In Conversation with Gulsen Bal
How latitude becomes form: Franz Thalmair in conversation with Gülsen Bal
Derived from contemporary creative practice and focused on the issue of intercultural dialogue, the artist, curator and theoretician Gülsen Bal initiated Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte in early 2008. The experimental framework of Open Space aims to create the most vital facilities for contemporary art in the city of Vienna on a non-profit basis, and is concerned with bringing the current developments of the enlargement of Europe to the fore through generating interconnected art routes. In the following interview Gülsen Bal talks about the means of contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of an improved new approach.
Franz Thalmair: What is your approach to the meaning of ‘cosmopolitan’?
Gülsen Bal:The new cosmopolitan position offers the means to benefit from a new existence beyond by the nation-state where the shared spaces are measured in relation to mobility, at the conjuncture of a meeting point where, a ‘temporary home for many’ resides, inhabiting the liminalty, border/boundary a key word.
This reflects the paradoxical settings of the present European Union’s differential structures, a dark adventure which suggests a certain discursive shift related to a new conjunction of ‘the transition’ in its potential at the edge of new outlines of the possible. Here what is momentarily unclear may later make perfect sense or perfect nonsense when explored in a critical approach. I guess this designates my subject-position in the very ‘in-betweenness’ where ‘nowhere’ meets with settled map through multiple entrances and exits.
Thalmair: With the programme of Open Space you are countering ‘current developments of the enlargement of Europe’ by ‘building and facilitating new forms of dialogue and cooperation’. What then are the parameters of the discourse on which that is built?
Bal: To answer this question I have to address certain issues related to an understanding of a different kind of creative journey in its mode of production. This is manifested in its reflecting on the culturally specific conditions that focus on making the invisible ‘visible’, by attempting to entail a structure of positions or positionality which exposes the ambiguity of the situation. This makes it possible to identify some specific and determining characteristics in the ensemble of different practices taking place at Open Space.
The creative exploration at Open Space is built around and at the intersection of interconnected routes concerned with European space as well as building cross-border dialogues among its multi-layered constituents. I intend to bring diverse creative practices together, as well as to create real and virtual collaborative forums, to encourage exchange and joint projects which aim to explore the open spaces of future, to generate new ideas and implement them in collaborative efforts to improve trans-national networks as well as to create a ‘network of networks’, a zone of communicative transfer in a particular socio-cultural setting.
‘One always searches for some symbolic point from which one can claim that something had ended and something else began’. This designates real life case studies and revealed in their culturally specific conditions and in trans-locality. New kinds of creative connections are set in motion around the boundaries of ‘New Europe’. The issue commences here and introduces an experimental dynamic to define the space of current relations that remain to be problematised.
This formulates a special attribute of Open Space in its input towards the ‘production of subject’.
Thalmair: Do you characterise your approach to the programme of Open Space as a curatorial or artistic practice? Do you think there is a clear cut difference between these two practices?
Bal: At this time of increasing debate around new forms of exhibiting, how we consider curatorial practice and how curatorial practice is being exercised beyond the traditional role of exhibition organiser. Your question bears on what is to replace the archetypal format and how one can articulate a coherent position relative to the current state of creative production.The question also concerns a practical approach to creativity. But this again mirrors an ambivalence towards ‘art [as] the production of differentciation’1 where the mechanism of methodology designates an inter-relationship between art production and divergent lines of encounters.
In short, this is to assert a break with the old forms of creative practice, and pertaining to productivity that instead leads to pluralistic approaches.
Critical practice hence stresses its function as the mapping of a ‘conceptual forcing construct’ into which the mechanism of methodology introduces different planes. This is where methodologically ‘practicing theory’could produce the matrixial space and interfaceswith that very ‘in-betweenness’. Here lies the ambiguity where the practice becomes a mode of distributing and activating ideas and challenges us to rethink different planes of creative practice, with attention given to theoretical issues which arise from both the possibilities and limitations of practice.
Thalmair: Besides social and networked projects, the programme of Open Space includes video, performances, documentation of discursive projects and even Internet-based works of art. Is there any special interest in New Media?
Bal:I aim to put across different forms of creative production in each individual project which engages with continual research on contemporary art. That way I can look out for new outlines of possible practices where each project can remain its own new subject at the threshold of ‘urgency’. This suggests some possible trajectories in formulating what ‘institutional creativity’ entails.
Unlike other small or even major institutions, Open Space offers a place for the exploration current relations associated with a process of generating the transitory characteristic – ‘in-between-ness’. Mindful of these issues and the current conditions in art, works that have been presented at Open Space keep to the form of multi/trans-disciplinary pattern ranging from installation, video and performance to an online platform of internet-based works. This identifies some of the specific and determining characteristics that comprise project-specificity within multi-directional models that behave ‘rhizomatically’.
At this juncture, within a set of circumstances, we encounter the virtual environments, social networks and multiple ways of connecting through the World Wide Web. These come into play in constantly expanding the boundaries of structural methodologies as new media form a special territory in which to see what is at stake in today’s world. In other words, we should not underestimate the web’s possibilities.
This is clearly in evidence in the current as well as 2008 programme… We opened our doors with ‘Temporary Zones’ last January 2008 and carried on with ‘Interface’, ‘On Xenophobia Redux’, ‘World-Expo’, ‘FOLDED-IN, I MYSELF AM WAR!’, ‘Networked Cultures’ and the year has ended with the project ‘Structures of Radicality’.
