Photo: Courtesy Elif Temizkan and The Moving Museum
“What if there was a moving museum?” This question, posed by Aya Mousawi and Simon Sakhai on a road trip from Berlin to Kassel for dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012, was the impetus that led them to set up the not-for-profit organization The Moving Museum. With exhibitions in Dubai and London last year, the young pair have now turned their sights to Istanbul, setting up a residency programme that runs from August until the end of October, encouraging participating artists to create a dialogue with the local culture.
“We want our projects to feel like they’ve grown from within the cities – we don’t want to be this international body that’s coming into the city and is disengaged from the dynamics of that city,” explains Mousawi. Differentiating themselves from this attitude, the pair have focused on creating a real infrastructure in the place they “move” to: “Our process is very organic – we’ve spent the last year with all the galleries, art institutions and non-profits here in Istanbul. We have a team here of young Turkish artist liaisons and residency managers, who have a lot of experience in the city and are part of the scene. We’ve also invited 12 local Turkish artists to be a part of the project, which is a really important part of it.”
It might also help that the roster of international artists Mousawi and Sakhai have managed to entice is quite an exciting one: Timur Si Qin, Ming Wong, Amalia Ulman, George Henry Longly and Rafaël Rozendaal, to name a few. The participating artists are asked present their work to the public through a programme of events, with the aim of creating “encounters”, rather than a one-way traffic of external ideas. For example, artist Zach Blas, best known for his work on the internet’s relationship to dissidence, specifically in terms of masking ourselves from electronic surveillance, is bringing together local and visiting artists to work on these concepts. “The public programme serves as the backbone to the residency, with each artist making an individual public moment as an engagement with the city,” Sakhai notes.
As well as mobilizing the artistic community within Istanbul, the aim is also to encourage international interest in that community, and it’s for this reason that the Moving Museum has planned a digital programme of events. Offering insight into the visiting artists’ process in Istanbul to an international, the Moving Museum’s planned web platform will be directed by self-proclaimed “famous new media artist” Jeremy Bailey, with contributions from Jonas Lund, Joe Hamilton and Harm van den Dorpel.
Developing the strands of ideas beyond the physical constraints of the temporary Moving Museum location is a clear indication that Sakhai and Mousawi are interested in the future of the artworks and beyond that, of the city they’re inhabiting. But what’s the next stop on the Moving Museum’s tour of international art hubs? “Hong Kong is somewhere we’ve been looking into – which is a completely different set of circumstances. Understanding those dynamics [Art Basel Hong Kong, all these blue chip galleries that jumped in, as well as the local Chinese galleries] is something we’re really invested in,” says Mousawi.
One thing is certain; the dedication to creating genuine dialogue in the place they inhabit will continue to be the defining intention. Mousawi concludes: “When we think about what a museum is, it’s the cultural foundations of that city. We wanted it to feel very rooted in the city we go to. It will always grow from that.”
An exhibition of works created during the Moving Museum residency will take place from 27 October until 15 December.
Taken from Sleek 43, Youth/Truth
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