Ahmet Öğüt: Round-the-clock / Allora & Calzadilla / Marwa Arsanios: Notes, texts, annotations or how to read while walking

Ahmet Öğüt: Round-the-clock
Alt art space presents Round-the-clock, a major exhibition of Ahmet Öğüt’s works, consisting mostly of new commissions—sculpture, installation and video—that collectively reflect on temporality, injustice, and resistance.

Ahmet Öğüt’s While Others Attack (Diğerleri Saldırırken), 2016, is made up of a series of bronze sculptures. These abstract-figurative sculptures, commissioned by Alt Art Space, are based on archival photographs of people being attacked by police dogs during historical protests from South Africa’s Cape Town to Alabama’s Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movements. Cast in bronze, While Others Attack prompts associations with public monuments or aristocratic busts, and suggests perpetual struggle. In early September, these sculptures will give way to one channel of the two-channel animation United (Müşterek), 2016, shown simultaneously at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Alt Art Space, and YAMA, The Marmara Pera Hotel, Turkey, in memory of lives lost in protests in both countries.

Another new work, For Six Months (Altı Aylık), 2016, consists of street signs of former art spaces that have either closed down or evolved into different organizations: logos of museums, galleries, foundations, nonprofits or artist-run spaces map what appeared and disappeared in Turkey’s cultural life and their economic, social, and political effects. Öğüt’s work takes on a palpable dimension, given that Alt is a new art space facing the same uncertainty as these spaces.

Among existing works is Bakunin’s Barricade, 2014–16, which has been modified to include works of art from the Zeyno-Muhsin Bilge Collection—a collection focusing on modern and contemporary Turkish painting, sculpture, drawing, and artist books. Inspired by Mikhail Bakunin’s never-realized proposal to put works of art in front of the barricade of the socialist insurgency in Dresden against the Prussian troops in 1848, this installation blocks the main exhibition space, conjures self-defense and civil resistance.

Allora & Calzadilla’s exhibition at Alt Art Space is comprised of two video installations: The Great Silence, 2014, and Apotomē, 2013. These two works offer alternatives to human-centric worldviews and communication, to imagine how other species, and “others” in general, may perceive the world. Allora & Calzadilla’s work has been a long-term investigation of societal systems, nationhood, environmentalism, political tension, and resistance. With that in mind, these recent works focus on communication—particularly, interspecies communication—as a way to open up new ways of thinking and relating to each other.

Marwa Arsanios’ solo presentation at Alt Art Space features the video Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila, 2013–14, and the installation Olga’s Notes, The Library, 2013—two works drawn from the artist’s larger Al Hilal Project (2011–ongoing), focusing on the left-wing Egyptian magazine Al Hilal from the 1960s. While Olga’s Notes, The Library presents books from the “What you should read section” in the magazine to underscore the ideological roots of a rare instance of utopianism in the history of Arabic-speaking peoples, Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila zooms in on one particular figure—namely, Algerian freedom fighter Jamila Bouhired—who became an icon through the circulation of magazines like Al Hilal.

Alt Art Space presents visual arts, performance and public programs, collaborating across disciplines and cultures. Located at the center of bomontiada, a historic beer factory re-purposed as a public social space, Alt aims to allow multiple authors to shape its dynamics.

Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Lisson Gallery, London; Gladstone Gallery, New York; kurimanzutto, Mexico City; mor charpentier, Paris; Alt Art Space, Istanbul