Thalmair: What makes political art ‘successful’ in your opinion? Is it necessary for it to have any measurable effects on the society by what you are doing and endorsing?
Bal: I certainly think this is one issue worth pondering, as this evidence opens up other questions, such as: what are the elements that traverse art and its politic? Such questions articulate the biased mindscapes where everything progresses towards the transformations of ‘demographic politics’ and the politicisation of life. However, here another question pose itself, as Christian Kravagna puts it: ‘to what extent is “social action” political, to what extent does a social interest take the place of the political’?
Thalmair: Your background is Turkish, you grew up in London and your artistic and curatorial practice is concerned with trans-national topics. So why did you decide to initiate Open Space in Vienna and not somewhere else?
Bal: As somebody born in Turkey and grown up in London, I have always been interested in understanding the new forms of articulation that derive from the issues: the ‘difference of identity’ and ‘difference’, minority and exilic discourse and border phenomena in trans-local and/or trans-national location within cultural geography. To a certain degree, this traces my questioning of the dynamics between habitual durations and what is already operative within the staggering proliferation and constant expanding of rigid boundaries. What follows from that is to the transformational processes occurring in social, cultural and ‘identity’ construction, reveals itself in between ‘belonging’ and ‘refusal’, and given where the political engagement is nowcited.
This line of reasoning leads to what one can describe as constituting an entry to ‘almost impossibility’, of transcending the intersections and mechanism of identity, along the axes of trans-cultural practices which engender a new space formed by a space of production.
Now then, the question of why Vienna…
Obviously, location-wise Vienna has retained a rich history and culture, while remaining itself the most important gateway to Central and Eastern Europe. This constitutes in itself a rupture that brings temporary systems to the surface and allows for different levels of manifested intensity and contents to be challenged. So, here I am…
Thalmair:Is Vienna at ease to encourage opportunities for this kind of project?
Bal: One of the flaws of progressive movements is indicated by Walter Seidl:
‘With the inauguration of Open Space by Gülsen Bal at the beginning of 2008, Vienna’s art scene saw an important enrichment of exhibition space after a number of crisis-ridden institutional changes in 2007. The merger of Generali and Bawag Foundation into one exhibition space saw the end of a decade-long exhibition programme concerned with a stringent focus on conceptual practices. The latter abruptly came to a halt due to the decisions made by the groups’ CEOs, which demonstrated how global capital dominates artistic representation and its social reverberations.
With the initiation of ‘Open Space’, Bal precisely confronts this onslaught of capitalist-driven exhibition projects…’
I believe this brings us to the ‘structure / agency’ dilemma and the entire range of problems encompassing that issue.
To some extent, to be based in Vienna allows me a hold on an empirical foundation brought into ‘intercourse with society’ where the catch-phrase is, ‘Wer ist der Verkehr? Wir sind der Verkehr!’ B
The discourses that we bring internationally to Vienna on monthly basis are something that was lacking in this city. Apparently this fills a big gap, while introducing certain dynamics that operate beyond ‘white cube’ context and at the same time function as a kind of ‘institution’ which serves as a hub linking together a complexity of strands.
Thalmair
: Are you personally facing any problems here in Vienna? As a Turk? As British? As a woman? As someone interested in questioning ‘borders/boundaries’?
Bal
: I have not been experienced xenophobic problems or any other kind in person myself. But I think we must nevertheless recognise a redistribution of power relations and the new role of the agent at the border of both ‘rooted’ and ‘routed’…
The emerging point here is a focus on nomadic figuration in which migration and dislocation come to be signifying practices for inclusions and exclusions. It remains necessary to recognise an oscillating odyssey, so to speak, a multiplicity of physical and social locations behind the mirrors that totalise a cul-de-sac vision. I suppose the question still remains open within the realm of how you define this space of engagement…
Thalmair: What does ‘border/boundary’ mean to you, on a personal and on a global level?
Bal: So far as the issues of inhabitating and creating your own space – and the specificity of location within the ‘I-other’ disparity of divergent lines of encounter – the question poses itself as: do ‘borders’ and ‘in-between spaces’ exist? What happens within this realm? Furthermore, what is still ‘missing’ in trans-local and trans-national location within cultural geography?
Thalmair: Crossing borders by ‘integration’?
Bal: Let’s drift a bit further and dispatch this as Guattari3 puts it: ‘The individual and the group cannot avoid a certain existential plunge into chaos. This is already what we do every night when we abandon ourselves to the world of dreams. The main question is what we gain from this plunge: a sense of disaster, or the revelation of new outlines of the possible?’
I guess this answers how latitude becomes form.
Notes
- http://www.openspace-zkp.org
- “Where is the intercourse? Where are the intercourse?” Verkehr has serveral meanings: traffic, communication, but also personal and sexual intercourse.
References
1. Hüseyin B. Alptekin and Vasıf Kortun in Conversation: Yörüngeden Çıkan: Bir Başka Beriki for ‘Reflection on current artistic practices found outside the centre‘, 1991 Date: 29.11.2008, refer to:
http://resmigorus.blogspot.com/
2. Walter Seidl, ‘Gülsen Bal and ‘Open Space’ at the Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Vienna’. Refer to: http://www.artmargins.com/content/review/seidl.htm
3. Felix Guattari, ’ Remaking Social Practices’. This article appeared under the title ‘Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales’ in Le Monde Diplomatique, October 1992, pp. 26-7. Translated by Sophie Thomas. Refer to: Guattari, Felix [Selections. English. 1996] A Guattari reader / Pierre-Felix Guattari; edited by Gary Genesko