Open Space at Vienna - interview with Gulsen Bal by Costanza Meli

Director, Head of Development of Projects and Programmes at Open Space - Zentrum für Kunst Projekte in Vienna.

"I aim to put across different creative production in each individual project which is engaged with a continual research on contemporary art looking for new outlines of the possible practices where each project remains as accountable for a new discourse to be discussed."


Costanza Meli: Hello Gulsen, let’s start talking about you. You were born in Izmir, Turkey. Could you tell us about your background? How long have you been living there? And why did you choose to settle in Vienna?

Gulsen Bal: Initially I would like to thank you for getting in touch and inviting me.
Well… I was born in Izmir, Turkey and got a Serbian blood running in my vein… have been living in London where my home is more than half of my life… and currently I am based in Vienna since December 2007…

Before getting into the question of why I choose Vienna, I guess I should talk a little bit about who I am rather than where I come from as this will shed a better light on not only “where we are and have been, but what we leave through and behind” which is placed within ‘inside-outside’ flux…
Clearly, describing along situations of “existential plunge” in a constant process of ‘becoming One/self’ drives one to question the dynamics of differential structures within a constant expanding of rigid boundaries. This follows addressing an account of a transformational processes occurring on social, cultural and “identity” construct. This traces a generative process of a transitory characteristic: the “in-between-ness” in an attempt to underline a multiplicity of physical and social locations which engender a new space formed by a space of production.

The emerging point here is a focus on the flux of nomadic figuration behind the limits of mirrors beyond its totalising vision within the realm of how you define this space of engagement in its entry of almost impossibility of transcending intersections.

Now… let’s get back to the question of why Vienna…

As I am somebody who always interested in aforementioned issues while initiating as well as taking part in different projects in Eastern Europe and Balkans with questioning the dynamics between habitual durations and what is already operative within this proliferation; obviously, location wise Vienna extricates itself as the most important gateway to Eastern Europe and neighbouring countries. This brings a rupture that engenders the temporary systems concerned with bringing different modes of manifestation onto the surface which allows for different intensity and contents to be challenged. So, here I am… in Vienna.

Meli: Do you consider yourself and your sensibility as the result of this particular experience and cultural training? The fruit of your walk of life?

Bal: Yes… it is indeed… and this reflects my approach upon restraining my ‘subject-position’ determining the mechanism and methodology that form the constituency of my creative practice.
I graduated from London Guildhall University in the field of time based media. And then I studied MA degree in Critical Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art &Design where I submitted a doctoral thesis upon an examination of differential structures within the “production of subject”.

So in this realm, there is an element of taking the position of the “outsider-insider-outsider” as being a visual artist, practicing curatorial production and work as an intellectual worker…

Meli: You define Gulsen Bal as a visual artist, practicing curatorial production and works as an intellectual worker: Sounds great!

Bal: To issue forth, as water from the earth… In this sovereignty the question concerns a practical approach to creativity where the attributes are the matter of production manifested in its reflection of a constant process of becoming, multiplicity and participation, confrontation and plurality...

Meli: What is Open Space? When did you found it?

Bal: To answer this question I have to address certain issues that are related to having an understanding on a different kind of creative journey in its mode of production. This maintains its reflection of culturally specific conditions that focuses on making invisible “visible” by attempting to enforce a structure of positions or positionality which exposes the unclearness of the situation. This is what makes it possible to identify some specific and determining characteristics that compile different practices taking place at Open Space.

Yes… The idea came about in mid 2007 with an urge how to build and create interconnected routes concerned with European space as well as building a cross border dialogues within its multi layered constituents. The initiation led by me intends to bring diverse creative practice together as well as creating real and virtual collaborative forum and opening spaces to encourage exchange and joint projects with aiming to explore the future, generating new ideas and implementing them in a collaborative effort to improve trans-national network as well as creating network of networks, a zone of communicative transfer in a particular socio-cultural setting.

The designation of “one always searches for some symbolic point from which one can claim that something ended and something else began” maintains real life case studies and reveals how cultural specific conditions in and/or afar its trans-locality. This sets new kinds of creative connections around the boundaries of ‘New Europe’ in motion. In this manner, the issue commence here introduces an experimental dynamic that define the space of current relations to be problematised.

This formulates the special attributes of Open Space that lies in its input towards the “production of subject” on the basis of improving new approach with its visual arts and educational programme that designates an inter-relationship between production of creative practice and divergent lines of encounters.

Meli: Is Vienna a city that offers opportunities for this kind of projects? Why?

