Produced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, ‘Is the Museum a Battlefield?’ took as its departure point Steyerl’s March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focused on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the media through the regular flow of images. The lecture asks the question of how a museum and a battlefield could be related. The question emerges when Steyerl follows the trace of an empty bullet casing which she found in the area where the mass grave of Andrea Wolf and her friends were located in Van, Turkey.
Almost one year after the lecture took place, Hito Steyerl will come together with Fulya Erdemci, curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial and Sener Ozmen, one of the participating artists of the Biennial for expanding on a post discussion moment. Last year as the Biennial was constantly questioned for its funding relations and the approach it took after Gezi protests, the lecture triggered art communities to think on new negotiation models with institutional structures and pointed towards a mode of institutional critique that initiates primarily from artists’ unfolding of their position in the heart of the criticized structures.
For the video link of the lecture:
http://vimeo.com/76011774