Second Exhibition

When ARTER opened on 8 May 2010 with the exhibition titled "Starter" that showed works from the Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, that "start" the title of the opening exhibition referred to actually implied the starting point of a route that will bifurcate in various directions: while evoking the promising developments in recent years regarding the rapidly evolving context of contemporary art in Turkey, it heralded determination for the expansion of a fledgling but ambitious international contemporary art collection; and furthermore it announced once again a museum complex project, that is presently in the preparatory stages and will be realised in coming years.

ARTER's "Second Exhibition", which assumes as a title its chronological order among exhibitions organised here, is in fact the first exhibition at ARTER in that it is realised independently from the collection and with new productions, and denotes the programme that will be adhered to from now on. The numerical reference in the title seeks to evoke the sequentiality within the programme of artistic events at an art institution as well as an institutional continuity, similar to the perpetuity inherent in the act of counting. It also ironically references the criterion of an art institution's success usually associated with numerical values rather than the content produced and the primary importance of numerical values for institutions.

"Second Exhibition" departs from the lack so far of sufficient institutional and sustainable response to the urgent requirement for support towards artistic production despite the rapid growth of contemporary art in Turkey, and focuses on encouraging new productions. In consideration of the processes of restructuring and transformation that Turkey is passing through in the 2000s and that are also observable in art institutions, the shared context of these new works consists of the concepts of the institution and institutionalisation in a framework with art at its centre. "Second Exhibition" proposes to examine the concept of the "institution" from a wider perspective and from within art itself; and through the new productions by the artists, attempts to render visible the tensions and dynamics between the art institution, the artist, the work of art and the viewer from different perspectives.

Second Exhibition
Kurator: Emre Baykal

Künstler: Halil Altindere, Burak Arikan, Volkan Aslan, Vahap Avsar, Banu Cennetoglu & Yasemin Ozcan Kaya, Ayse Erkmen, Hafriyat Art Group (Murat Akagündüz, Antonio Cosentino, Extrastruggle , Inci Furni, Mustafa Pancar), Ali Kazma, Aydan Murtezaoglu & Bülent Sangar, Ahmet Ogut, Iz Oztat, Cengiz Tekin, Canan Tolon