Bal: One of the flaws of progressive movements as indicated by Walter Seidl:

“With the inauguration of Open Space by Gulsen Bal at the beginning of 2008, Vienna’s art scene saw an important enrichment of exhibition space after a number of crisis-ridden institutional changes in 2007. The merger of Generali and Bawag Foundation into one exhibition space saw the end of a decade-long exhibition program concerned with a stringent focus on conceptual practices. The latter abruptly came to a halt due to the decisions made by the groups’ CEOs, which demonstrated how global capital dominates artistic representation and its social reverberations.

With the initiation with “Open Space”, Bal exactly confronts this onslaught of capitalist-driven exhibition projects...”1

I believe this brings us to the emergence of the structure / agency dilemma with the entire range of problems encompassing the issues resides. To some extent, to be based in Vienna allows to hold an empirical foundation brought into an “intercourse with society”, where the catch-phrase is: „Wer ist der Verkehr? Wir sind der Verkehr!“2

Together with this, the discourses that we bring internationally on monthly basis are something in lack in the art scene here in this very city… Apparently this fills a big gap while introducing certain dynamics through operating beyond white cub context and at the same time functioning as a kind of ‘institution’ serving like a hub linking all the complexity of strands.

Meli: About this, I know that your first exhibition project at Open Space, “Temporary Zones,” with artists like Ergin Cavusoglu, Nada Prlja, Peter Mortenbock and Helge Mooshammer, was a strong and important event concerning the potential of a project space to state the role of independent artistic research towards economic and institutional context. Could you confirm this?

Bal: In fact, we opened our doors with “Temporary Zones” in the first week of January 2008. This project offers a space for exploration of current relations of and in predicated conflict and negotiation within cultural specific conditions. In pointing out the space of current relations, the scope of the project allows an engagement of a space that identifies the transitional conditions and globalised flows where the temporal construct seemingly erases all its secrets and ambiguities. In a passage of an unstable world, this hunts for a moment of urgency in the insistence of a dissonant power of role of independent artistic research towards economic and institutional context.

Ergin Cavusoglu poses questions about our understanding of place and identity in a globalised society marked by mobility. His single channel video Empire (after Andy Warhol) reflects the ‘space of current relations’ associated with notions of temporal and spatial continuity, generating a different register through a moment of interruption where we witness something different, ‘another truth’ in which the concepts of domestic comfort are unsettled through an unrelenting gaze.

Nada Prlja in The Rights which is a series of video recordings of children who are reading ‘European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom’ in the manner it presents that there is no protection of human rights and freedom, exposes the complexity of the issues of immigration and the EU politics around the boundaries of ‘New Europe’.

In their work Visiting Stalin, Peter Mortenbock and Helge Mooshammer reflect upon cultural transformations of our contemporary world through exploring the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices. Departing from sites of geopolitical conflicts and social confrontations they seek to conceptualise the knowledge embodied by these new forms of socio-spatial organisation and group action. In doing so, they raise questions how the emergence of networked cultures has changed our cultural forms of cohabitation and communication, and how we produce and experience the spaces we live in vis-à-vis a globalised world of flows
Meli: You say that Open Space “aims to create a facility for contemporary creative practice concerned with contributing a model strategy for cross-border and interregional projects on the basis of improving new approach with its visual arts and educational programme”. That’s a difficult project, I think, but I fully understand it as it relates to our editorial research. How is this concept linked to practical aspects of your work?

Bal: I certainly agree… this is not an easy task at all.

As I have briefly mentioned before, I aim to put across different creative production in each individual project which is engaged with a continual research on contemporary art looking for new outlines of the possible practices where each project remains as accountable for a new discourse to be discussed.
Unlike other small or major institutes in Vienna, Open Space offers a place for exploration of space of current relations associated with a generative process of a transitory characteristic. Mindful of these issues and current conditions in art; works that has been presented at Open Space keeps the form of multi/trans-disciplinary configuration from installation, video, performance to an online platform: Internet-based works. This helps to identify some specific and determining characteristics that shape project-specificity within multi-directional models that behaves “rhizomatically.” And this begins with beginning from beginning.

Meli: Could you tell us something about your collaboration with “Networked Culture” project?

