Turkey, a supposed democracy since 1946 although with three official military coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, presents a common split between a form of state-condoned art and an independent collective contemporary art practice in recent history. Yielding to changing dynamics that prompted national visibility in multiple aspects, the state remained indifferent but was the beneficiary of various internationally acclaimed art events that started slowly in the 1990s. The visual art scene of the 1990s in Turkey depended on a younger generation of curators and artists. Even though an imagined flawless → continuity of practices would entail a discussion, it is known that there were influential art collectives and individuals active earlier than this, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Three particular → archives available at SALT Research provide details of different historicisation processes. One is the archive of artist Gülsün Karamustafa, who single-handedly kept works or documentation of works from the early 1970s to today, typically identified as an act of “self-historicisation”. The second archive, by artist Yusuf Taktak, presents documents related to institutions, galleries, and exhibitions dating back to the 1970s and 1980s in Turkey. Former director of the Museum of Fine Arts and a consummate researcher and (document) collector, Taktak practices another type of historicisation. In what might be called an “induced-historicisation”, over time the mixed archive becomes public information open to multiple interpretations. The third particular archive is that of İsmail Saray, artist and activist on art workers’ rights. Having definitively moved to London in 1980 due to the oppression he faced in Turkey, Saray continued his contact with fellow artists, even producing artworks by sending instructions from afar. Collected from locations in both countries, from Saray’s home in London, his → family home in Kütahya, and his colleagues’ archives in Istanbul, the archive holds immense documentation of his practice and activities. Since Saray is considered a key figure in understanding conceptual art in Turkey, this archival work could be described as a model of “reviving-historicisation” by an institutional attempt and effort.

The machine of historicisation of contemporary art is definitely organised hierarchically, so that numerous artistic practices and theoretical researchers of the so-called socialist and post-socialist period are absent in it. This absence is conditioned not only by a certain hegemony of the so-called “Western” contemporary art canon, but also by the very specific interpretation of the socialist legacy – both by the Western “left” and “non-left”. This socialist background is treated as one of the regional cultural narratives from elsewhere, and thus numerous → emancipatory and conceptual non-Western cultural experiences are collected into the global art database as local modernities. But in this case, modernity becomes a diversified collection of local histories. What is ignored here is that the socialist project and its avant-garde practices were politically and culturally more mature and modern than any modernity evolving in the conditions of the capitalist state. Ignoring this condition in the realm of contemporary capitalist realism leads to the situation that the global historicising art-machine welcomes regional stories much more willingly than any legacy constructed as a form of conceptual → agency on behalf of socialist and communist conditions.

Another aspect of the way global art’s historicising machine works is that its tools are focused on gaining the institutionalising power of a narrative, rather than accomplishing any historical record.

It is thus no surprise that all the late socialist and early post-socialist conceptual collectives and their creative projects had been functioning as quasi-institutions – both in production and → representation.