Pera Reverse

The seminar on decolonial artistic and architectural research and practice takes place at the invitation of the Pera Museum in Istanbul and is linked to the field trip in the fall of 2023. The Pera Museum, with its archival collection, neoclassical architecture, and urban setting, provides a “contact zone” for us to engage in a decolonial, decentered history of aesthetic practices and transcultural exchange. Responding to this context, we will evolve a collective exhibition and spatial intervention at the renowned museum in 2024.

The making of Westernized modernity is still encoded in our aesthetic forms and practices, in architecture and art, as well as in all modes of representation, distribution, and institutionalization. Most importantly, it continues to shape our imagination. The Bauhaus –with its iterations in the U.S.– has played a dominant role in this fantasizing and claiming of a modernist distinction, as well as in the distribution of modernism to the “Orient”. With its collection's focus on "Orientalism," the Pera Museum allows us to explore interdisciplinary artifacts that have both shaped and undermined notions of modern Europe and its "Other," of center and periphery, of cultural domination and submission.

We look at the role that a shift in perspective from modernist/colonial "distinction" to "encounter" might play in the concrete context of Pera, as proposed by Mary Luise Pratt through her concept of contact zones. With this concept, the influential theorist of linguistics and language rights describes spaces in “which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. We can understand contact zones as those reciprocal spaces, where interactions take place and (asymmetrical) relationships form, where perceptions and practices are shaped by encounter and co-presence.

Mona Mahall, Asli Serbest, Yelta Köm

Exhibition

Pera Museum presented the exhibition PƎRⱯ Reverse* in collaboration with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s “Practices and Politics of Representation” class, led by Prof. Mona Mahall with Yelta Köm, and Hochschule für Künste Bremen’s “Temporary Spaces” class of Prof. Aslı Serbest. The exhibition brought together multiple perspectives on contemporary art spaces and their urban neighbourhoods in Istanbul, moving between high and popular cultures. Departing from two paintings in the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation’s Orientalist Painting Collection, the participants explored global capitalist relations and localized cultural practices in art, as well as the role of architecture in both establishing and revealing the ways in which institutions mediated and operated in relation to their urban environments in a specific place and time. PƎRⱯ Reverse consisted of three parts, entitled “Globals,” “Steps,” and “Speculations.” In “Globals,” adaptations of light signs, pools, a Guzmania plant, and the smell of detergent mimicked and exposed the global city as a ruin, while the low-hanging chandelier borrowed from the Pera Museum’s Art Deco café emphasized the institution’s glamorous fragility. “Steps” addressed the trauma that came with the reality of representation, which failed to enact the world—or, in this case, the complex and fragmented urban topography of the Pera area, full of different stairs and ramps. They highlighted the absurdity of the universalist dream of form and norm promoted by Bauhaus modernism in particular and Westernized modernity in general, with its linear concepts of progress, the nation-state, and the rigid politics of physical and metaphysical borders. “Speculations” commented on the increasingly abstract and transnational processes of global economic, political, and aesthetic speculation and valuation that performed violence differently—through ongoing operations of unequal exchange. The exhibition speculated on alternative values by exploring local non-profit art spaces and engaging cultural workers and visitors in a public program.

• PƎRⱯ Reverse proposed themselves as an institution—one in the process of self-instituting a set of shared practices—to explore the role of (cultural) institutions in different places in a world that was both increasingly connected and fractured. They brought together a shifting group of artists, architects, and researchers from Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Tehran, Hong Kong, Osaka, Berlin, Bremen, Weimar, and other German cities.

External Links

• Exhibition Website Pera Museum
• Contact Zone Archive