Istanbul Design Biennial Parallel Participant Dilek Hanif highlights the overlap between Couture works with the theme of “Imperfection”. Dilek Hanif explains that the cloths made by hand in eye-straining work can never be identical and will bear an impressive mark of imperfection. Hanif believes the reason for couture’s value and specialty lies in the fact that, contrary to mass production, it is produced and embroidered one by one, thus becomes unique. The designer expresses that the imperfections arising from this reason actually symbolizes the originality and dissimilarity. Hanif, for the first time, opened her private creative workshop to visitors on October 14, 2012 all day long where she demonstrated a piece of work within this theme. In addition, Hanif will also hold an interview on what the concept of ‘Imperfection’ means to her. The exhibition is open until 30 November 2012 between 10.00 – 19.00, expect for Sundays and holidays.
Address: Dilek Hanif Ready to Wear Boutique Maçka Caddesi Ralli Apt. 37/1 Teşvikiye İstanbul
October 13th—December 12th 2012
Online journal of
the first edition of the
Istanbul Design Biennial,
curated by Emre Arolat
and Joseph Grima
October 15, 2012
Parallel Participant Dilek Hanif’s Couture Works
Posted by İKSV on October 15, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/2915/
October 15, 2012
Haliç Center by Yona Friedman
Photo by: Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Adhocracy Exhibition – Haliç Center Project
Sixty years after French-Hungarian architect Yona Friedman first brought into architectural debate the key concepts of “Mobile Architecture” and “Spatial City”, alongside a series of advanced proposals in the fields of architecture, art, and social studies, his concepts have become realistic proposals for megacities in the wake of globalization.
In this context, Friedman’s first installation for the city of Istanbul, the Haliç Center, inscribes itself in Friedman’s general understanding of mega cities as knots of communication inside continents, beyond 19th century concepts of national identities and boundaries.
The Haliç Center follows an installation developed in Shanghai in 2010, and focuses on the important element of water as a way of communication and connection between the heterogeneous socio-cultural structured districts of Istanbul.
Friedman’s approach is directed towards a question of relations, of space and of continuity within the pre-existing urban fabric. “I believe that the city (or building) is not a ‘finished product’,” he states, “but rather an endless process, with continuous transformations in every moment.” Thus he stresses the importance of the process in architecture and art, which are ultimately nothing more than the direct expression of a capacity to create relations between individuals, embracing the inevitability of constant change. The idea of process becomes explicit in the Haliç Center. This bridge-housing embraces all the relationships of the city, including a mobile population very often composed of migrants — the new citizenship status of those living against the backdrop of globalization that is completely opposite of neoliberal political fantasies nowadays.
Since Friedman’s work is inextricably linked to communication, the Haliç Center has been conceived as a platform where a few artists and architects — Tomás Saraceno, Boğaçhan Dündaralp , Ömer Kanipak, Cevdet Erek and Gabriele Basilico — are invited to dialogue with Friedman’s intervention. These added interventions will be displayed incrementally, in progressive accumulation.
The Haliç Center is on display at the main hall of the Greek School as a special project within Adhocracy and as homage to Yona Friedman, from whose work the exhibition draws inspiration.
The Haliç Center is curated by Maurizio Bortolotti.
Calendar of interventions: 19 October — Tomas Saraceno; 26 October — Boğaçhan Dündaralp ; 3 November — Ömer Kanipak; 10 November — Cevdet Erek; 17 November — Gabriele Basilico.
Posted by İKSV on October 15, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/halic-center-by-yona-friedman/
October 11, 2012
Istanbul Design Biennial Begins
The Istanbul Design Biennial, covering fields of urban design, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, fashion design and new media design as well as relevant creative products and projects, hosts over 100 projects by nearly 300 designers and architects from 46 countries in two different exhibition venues where curators Emre Arolat and Joseph Grima interpreted the theme “Imperfection” from their own perspectives. The Istanbul Design Biennial will transform Istanbul into a city of design during two months by presenting academy programme, workshop exhibitions, seminar programme, film screenings, parallel participant programme, and design walks as well as both main exhibitions.
The Istanbul Design Biennial was opened and presented to local and international press members with the Official Opening Ceremony and Press Meeting held at Galata Greek Primary School on Wednesday, 10 October. İKSV Chairman Bülent Eczacıbaşı delivered the opening speech at the Official Opening Ceremony of the Istanbul Design Biennial.
