İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe, a collaborative project between SALT and Van Abbemuseum, will evolve over the course of three exhibitions presented across both SALT venues throughout 2012. The first exhibition, İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe: Post ’89, opens on January 27 and presents art works loaned from the Van Abbemuseum collection that were produced after the year 1989.
In collaboration with the team at Van Abbemuseum, SALT has selected over forty individual works by fifteen international artists who have either never shown in İstanbul or have been rarely exhibited despite their notoriety. In addition to believing that these particular works are of inspirational importance and hence should be seen first-hand, the selection also revolves around several key themes explored within artistic practices of this period. These include ‘portraiture’ with photographs by Rineke Dijkstra and an installation of paintings titled Models by Marlene Dumas, ‘literature and text’ for which Allen Ruppersberg’s homage to Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl takes center stage, ‘film’ as referenced throughout the practices and works of Douglas Gordon and Rodney Graham among others, and ‘time and space’ conceptually explored most intimately by Stanley Brouwn. Works by local artists that relate to these loose thematic sections are positioned to encourage visual and conceptual conversations between similar ideas and approaches. These include paintings by Leyla Gediz that afford an alternative appreciation for portraiture, Cevdet Erek’s studies of rhythm and measure, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt’s plays on translation and geographical positioning and İnci Eviner’s quirky film-set-like panoramas that read along one horizon line.