feature
Turkey
Istanbul
Ankara
Sinasi Günes
Genco Gulan
Istanbul
The today’s article is on occasion of the opening of a videoart event organised by Sinasi Günes in the city of Canakkale, located at the Marmara Sea belonging in a wider sense to the Istanbul area – Visitors – The International Video Art Activity Canakkale-Turkey – 14-15 May 2010
From Istanbul, Genco Gulan started in 2002 – The Istanbul Museum – a virtual museum. Wilfried participated in the “Netart Open @ Instanbul Museum 2002- and in 2003 in Web Biennial – another online context by Genco Gulan, in We Biennial 2007. Web Biennial is said to be the 1st Biennial online, but retrospectively seen, in 2020 is was rather a short term initiative, like many other platforms for netart – simply because after 2004 there was a more less quick decline of netart.
On 14 May 2005, Wilfried released the online presentation of videoart from Turkey – curated by Sinasi Günes, who, as a video artist himself, participated in many projects Wilfried was realizing between 2000-2010.
In 2007, Julie Upmeyer started in Istanbul art related activities – Enter Caravansarai Festival by installing in sequence the art space Caravansarai. At the beginning in 2007, Julie was exploring her possibilities in Istanbul first, but Wilfried found in this context the interest in presenting a selection from CologneOFF I and II as a screening program.
Bursa
In a certain way, 2007 was the year of activities in Turkey, because also in 2007 Wilfried was invited by Hülya Küpçüoğlu to participate in a videoart exhibition in the framework of 2nd Bursa International Film Festival.
Ankara
In 2005, Wilfried was following a call for videos by the METU University in Ankara which was planning to organise a festival that year, but when it was so far, he never heard anything any more – even the website had been taken from the net, so Wilfried was thinking, typical for many festivals which got financial problems and gave up – until nearly one year later, the festival contacted Wilfried again announcing the festival date in March 2006. While he was thinking this might be again an occasion to visit Turkey, he recognized the email arrived two days before the festival startes – so it was on too short notice and too late.