Sinopale, International Sinop Biennial for Contemporary Art, Turkey
in collaboration with Corner College, Zürich
present:

COLLECTING THE FUTURE

2014–2006–2016

A SINOPALE EXHIBITION

13 February to 14 March 2015

With Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Quynh Dong, Benjamin Egger, Esther Kempf, Franziska Koch, Petra Koehle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, Daniel Marti, Garrett Nelson, Cat Tuong Nguyen, RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), Romy Rüegger, Riikka Tauriainen, and works from the collection of Sinopale by Alpaslan Baloğlu, Nezaket Ekici, Shilpa Gupta, Ashley Hunt, Emre Koyuncuoğlu, Monali Meher, Lerzan Ozer, Adrien Tirtiaux, XsentrikArts (Bahanur Nasya & Yılmaz Vurucu), Eşref Yıldırım.

Curated by T. Melih Görgün, founder and artistic director of Sinopale, and co-curated by Dimitrina Sevova

Sinopale Newspaper (printable as PDF 3.35MB).


Opening Hours during the exhibition / Öffnungszeiten während der Dauer der Ausstellung:

Monday closed. Montag geschlossen.
Tuesday closed. Dienstag geschlossen.
Wednesday: 3 pm - 7 pm. Mittwoch: 15 - 19 Uhr.
Thursday: 3 pm - 9 pm. Donnerstag: 15 - 21 Uhr
Friday: 3 pm - 7 pm. Freitag: 15 - 19 Uhr.
Saturday 2 pm - 6 pm. Samstag 14 - 18 Uhr.
Sunday 2 pm - 6 pm. Sonntag 14 - 18 Uhr.


The exhibition collects in a non-linearly organized display at Corner College reflections, documentation, archive and research materials as well as some art works from the five editions of Sinopale – International Sinop Biennial, in-between its past, present and future. Especially for this exhibition, the Swiss participants in the past two editions reflect on their work at Sinopale in contributions between archive, research and art work.

Friday, 13 February, 19:00h Opening with the performance Exercice d’Isolation (Tagblatt) by Petra Elena Köhle and Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, continuing into the next day’s activities

Saturday, 14 February, 16:00h Talk, screening and performances

16:00h Presentation of Sinopale by T. Melih Görgün, founder and artistic director of Sinopale

18:00h Screening of The Sea in Me by XsentrikArts (Bahanur Nasya & Yılmaz Vurucu), 2012, Sinopale 4, documentary, 60ʹ

20:00h Performance My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays by Riikka Tauriainen

Throughout the afternoon and evening, the performance Exercice d’Isolation (Tagblatt) by Petra Elena Köhle and Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, continuing from the opening night



One can say that Sinopale is a peripheric and young biennial of contemporary art on the map of the International Biennials of the art world system, and rather alternative to the so-called “biennial phenomena” and their genre. If it has been in a position of weakness with respect to the center and its political, economic and aesthetic dominance, indeed it mobilizes personal and collective collaborative efforts on the creative edge, where crossing over local and global perspectives, south and north and east and west, it analyzes and re-signifies the biennial discourses dominated by a logic of globalization, traveling art lovers and the shipping of expensive art works.

With its less spectacular exhibition and more humble project, it embraces a rather pragmatic approach to its structures, which in its generosity functions in the mode of new institutionalism rather than institutional critique, and even generates a rupture with the representational models of the big-scale art world projects from the center. It has the advantage to re-invent the relevance of the relation between contemporary art practices and daily life, and re-define the paradoxes of the creation of the value and status of art on the limit. It re-situates and re-articulates the notion of art and its institutionally driven formats and betrays the established network of distribution of art, such as the art markets or the circuit of commercial galleries. Where art, in a real situation, can be seen as an object that acts as ambiguous support or medium or catalyst of existential change and new ways of transference of relations, i.e., art practices can be seen as transversal tools for social change that can dissolve in the existing context as they externalize and modulate it and can productively cast new bridges to reconnect the land-space-town, with responsibility towards relational and new ecologies and their potentialities that engender the conditions for creation.

This transversality is not given, but a matter of a pragmatics of existence, a kind of openness and progressive deterritorialization from existing modelization. “Transversality still signifies militant, social, undisciplined creativity” (Félix Guattari), where art practices work as urban guerilla. [1]

Sinopale puts a finger on the painful points and dynamics in the post-industrial and neoliberal conditions of living in-between urbanized and rural environments in which the commercialization and permanence of the economic crises threaten the communities and challenge daily-life existence. Sinopale is a Biennial for all, with its broad and open stage for an aesthetics and politics of art that can empower the quality and quantity of life and bring new experiences in which the present memory and historical past interweave towards the future, with the social and cultural commitment and self-valorization.