İKSV Chairman Bülent Eczacıbaşı stated: “In this first Istanbul Design Biennial which we have been preparing for since 2010, we aimed at organising an event that would encompass not only design, but all related creative industries that have gained momentum all over the world in recent years. Aiming to treat design as a cultural element and examine it from different angles, as well as, think about it anew and urge others to do the same, we wanted to approach the field from the unique perspective of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. (…) Like all other events organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, we hope that the Istanbul Design Biennial will be a successful one that will enrich its discipline, promote the country’s contemporary cultural production in the international arena and provide audiences in Istanbul an opportunity to examine diverse trends and practices from all over the world.’’
Posted by İKSV on October 11, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/istanbul-design-biennial-begins/
October 5, 2012
Istanbul Design Biennial Calendar
Istanbul Design Biennial will take over the city with a series of events to take place between October 13 and December 12.
Click for the detailed program
10-18 October 2012
19-31 October 2012
01-10 November 2012
11-19 November 2012
20-30 November 2012
01-12 December 2012
Posted by İKSV on October 5, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/istanbul-design-biennial-calendar/
October 5, 2012
Istanbul Design Biennial Creative City Map
Istanbul Design Biennial will take over the city with its two main exhibitions, Musibet and Adhocracy, Academy Program, Workshop Presentations, Seminars, Film Screenings and Parallel Participant events. Designed by Superpool and published with the support of TUSKON (Turkish Confederation of Businessman and Industrialists), The Creative City map, displaying all the biennial events will be distributed free of charge in the biennial venues as well as in various centers around the city.
Click for the Creative City Map No:1
Click for the Creative City Map No:2
Posted by İKSV on October 5, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/istanbul-design-biennial-city-map/
October 3, 2012
ifau + Jesko Fezer have come to Istanbul to design the Adhocracy exhibition
ifau (Institut für angewandte Urbanistik, 1998, Berlin/Germany) is a working group of architects focusing on interrelated, interdisciplinary projects in the field of architecture and urban design. Their flexible methodology extends to research projects, installations and generally to events in the urban context whereby all of their projects aim to involve and inscribe contextual processes, urban difference and diversity, creating space for negotiation in the design. ifau are: Christoph Heinemann, Susanne Heiß, Christoph Schmidt.more
Since 2004, ifau started collaborations with Berlin-based architect Jesko Fezer who is a co-editor of the magazine An Architektur, and partner in the Berlin bookstore Pro qm. He is professor for Experimental Design at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. ifau + Jesko Fezer have come to Istanbul to design the Adhocracy exhibition.
Posted by İKSV on October 3, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/adhocracy-exhibition-designers-ifau-jesko-fezer/
September 5, 2012
NCR-05 Letters to Istanbul -2
Joseph Kanon, Alejandro Zaero-Polo, Daan Roggeveen and Nazlı Gönensay letters
Dear Istanbul,
In 1945 you were a city that had spent the war walking a tightrope of neutrality, a playing field for foreign spies table-hopping at the bar of the Park Hotel. The Park is now gone, replaced first by a parking garage, and now by a luxury apartment building. Much else has changed: tram lines have been discontinued, bridges flung across the Bosphorus, streets given new names. 14 million more people crowd its your steep hills and hinterland. The Istanbul of 1945 is now a city of the imagination and to make it real you have to perform a kind of literary archaeology, peeling back layers of history with old maps, photographs, casual references in memoirs.
But recreating infrastructure, a street, is one thing– the real leap is to go back in time. Things that seem impossibly distant to us now were recent events then. The Sultanate had been abolished only 23 years earlier, the recent past, and the harem only 36 years. Istanbul, you would have been filled with Ottoman retainers, nostalgic for past glory, and the young Ataturk generation, determined to race into the modern world. And living among them remnants of the once vibrant minority communities, the trickle, then stream of war refugees, the Western ex-pats, self-absorbed and dabbling in espionage. A wonderful setting, I thought, and maybe not as remote as we first think.
