the West, and its application to the Istanbul Biennial edition he curated in 2007 is that irony inevitably intervenes in the course of historical replay. Therefore, the politicized critiques earnestly repeated by contemporary artists throughout this Biennial, intended to bring art to the “non-art” sites across the city, seemed oddly out of touch with the hyper-mediated images they were attempting to revoke and raised new questions about the tension between art and public sphere today.

Hou Hanru is a prolific writer and curator based in Paris and Rome. He was Artistic Director of MAXI (National Museum for 21st Century Art and National Museum of Architecture), Rome (2013-2022). Hou Hanru has curated and co-curated over 100 exhibitions for last three decades across the world. He has been working closely with Sarkis since the early 1990s, notably in Paris, London, Shanghai, San Francisco, Istanbul and Rome, while among others, he was the curator of Istanbul Biennial 2007.

He is an advisor for numerous cultural institutions including Times Museum, Guangzhou, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York. He frequently contributes to various journals on contemporary art and culture and lectures and teaches in numerous international institutions. His books include “A Story for the Future, the first decade of MAXXI” (MAXXI, Quodlibet, 2021), “Hou Hanru”, (Utopia@ Asialink, and School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, 2014), “On the Mid-Ground” (English version published in 2002, by Timezone 8, Hong Kong, and Chinese version published in 2013, by Gold Wall Press, Beijing), “Curatorial Challenges” (conversations between Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, in “Art-it magazine” as “curators on the move”, Japan, 2006-2012, Chinese version, Gold Wall Press, Beijing, 2013).