Bal: Sure… As you might gather, the initiation intends to bring diverse creative practice together as well as opening spaces to encourage exchange and joint projects with contributions of varying partners. The collaboration involves in providing a mapping the future, generating new ideas and implementing them in a collaborative effort to improve an understanding among artists, arts communities and cultural producers in an expanding trans-national/local network. Here I managed to develop collaboration not only with them, but also with Škuc Gallery (Ljubljana), Stacion - Centre for Contemporary Art (Pristine), MAGAZINE 4- Bregenzer Kunstverein (Bregenz) and Divus Publishing House (Prague).
And in addition to this, I have also recently developed a new program Critical and Curatorial Investigations for Masters Degree at TU Wien that sets a different kind of zone of collaboration while we have a big list of associates in principles along the side.

Meli: In your website I read about «Boundary signals», an exhibition concerning both language and political maps. It’s very interesting for us.

Is it possible in your opinion to modify actual perception of boundaries starting from a new approach to the language structures and their cultural development?

Bal: Well… The project curator, Fatih Aydogdu who is an internal stuff, takes up the issue of boundary within its “transgression of norms” positioned in the ‘after-field’ concentrated on, in his word: “the ‘Sound’ as a possible communicative level of artistic strategy, as a model of reflexion, as a border zone and an experimental field that goes beyond the act of speaking and beyond music”.
However when we drift further, here the question poses: does the context add meaning? I guess this recalls Flusser whom utilize this complex discourse similarly as “art is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situations, and it is the more artful (artistic) the less probable the situation that it produces.”3

Meli: What are the other projects you are currently working on?

Bal: If you are referring to our 2009 prog, then the list is: The Politics of Redistribution (Project curator: Sabine Winkler), (Im)migrants With(in) (Project curator: Nada Prlja), MySpace/TheirSpace: The Dissent of the Migrant (Project curator: Can Gulcu), THE FUNding FACTORY (Project curator: Sophie Hope), The dramaturgy of the subject (Project curator: Zeigam Azizov), A step to the right (Project curator: Gulsen Bal), How to resist and react to conditions of the present (Project curator: Hedwig Saxenhuber) and the last exhibition in slot is TODAY = TOMORROW (Project curator: STEALTH).

Apart from all of this, I am editing a yearly hard copy publication called: OPEN SPACE - Mapping contemporary creative practice that is coming out in February 2009… Additionally I still pursue presenting papers, practicing my free-lance curatorial nationally as well as internationally at different venues…

Meli: How do you choose artists and guest curators? Did you select a permanent teamwork or do you change collaboration forms every time?

Bal: The focus is related on bringing certain discourse on surface and signifying practices to come out for exclusions. For that reason, I decide what we are presenting and the orientation of my selection involves in investigating transformative connections, the mechanism for critical engagement of creative production leading to pluralistic approaches introduced in which different curatorial models are exemplified next to each other in the course of cross-referencing conceptual forcing behind new forms of exhibiting.

Meli: In your view, what does contemporary mean? Is it a related concept?

Bal: This reflects the paradoxical settings of the differential structures, a dark adventure when explored in a critical approach.

Meli: How could be possible for transgressive - social and artistic - practices to coexist with great cultural strategies in this moment of global crises?

Bal: I certainly think this is one of the issues that worth pondering. This also shows to be true where everything progress towards the transformations of “demographic politics” and politicisation of life.

Meli: Interculturality can be seen as a way of being or as a way to advertise something new, such as the poor, or minorities, what do you think about this? I’m thinking to the birth of lots of Biennals and Fairs, and to the new artist’s mobility.

Bal: At this intersection, we have to look at the possible path traced.

I sited with Maria Hlavajova elaboration as “art (as it) is structurally anchored in the main narratives of contemporary capitalism in various ways, from its economic manifestations on the one hand to it being a site of harmless - perhaps even welcome - critique on the other.”

SA: Thinking locally, what relationship has Open Space with the physical place in which it is located? I mean the road on which it leans out and the people or the commercial activities that surround it. Has it ever occurred an interaction between your area and you also in the circle one show that goes out the show spaces realizing specific interventions?

Bal: In fact, “serving as the hub connecting all the strands” on non profit based; Open Space maintains a political position and a certain artistic agenda in the second district where a heavy in wit gentrification is taking place with its new cultural spaces and a younger population offering new potentials by means of holding its utmost geopolitical stand. This provides the ground to Open Space to set relations in realizing specific interventions locally in motion.

Notes:
1. Seidl, Walter. “Gülsen Bal and "Open Space" at the Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Vienna”. Please refer to: http://www.artmargins.com/content/review/seidl.htm
2. Here “Verkehr” means the social intercourse and exchange in Marxian understanding.
3. Vilém Flusser, “Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion,” in Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 52

Links:
www.openspace-zkp.org
http://www.succoacido.net/showarticle.asp?id=659

First published in Succo Acido, 6.2.2009