Glenn Ligon or QueerFest: Rethinking the 16th Istanbul Biennial
By Matt Hanson
The centerpiece of Glenn Ligon’s contribution to the 16th Istanbul Biennial, “The Seventh Continent,” is a work characteristic of his textual oeuvre. Painted light bulbs strung with wire between metal stands form the lettering, “A-M-E-R-I-C-A”. A series of sketches on the wall opposite the installation reflects the quartet of spelling variations in which the word appears; upside-down, backwards and in Turkish, replacing the “C” with a “K”.
With the VIA Art Fund, the biennial commissioned the piece, “Untitled (America)” (2019) to hang on the ground floor of the freshly renovated, but dusty interior of the elegant Mizzi Mansion on the island of Buyukada, accessible by a commuter ferry within Istanbul’s metropolitan region.
The curator, portmanteau wordsmith, and Palais de Tokyo co-founder Nicholas Bourriaud, refers to “Untitled (America)” as mahya art. As early as 1617, mosques in Istanbul have followed the Ottoman tradition of stringing lights between minarets, like premodern billboards that were commemorating Ramadan. By the early 20th century, the old mahya craft of suspending hundreds of oil lamps, and arranging them into religious formulas in Arabic script, had turned into electric bulbs spelling out Latinized Turkish phrases to relay political messages.
The focal point of the show demands revisits in order to appreciate it, as the spelling of “Untitled (America)” changes day by day. This kinetic mechanism is fully congruent with Ligon’s homage to James Baldwin. Ligon features the 1973 documentary, “From Another Place” by Sedat Pakay, with subtitles newly translated into Turkish. Three interviews with Baldwin while he is in Istanbul are interspersed with him in his apartment in skivvies, meandering through the crowds and streets, and reflecting on his love life at his writing desk, however ambivalently.
Ligon’s inclusion of the documentary triggered LGBTQIA+ underrepresentation in Turkey. The Biennial attributed Glenn Ligon as the first to translate “From Another Place” into Turkish. In 2017, Turkey’s annual, multi-city QueerFest screened the film with Turkish subtitles at Pera Museum, one of this year’s Biennial venues. This year, QueerFest survived a government ban on all LGBTQIA+ events in Ankara.
“From Another Place” shows Baldwin exploring the Istanbul of 50 years ago, identifying himself as a “kind of witness”. He stops at a used bookstand, and sees a copy of the Turkish translation of his novel, “Another Country”, which he finished in Istanbul in 1961. He holds up the book. Its title translates to “Dark Stranger”. Linda and Sonny Sharrock composed and performed gospel instrumentals for the film, evoking the tragic dignity of the Civil Rights era in which Baldwin stepped in and out of in between trips to Istanbul.
In his next book, The Lion and the Nightingale, out October 17, the Turkish journalist Kaya Genç delights in conversation with the theater director Engin Cezzar, who Baldwin met in New York before his first trip to Istanbul. Baldwin, he writes, strolled nocturnally throughout the far-flung village neighborhoods of Istanbul. “I feel so free in Turkey,” Baldwin once said to the late Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal, who responded, “That’s because you’re American.”
Ligon, an African-American artist who is particularly lionized for his neon calligraphy, filled two rooms in the entrance gallery at the Mizzi Mansion with examples of his beaming, iconic decor. “Untitled (29 Ekim 2023)” (2019) is a painted fluorescence of the imminent centennial commemoration for the Turkish Republic’s founding on the 29th of October, 1923.
Parallel, “Untitled (31 Mart, 2019)” (2019) refers to the nationwide municipal elections that rocked Turkey’s ruling AKP party led by President Erdogan, from its 25-year reign in the capital of Ankara. Their mayoral loss of Istanbul was a sea change. It essentially forewarned a new era in Turkish politics. In Ligon’s hands, its significance is as vivid as the inception of the Turkish Republic.
The modern core of Istanbul is the focus of Ligon’s videos, “Taksim (1)” (2019), and “Taksim (2)” (2019), each approximating 40 minutes. Their soundtracks transform the eye-level cityscape into a medium for experimental thought techniques like free association. Pulsing drum solos by Don Cherry and Neneh Cherry spiral into airs that fuse Black Sea fiddling with avant-garde flute. Nauseatingly, the camera whips around, landing in view of a man’s crotch on one side, and a woman bending over on the other. There is no center. The heart of Istanbul is a bloody mess of statuesque poses, selfie smiles, scattered pigeons and plainclothes strollers.
“Taksim (2)” is longer, in slow motion. Its music, by Tyshawn Sorey, draws out protracted tones for a foreboding mood. Ligon trains its focus on a juvenile street food hawker with albinism, a downcast elderly man with a cane, a uniformed worker pushing a shopping cart. In the gray doom, the camera is raised toward pigeons balancing on a triangle of electric wires followed by their visual likeness as a string of blood-red Turkish flags. The masses are weighed by an unseen depression, and perhaps like Baldwin, must leave in order to find clarity. As for Ligon, Istanbul invigorated his multilayered visual vocabulary.
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Matt Hanson is a writer and journalist living in Istanbul, and New York, where he works as an arts and culture reporter for various internationally-distributed newspapers and magazines.