Istanbul, 2018

These days, to be a cultural institution without an archival agenda is a sign of being outdated. Whether it is a strongly pronounced urgency for preserving while producing, or the irrepressible fascination with digging beyond histories in circulation, the art historiographic impulse is currently building mountains of storage material—both physical and virtual. The practice is surely not revolutionary within the field since it is synonymous with the modern world, and the growing attention it attracts is far from accidental. As social and political updates on the direction of the world put pressure on the imagination of our shared futures, it becomes a duty to investigate clues from the recent past. However, as this publication amply demonstrates, there is—refreshingly—a lack of shared positions, let alone a consensus, on how and why this particular area, the curatorial archive, matters.

The inclusion of researcher Michela Alessandrini’s conversations with nineteen international curators on SALT’s online bookshelf is contingent on the institution’s practices. Archives collected and catalogued by SALT Research rest on the principle of becoming digitally available to anyone, anywhere, at any time; a measure that is actually counter to the prevalent exclusivity of intellectual labor, for instance, in academia. The fact that documents from certain fields, media, and periods remain in close proximity is not only a service to scholarly researchers, but also an invitation for everyone to pull out the one piece that pierces through the established grand narratives. The promise and potential are always there because, though they may not survive intact in all geographies, archives are not authorized content. They may suffer from poor insight in their cataloguing, but they will neither recompose nor exclude themselves to merely strengthen one view, one position, unlike written theses. This assertion of accessibility ensures that the archive is not to be perceived as a storytelling tool for a few but an investigative instrument for all. It is this that offers archives life beyond the events they register.

The major inspiration behind Alessandrini’s research is the Harald Szeemann archive, which, paired with her intuition, has led Alessandrini to conduct a timely investigation into a number of contemporary archives with their individual or institutional bearers. The initiating effect of Szeemann’s archive and library is not arbitrary. It could be considered an institution on its own—one that continues to define the potential of the curatorial. Alessandrini remarks that the importance of curatorial archives lies in the interweaving of the resources with those who generate them in practice. Fittingly, her research into the contemporary includes curators who have addressed art and its history in various capacities in the past few decades. Whether they have purposefully crafted their own archives or not, their contributions count as evidence of how curatorial work is maintained today, and it is both obvious and inspiring to read that there is no one way. What is unclear is whether there is ever a concern with the way the practice is instrumentalized, as is the case for so many others, not among those interviewed but in the world of exhibition-making at large.

While Istanbul was being hailed as a new international art hub in the first decade of the twenty-first century, virtually every article on the matter would include the words emergence and boom—terms that are clearly redolent of corporate language. Indeed, this era can be defined as a phase of art consumerism. We should not confuse this with ongoing discussions about the dictates of the market; rather, it was one of the outcomes of a search for peripheral globalism. Yet the greater by-product, overlooked by many, is a constant celebration that takes the form of exhibitions in every other corner of the city with various trends informing various edifices, shopping malls and communal squares became spaces for exhibits. Much like the tranquilized beneficiaries of the world expositions in their heyday, the public is invited to and entertained by these ubiquitous displays. From food-related festivals to local design souks, the temporary now dominates the everyday. While the real art market continues to depend on conventional operations such as fairs, a high-paced, semi-financial cultural production economy is being built and maintained through student awards, young artist prizes, sponsored five-day art events and the like. Istanbul is not the exception but one prosperous setting among many simultaneously “happening” around the world— a situation that has invoked the imagination of many authorities to intensify both the production and the polarization of cultural capital in the city. It would be comforting to dismiss the side effects of the established art circuit but such intricacies call for the following question: to what extent is the curatorial implicated in the temporary means of cultural production that is taking over the urban sphere?

Art historiography has the capacity to immediately dissociate itself from the shopping mall gallery scene and to prove such associations unworthy. Yet, exhibition-making is complacent about the notion of temporality and the ceaseless act of producing. The examples of festivals, souks, and the like rely on their formats to disrupt the long haul of cultural institutions’ specific temporality, and now, increasingly their monetary and intellectual economies, in much the same way that a short-term home rental does to a hotel. What arises from the disruption is not an internalized corporatism that wishes to keep the hotel afloat, but an alert to the aptly standardized and more reckless impacts observed in the city by the former. In the same way that traveling is made easier and cheaper by home rental at the expense of the accommodating neighborhood (which immediately caters to the visitor), the art-related event takes a toll on the institution and its future users. In the latter, the real danger lies in the institutions’ docile alignment with the benefits of the temporary. Instead of encouraging fresh thinking to enable knowledge-making, they tend to upscale visual and material production. One way or another, the curatorial archive can be championed as the antidote to this oversimplification of the significance of exhibitions and their making. But one wonders will it be sufficient at this stage to strengthen that consolidated area of knowledge alone? Does the comprehension and therefore the practice and archiving of the curatorial still belong to the ways and times of Szeemann? Have exhibitions already become conventions and gestures of conservation, realities easily ignored as long as they now feed on and travel across exceptionally wider geographies?

It is not the substance of the archives that causes self-inflicted interrogation; it is what they refuse to substantiate. Exhibitions are spaces of limited encounters. The intelligent ones build environments out of layers of knowledge. In most cases, they rely on immediate public engagement.

Why and how something becomes an exhibition can only be attested to by the curatorial. However, the embedded system of their quantification leans more to their justification as the dominant format of exchange than the more urgent elaboration of current responsibilities. The habitual cyclical production of the permanent institution has been made the validation of its funding and therefore its main instrument for survival. Under these circumstances, one wish would be for the time-and-space-bending quality of the archive to work in two different directions. One is the obstinate recording and reciting of what hopefully is impactful in testifying to shared concerns— or even anxieties—of a chosen moment. The other is the promise of interstitial conversations initiated by non-professional wisdom that opens up a context beyond the confirmation of exhibitions. Curatorial Archives in Curatorial Practices brings both acts closer to our thinking. It also serves as a gentle reminder that, to the sites of cultural production, the archives are today what exhibitions were yesterday. Their habitual accumulation and growing capacity for monetizing operations needs to be considered immediately, broadly, and delicately by all those who already play a major part.

Meriç Öner is a trained architect and the director of Research and Programs at SALT. Focusing mainly on material culture in Turkey and its surrounding geographies, Öner works on programming with an eye to tackling the culture in question with a comprehensive and progressive approach. Her work circulates in the form of print and online publications, exhibitions, and public programs. She advocates for the establishment of physical and online platforms that present co-learning opportunities as SALT’s main institutional responsibility, reaching beyond the act of classical exhibition-making.