Istanbul, 2015

Vasif Kortun is chairman of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives. He was founding Director of Research & Programs at SALT – an institution that hosts an extensive archive on modern and contemporary art and architecture from Turkey- from 2011 to 2017. He remains active as a curator, educator and advisor on contemporary art and institutional practices. Kortun was the director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (2001-9); director of Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2001- 3); chief curator and director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial (1992); and co-curator of the 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), as well as of the 6th Taipei Biennial (2008). Between 1994 and 1997, Kortun worked as the director of the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

THE FIRST TIME WE MET, WE TALKED ABOUT SALT’S ARCHIVE, DO YOU REMEMBER? NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT YOUR OWN ARCHIVE.

Oh God. Do you mean my own personal archive?

WELL, YOUR REACTION IS ALREADY AN ANSWER! IT SEEMS THAT EVERY CURATOR HAS A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO HIS/HER ARCHIVE…

Sure, it’s true. I did keep certain things early on and quite diligently, but I came to believe that archiving one’s self is perverse. It is presumptuous to imagine a place for yourself outside the trash bin of history. There may come a time when your practice is neglected, and you cannot be both the object and the subject of interest. The focus of curating is not the curator. That being said, I have kept things that I thought should be kept and it is a solid base of material. This was up to the 1990s, and then I became more and more negligent. One does not keep a copy of each letter sent out. Nowadays everything is automatically archived and is not necessarily relevant. The challenge is shifting away the noise and the junk, not to ke- ep but to keep throwing away. The “archivable” changed in the mid-1990s when we moved from dial-up to broadband. Before then, you had to complete everything in one go. Everything had to be much more deliberated, unambiguous, and provident. Looking at old emails and letters, I realize we would organize an exhibition with one letter: compressed intelligently, it would be substantial and compelling. In 2013 we staged three exhibitions at SALT, one of which I had organized back in 1993 and was considered a landmark exhibition in Turkey¹. I had kept the documents of that project very carefully, because I knew it was momentous. So there is always a hierarchy among what’s kept. You don’t store everything and there may be things you prefer to be left alone, missteps, in order to avoid being judged on those. Filters are always in place. Everything is online now. I gave away my archives and library to SALT and they take care of it, both physically and digitally.

SO YOU DON’T HAVE AN ARCHIVE IN YOUR PRIVATE SPACE?

Only a few books I am reading at the moment.

My bookshelf is pretty below par, with grey boxes stuffed with cables, old hard drives, printer paper, small presents and art given by friends, notepads, a lantern, a glass funnel and some gauze, passports and receipts, and a few books. I have no attachment to objects. I do not own anything. Everything goes to SALT.

IS THAT FOR A PRACTICAL REASON, OR BECAUSE YOU IDENTIFY WITH THE INSTITUTION?

I guess it has to do with a sense of scarcity of local resources we had when I was growing up. Libraries and individual collections had a public aspect for me, visiting a friend or a relative would also mean raiding the bookcase. Before 1990 not much literature on art existed. I decided more than twenty-something years ago that it should all end up in an institution, and I began to collect beyond an individual need, pedagogically, in an organized way. Most of the materials I donated to the institution were not even quirky or idiosyncratic. They came from me but not all of it is specific to me.

TELL ME ABOUT SALT’S PUBLICATION OF THE ARCHIVES OF VOTI—UNION OF THE IMAGINARY. WAS THAT YOUR INITIATIVE?

Not only me. Actually, the VOTI archive was never intended to be in the form of a printed book. We were supposed to remain a closed group, to encourage honesty. At the end of the 1990s, when I was back in Istanbul, it was one of the few things that kept me alert. We were all around the world. It was part of a daily ritual: I would go to the bakery in the morning, come back, turn on the computer, dial-up and hear the comforting sound of the modem connecting to the internet, and check who had written on the forum. It was our way of keeping in touch with the world. As curators, none of us had an institutional position or even a full-time job. We wanted to use it to transform exhibition practices and institutions. I had always relished the idea of keeping this memory intact somehow and making it into a book. I tried to keep as much as I could during that time and printed out some of the materials and scan- ned or saved the others, but I was still missing a lot. We collaborated with VOTI’s archivista Susan Hapgood, who was also one of the editors of the book. She came up with additional materials but did not have the entire documentation either. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was one of the first VOTI people I met face to face in Venice in 1999. We discussed the idea of issuing it as a Documenta publication, but the time frame would not allow it. The crucial contributor was Robert Fleck. He had printed and stored everything in his summer- house in France. From A4 printouts we went back to the digital and reconstructed the discussion threads. The publication was the resurrection of this naive and untarnished time of curating. We thought it was important to revisit that time and regenerate some of VOTI’s major discussions.

TO REVISIT PREVIOUS TIMES IS WHAT ARCHIVES—PERSONAL, INSTITUTIONAL AND/OR COLLECTIVE—ALLOW US TO DO.

FOOTNOTE

1. It was a time of conversation is an archive and research project. It revisits the story of three exhibitions that took place in the first half of the 1990s in Turkey: Elli Numara: Anı/Bellek II [Number Fifty: Memory/Recollection II], GAR [Railway Station], and Küreselleşme–Devlet, Sefalet, Şiddet [Globalization–State, Misery, Violence]. In 2012, SALT visualized the research in the form of an exhibition at SALT Galata in the Open Archive. This was followed by a more developed presentation of the exhibition at SALT Ulus in 2013. ↩︎