[1] Hou Hanru emphasized at the beginning of the 10th International İstanbul Biennial manifesto that “We are living in a time of global wars,” and stated that “In such a debate, artistic actions, including the Biennial itself, can certainly find their roles in prompting cultural and social changes through innovative forces of intervention – a form of urban guerrilla.” 10th International İstanbul Biennial, Hou Hanru, “Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War” (Istanbul: İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2007).





Organized by



Special thanks to




for their support!

Finissage of the exhibition:

COLLECTING THE FUTURE
2014–2006–2016
A SINOPALE EXHIBITION

13 February to 14 March 2015

With Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Quynh Dong, Benjamin Egger, Esther Kempf, Franziska Koch, Petra Koehle & Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin, Daniel Marti, Garrett Nelson, Cat Tuong Nguyen, RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co), Romy Rüegger, Riikka Tauriainen, and works from the collection of Sinopale by Alpaslan Baloğlu, Nezaket Ekici, Shilpa Gupta, Ashley Hunt, Emre Koyuncuoğlu, Monali Meher, Lerzan Ozer, Adrien Tirtiaux, XsentrikArts (Bahanur Nasya & Yılmaz Vurucu), Eşref Yıldırım.

Curated by T. Melih Görgün, founder and artistic director of Sinopale, and co-curated by Dimitrina Sevova


The exhibition collects in a non-linearly organized display at Corner College reflections, documentation, archive and research materials as well as some art works from the five editions of Sinopale – International Sinop Biennial, in-between its past, present and future. Especially for this exhibition, the Swiss participants in the past two editions reflect on their work at Sinopale in contributions between archive, research and art work.


Finissage with a DJ set by Nicki Manij, hot vegetarian soup and bar.

Quynh Dong takes us on a journey into her studies of movement, of what has to be done from the vanishing point. The artist maps or sketches the affectual orientation and disposition of her practices, concerned with the politics of movement and its formal aesthetics. They confront her immediately with the affect and its practical and theoretical implications, as the affect always brings something unstable in the encounter between forces and mutable matter, through performative inversions of a choreographic web, like a dance of space/time whose distortions affect, able to induce the migration of the image or to decolonize bodies, as affect is resistance, too.

The artist’s interest in the affect lies in its potentiality of opening her practices towards an ethico-aesthetic paradigm in which race, class and sex become affective forms that are not directly inscribed in the bodies and the subjects, but are political spaces. This moves the bodies and subjects away from identitarian constructions and their cultural limitations. Identities, understood as projections of the signifier, are dispersed in the field of the affect with is forces liberating them, which become able to create themselves as a process of self-organizing and self-inventing subjectivities.

The artist deliberately exaggerates the femininity of her female characters, such as to affirm the ongoing feminization of affective labor inherent in the post-colonial landscape of late global capitalism. This embodied femininity, with its fragility and weakness, has the power to induce a creative melancholic opening that intensifies the flowing ephemera, re-appropriating them and the affect from the post-Fordist economic relations and recent rapid technological developments. She sets out, by means of art, to fill the atmosphere with fleeting implications of e-motions and sentiments that make the spectator feel how their perceptions depend on the conditions and the angle of their position in the space. The affect is for real, which means that its arrival serves as a force on her work that sometimes is rather non-work, which in the range of the affect lose their opposite values as the artistic practices are extended to the aesthetics of existence, i.e., “how to affect and how to be affected.”

Despite the apparent solidity of Quynh Dong’s sculptural installations, where she abandons the human subject in the fever of disjointed pieces of glossy ceramic leaves from the chalices of moribund flowers running away from each other. They are sculptural assemblages of oversize copies of pieces of dying matter, which emphasize their partial relations in the generating structures. In close-up, their surface becomes quantized, which leads to the idea that the world has a resolution. Their assembled ontology is a convoluted space oriented towards the virtual, trapping the perception into an installation process embodying optimistic cruelty that performs with striking effects to model the space in patterns patterning the plane. It brings the spectator directly to the heart of phantasm. The phantasm and the apparent solidity of the object are both flux and concrete, one turning into the other depending on the spectator’s distance to the object, which changes their picture of the world.