Istanbul you are still a heady mix of peoples and agendas, with streets that look very much as they looked then, still alive with water traffic, still a city of historical layers, 1945 only one of them, enough for my book but only one piece of your mosaic. What would have delighted us then delights us still: Sinan’s ethereal buildings, birds swooping across the Eminonu piers, the patient fishermen lining Galata Bridge. You are always both then and now, a writer’s dream, its history around you, breathing.
Joseph Kanon
Posted by İKSV on September 5, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/ncr-05-letters-to-istanbul-2/
September 4, 2012
New City Reader 05 more letters!
Charles Jencks, David Kohn, Seyla Benhabib and Merve Kaptan have sent their letters to Istanbul for the fifth issue of the NCR.
Istanbul – The Time City
Istanbul and Rome are the quintessential time cities of the world, with layers of history going back thousands of years, marked in stone structures and excavations. But in one way the Turkish city, and the country as a whole, has an even bigger claim to be the historical, layered site of the globe going back further than Rome.
Turkey has some of the first Neolithic sites in the world, such as Catalhöyük, where the town came into being, and Göbekli Tepe, the 12,000 year old site which is revolutionizing our view of what caused the first urban society. The Neolithic Period came about not just because of the revolution that started agriculture – the mutation in wheat that allowed people to collect into towns and live off farming, but for another surprising reason. They came together to worship, or at least build haunting architectural monuments laid out in concentric circles. Göbekli Tepe, excavated over the last seventeen years, was made from T-shaped monoliths carved with sculptures and bas-reliefs of animals. Most are ferocious predators baring their teeth, and they look as uncanny as the long arms, and thin fingers that turn each T-shape into a giant human figure. Generations at Göbekli Tepe built one circle of T’s inside or around another at great human effort. Some of the monoliths are comparable to those at Stonehenge. The ritual underpinning this collective belief is now mysterious to us, but archaeologists and anthropologists are calling the creations “the birth of religion” because they entailed a strong social cohesion. No evidence of houses survive, the farming communities must have lived nearby. Twelve thousand years ago the Neolithic Revolution apparently started partly because of this “oldest known temple site,” and Istanbul has evidence of habitation at least as long.
What are the implications for new building in such areas? A Time City is a layered amalgam of different ages and, like a geological section through a mountain, reveals its levels as different materials, colours and chemistries. In effect, these levels show a naturalistic picture of history, an indexical sign of time, and a palimpsest of cultures. To build in the Time City of Istanbul is to protect and dramatise this layering. Where construction is over new landscape or infill, it is to simulate the layering as an artificial construct. The Time City is constructed by the ages; the architect brings to consciousness evolution, destruction and the re-minting of coins – the palimpsest.
(Layered Walls of Theodosius….and The New Artificial Walls)
Charles Jencks
Posted by İKSV on September 4, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/new-city-reader-05-more-letters/
September 4, 2012
New City Reader [05 - Letters] more pictures!
Posted by İKSV on September 4, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/new-city-reader-05-letters-more-pictures/
September 3, 2012
NCR-05 Letters to Istanbul
Shumon Basar, Superpool, Füsun Türetken ve Tom Dyckhoff wrote letters to Istanbul for the fifth issue of New City Reader.
Dear Istanbul,
Yesterday, I was in The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s grand corollary to his novel of the same name. A friend pointed at a fez hat, and asked me, ‘Do you know what that is?’ I said, ‘Yes. Kemal Ataturk banned them as part of the founding of the Republic.’ She said, ‘Because they were Ottoman.’ Just this week, public debate is raging around the moral and legal status of abortion in Turkey. This was not a battle that liberals ever thought they’d have to re-win; but the assumption that progress – social, economic, biologic – is a one way street is being tested here, in Turkey, which, having been ceremoniously kept out of Fortress Economic Europe during the 9/11 decade, has turned its compassion of optimism in the other direction, east. East may be Al Jazeera Turkey, it may be altering the nation’s time to ally with the Arab world (+3, not +2), it may be Baku or Biskek, Mecca or indigenous MTV. Do you remember in 330AD, some say that you became ‘The New Rome’ – shifting the centre of Christendom’s gravity eastwards, back closer to where it began? Super-cession, adaptation, new names, the vanquish of the past. And now? As Louis Althusser said, ‘The future lasts for a very long time.’
Posted by İKSV on September 3, 2012
http://1tb.iksv.org/ncr-05-letters-to-istanbul/
