Centro Huarte

Gul-Ten. Sitki Kosemen

Focus for a moment, not on a visual image but that evoked by two of Istanbul’s most popular poets some 50 years ago.

Yahya Kemal Beyatli’s (1884-1958) “Dear Istanbul” (1964) includes words familiar to every Turkish school child:

 There are many flourishing cities in the world.

But you’re the only one who creates enchanting beauty.

I say, he who has lived happily, in the longest dream,
Is he who spent his life in you, died in you, and was buried in you.

Orhan Veli Kanık (1914-1950) writes in his “I am listening to Istanbul” (1966) :

I am listening to Istanbul, intent, my eyes closed.
The Grand Bazaar is serene and cool,
A hubbub at the hub of the market,
Mosque yards are brimful of pigeons,
At the docks while hammers bang and clang
Spring winds bear the smell of sweat;
I am listening to Istanbul, intent, my eyes closed.
                                                     

Both describe Istanbul with a tender romanticism, with happiness and longing shaded by the trivial aspect of everyday life. Both illustrate an Istanbul now best remembered in post-cards, family photograph albums and popular films. These are images of delicate beauty at odds with the contemporary city shaped by harsher paradoxes of globalization, and  an urban environment that filters out the nuanced sounds of human energy and joy. But look hard enough and one can still discover city’s still concealed treasures. For many artists, intellectuals and academic theorists, foreign or Istanbul-born, the city is still a portal to an intricate maze, a terrain to be surveyed and utilized as a basis for creative thinking and production.

The well-respected Turkish sociologist, Çağlar Keyder, identifies the post-1945 era as the 2^nd Republican Period. This is the period in which Istanbul embarked on its modernist transformation, no longer the abandoned home of empire, but a metropolis at the centre of national development. The uncontrolled expansion of the city, the result of continuous in-migration from Anatolia, challenged during two short decades the dreamy and Orientalist image of the Istanbul. The two poems were a last optimistic portrayal of a city, which by the end of the 1970s had already lost its Byzantine and Ottoman, character and become a heterogeneous and chaotically modernist mega-polis.

Later, in his 1990 novel Black Book Orhan Pamuk invented a post-modern language to reflect the multi-faceted texture of life in Istanbul, its intricate pattern of ancient streets, its 3,000-year complicated history and the dilemma of being divided by the Bosporus, of being half Europe, in Asia.

“The paradise we call the Bosporus will turn into a pitch-black swamp in which the mud-caked skeletons of galleon will gleam like the luminous teeth of ghosts” is Pamuk’s description of a dried up Bosporus in chapter two of the Black Book. The surrealistic deconstruction of the city is in fact a prediction of ongoing architectural, sociological, transformations.

For centuries, Istanbul has been graphically reproduced in old engravings and photographs. Today we have a seemingly infinite archive of objective, subjective and digital photography of Istanbul. Sometimes the city itself is the subject of these images, but sometimes the city is used as a metaphor for the expression or narration of a concept or a statement of an artist.

One of the artists who identified his quest for truth with Istanbul is Sıtkı Kösemen.

Sıtkı Kösemen is a contemporary artist who, since the early 1970s, has devoted himself to photography. His central theme is Istanbul and its socio-political transition. These he mirrors to astonishing effect in intriguing street scenes or more spectacular panoramas. His camera also follows the micro-narrations of the daily lives of Istanbul’s multi-cultured inhabitants.

Kösemen records Istanbul’s changing scenery, its elusiveness, as well as moments of transition through separate series of photographs. His aim in these series, examples of which appear in this exhibition, is to treat his chosen subjects to repeated observation, all pointing to the most contemporary manifestation of this city.

In his Bosphorus Series, he approaches the most eminent of Istanbul landmarks from the sea, focusing his camera on the famous seaside palaces and residential Yalıs. His perspective is deliberately frontal and rigorously reminiscent of the famous orientalist engravings; in particular his use of the triptych form indicates the semi-impossibility of depicting a building in its totality. These exquisite photographs contain hardly a trace of an Istanbul of poems and post-card nostalgia; they are momentous and worldly, an attempt to flip the orientalist discontent into a post-orientalist contentment.

In an age of ecological disasters, landscape/seascape is an ambiguous concept, not only in the sense that every landscape/seascape is liable to destruction, but that the associative images of landscape, such as culture and mental journey are also in jeopardy.  Landscape/seascape, a staple of art historical terminology has now become volatile. There are analog, digital and virtual landscapes/seascapes, which never convince us about the real, or the representative. Landscapes are drawn, painted, photographed or videotaped, and in all of them, cultural meanings or values of different territories are predetermined or deciphered. What is the cultural meaning or value of Istanbul landscapes or in the case of Kösemen’s photography Bosphorus-scapes? If we turn back to Pamuk’s description of a desiccated Bosphorus, we again see that Kösemen is reversing the verbal deconstruction into a visual re-construction.

Kösemen works in Istanbul, a city that juxtaposes history/tradition and modernism/globalization, high and low, luxury and misery, popular culture and conservative culture. He seeks out people who are witnesses, heroes or victims of this complex everyday reality. And he finds locations of collective memory, amnesia, joy and sorrow. Thus, in his portrait series, he investigates the psychology and mentality of communities with different ethnic backgrounds and social classes, all the while giving them a platform to express their ideas and feelings.  The portraits in I Beyoğlu (2002) explore the thoughts and inspirations of people living and working in the most cosmopolitan district of Istanbul, a neighbourhood of different religions, languages and traditions. Beyoğlu, seen through Kösemen’s lens, is a laboratory to evaluate the potential of a multi-cultural life in Turkey. In the series, ordinary people become extraordinary. This is accomplished through expert selection of context. Colorful and symbolic settings frame the everyday icons of our celebrity-infatuated culture. In the accompanying interviews we can read how these people’s lives are amalgams of self-creation, hype, myth, and reality.

Kösemen devotes his second book of photographs, Diaries (2006),  to women of different social classes and cultural origins.  Some of these photographs, displayed in this exhibition, reveal how Kösemen extrapolates a discussion of being a woman in Turkey’s male-oriented commodity culture. Depicted are women who managed to survive or go beyond the sphere of symbol-expression-ideology assigned to them at birth, as well as women who have richness, diversity and wisdom in their lives. And this they encapsulate in a single sentence.

Kösemen’s photographs are hybrid documents, a term that describes the combination of research, journalism, documentation and artistic intervention from which they are comprised.  His photographic series of individual portraits crosscut social complexity, but the intentional simplicity of their rendering opens them to multiple interpretations. The hybrid format allows the truth claims of the photograph – the reality we expect from journalistic photography – to remain on the surface, so that the ambiguity of the theme emerges from behind this truth. Kösemen believes that the viewer should experience what is behind the veneer.

Beral Madra

Blue Sky. Sitki Kosemen.