“Art is an object of Beauty!” states Quynh Dong about her work. She sees the position of the artist in old fashion as the copyist of nature who questions reality, reaching a romantic overmodel of it and even kitsch. The copyist’s gesture evokes the law of the copy and the matrix in a biopolitical sense. The copyist-artist can be seen as embodying the dark side of grace, as the artist gets access to the weak forces of a second nature of something artificial and plastic, which breaks the symmetry of the laws of physics and can capture and sustain the natural glamour and attraction of the dying flower like the frozen ripples of space/time, modeling the reality of decay and the noise of the entropic process. Could this be the noise coming from the degrees of microscopic freedom of the entropic process? Indeed, there is hidden information in the solid objects, which can be understood as the intervals between “the infinity of little affective events,” induced by the relation of rest and accelerated movement of the virtual images blocked between the particles of solid matter. These oscillations are the creative resistance of the material. The waving reality of the hysteresis of the forces within the clay and their virtual potentialities meet the hesitating line the artist traces into it. In this sculptography, the network of objects becomes a system that claims that “the social is always more than human,” as assemblages are always social, and the social lies in the principle of connectivity. The links between them have to be composed by the audience walking among them. One can never be sure where these delusive statements are the noise of the ripples of laughter, or the artist’s own laughter, and where it has to be taken very seriously.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova

Der Chor als Klangkörper, der durch die Summe der einzelnen, klingenden Menschenkörper entsteht, ist eine der ältesten gemeinschaftsbildenden Tätigkeiten. Wir verstehen den CC Choir als Experiment auf diese ursprüngliche, prä-humane Tradition zurück zu blicken und in der Freude seinen eigenen Körper als Klangproduzent zu benutzen, neben dem gemeinsamen Singen von bekannten Liedern, rituelle und animalische Gesangstechniken zu erproben.

Der Chor ist offen für alle und das Repertoire wird gemeinsam ausgesucht und erprobt.

Die Chorleitung übernimmt Oscar Mario Echeverry.

Nach einer Einleitung durch die Herausgeber lesen Rosa Isela Lopez Gotoo und Tim Czerwonatis einige der abgedruckten Gedichte im argentinischen Original und in der deutschen Übersetzung.

«Un verano antes del verano» («Ein Sommer vor dem Sommer») inszeniert typografisch und fotografisch 16 Gedichte zeitgenössischer argentinischer LyrikerInnen*, mit Übersetzungen ins Deutsche**. Die Gedichte werden umrahmt von einer persönlichen Annäherung an die Stadt Buenos Aires, in Form einer chronologischen Collage aus Texten und Notizen, und von 51 Fotografien zur Stadt in s/w und Farbe.

Von November 2012 bis Januar 2013 sprachen Florian Bachmann und Helen Ebert in der argentinischen Hauptstadt spanisch, assen Fleisch, warteten auf den Bus und lasen zeitgenössische argentinische Gedichte. Herausgekommen ist eine persönliche Sicht auf die Stadt, ihren Alltag und ihre Lyrik, im Jahr 2015 verlegt von der Bieler «edition clandestin».

*Gedichte: Fabián Casas, Soledad Castresana, Macky Corbalán, Washington Cucurto, Martín Gambarotta, Fernanda Laguna, María Medrano, Marta Miranda, Cecilia Pavón, Sergio Raimondi, Noelia Rivero, Alejandro Rubio

**Übersetzungen: Juana und Tobias Burghardt, Timo Berger, Odile Kennel, Léonce Lupette, Valentin Schönherr

Dieses Buch erscheint auch in einer signierten Vorzugsausgabe von 30 Exemplaren mit risographiertem Umschlag, nummeriert und signiert 1/30 – 30/30

Helen Ebert + Florian Bachmann: Un verano antes del verano. Poesie, Fotografie und Notizen aus Buenos Aires. Freirückenbroschur, 28.2 × 25.8 cm. 144 Seiten, 4-farbig. Deutsch / spanisch. edition clandestin, Biel 2015.

ISBN 978-3-905297-61-4. CHF 38.– / € 32.–

English (Deutsch siehe unten):

This is the second event of the series Sunday Brunch – Making Space for Kids and Animals.

Details to be announced.

Deutsch (English above):

Dies ist die zweite Veranstaltung der Serie Sunday Brunch – Making Space for Kids and Animals.

Einzelheiten folgen.

The artist Teresa Chen (www.teresachen.ch) began a dissertation as a way to extend her own artistic practice by exploring how contemporary visual artists – especially women with (East) Asian diasporic backgrounds – express ideas or meanings about Otherness and issues of belonging in their art. Using proposed set of categories, her methodology was a comparative analysis of selected pairs of artists – where at least one was a woman artist of (East) Asian diasporic background. The results of her research confirmed the significance of cultural, historical, and geographic experiences on both the conception and reception of visual art and indicated that various artistic strategies have the potential to expose and undermine culturally constructed meanings of difference. In this lecture, she outlines some of the main arguments and themes from her research.

Dr. Teresa Chen

Please note the change in the time: 20:00h, to accommodate those of you who would like to attend Étienne Balibar's lecture at ZHdK before that.

In this third session we will read Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd. In the following sessions we will return to it from different angles, exploring its rhizome of interaction with theory and fiction alike, in the genealogy from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gabriel Tarde and Walter Benjamin to Elias Canetti and Bruno Latour, or Gilbert Simondon, Donna Haraway or Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Other texts are welcome that can contribute to the diagram, from Science Fiction to microbiological and cosmological scientific texts, philosophy, and contemporary theoretical and fictional writing with new perspectives on the social, which connect the subjects of crowds, swarms, packs, colonies of bacteria, and celestial clusters!

Deutsch (English below)

Gerald Raunig, DIVIDUUM

Buchvernissage mit Gerald Raunig, mit performativen Lesungen und Interventionen von Niki Kubaczek, Isabell Lorey und Alexander Tuchaček.

Die Buchvernissage ist Teil des Programms der 11. kritnet Tagung mit dem Schwerpunktthema «Ökonomie und Rassismus im europäischen Migrations- und Grenzregime», die vom 26. bis 29. März 2015 in der Shedhalle und in anderen Räumen in Zürich stattfindet.

Erst die Erschaffung einer Mitte, in der die vielen Komponenten der Maschine auseinander- und zusammenstimmen, lässt das Gras von der Mitte des Stengels her wachsen. Eine dividuelle Maschine also, teilbar und teilend. Dort, in der reissenden Mitte des Dividuellen, braucht es keinen Grund, keine Wurzel, keinen Boden, keine Wände, die Leitern halten, keine weissen Wände, die Gesichter zeigen. Dort verketten sich die Körpermaschinen, die sozialen Maschinen, die molekular-revolutionären Maschinen, mit den Textmaschinen, dort entsteht aus mannigfaltiger Geisterhand die dividuell-abstrakte Linie.

Dividuum entwickelte sich als Begriff zusammen mit seinem Negativ, dem Individuum. In frühen römischen Komödien erscheint es als Marker für Sklaverei und gegenderte Herrschaft, und zugleich für Weisen des Wegstehlens und Fliehens aus diesem extrem herrschaftlichen Konnex. In der lateinischen Philosophie dient es zur Übersetzung des Teilbaren (im Gegensatz zum Atom), und dann in der Spätantike und Scholastik als Teil der theologischen Diskussion über Mannigfaltigkeit und Singularität der Dreifaltigkeit. Hier, in den hochmittelalterlichen Texten des Bischofs Gilbert de Poitiers, findet sich der Ausgangspunkt des Narrativs der Dividualität als zeitgenössische Produktionsform und Lebensweise. Zeitgenössischer dividuell-maschinischer Kapitalismus basiert nicht nur auf der Unterordnung des Menschen unter Maschinen, die in menschliche Körper und Geister eindringen, sondern auf maschinischer Dienstbarkeit und Selbst-Teilung durch soziale Medien, Quantifizierung des Selbst und vielfältige Formen des Anhängens an die Maschinen. Und auch auf den abstrakt-dividuellen Linien von Big Data, algorithmischer Logistik und Derivaten, die die individuellen Körper von Personen und Dingen wie auch ihre Wünsche und Sozialitäten durchqueren. Wenn wir vor diesem Hintergrund adäquate Formen des Widerstands in Betracht ziehen wollen, müssen wir sie auch auf der Ebene von Division, Dividualität, Condividualität denken.

Das Tier der moekularen Revolution wird kein Maulwurf sein und keine Schlange, sondern ein Drohnen-Tier, fest, flüssig und gasförmig. Un/Gefüge.

English (Deutsch siehe oben)

Gerald Raunig, DIVIDUUM

A book launch with Gerald Raunig, with performative readings and interventions by Niki Kubaczek, Isabell Lorey and Alexander Tuchaček.

The book launch is part of the program of the 11th kritnet Convention on the theme of «Economy and Racism in the European Migration and Border Regime», which takes place at Shedhalle and in other spaces in Zurich from 26 to 29 March 2015.