İstanbul Eind­hoven
SALTVanAbbe
Modern Times

SALT Galata

The collaboration between SALT and Van Abbemuseum, İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe, evolves over the course of three exhibitions presented across both SALT venues throughout 2012. The final exhibition, İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe: Modern Times opens on September 21 and presents a selection of artworks from the Van Abbemuseum collection from the beginning of the Twentieth Century until 1960s along with corresponding works from the same period in Turkey.

The exhibition starts from the early Twentieth Century and ends with the epistemic shifts of the 1960s. It incorporates stories of Western and “other” modernities. Modern Times provides clues about half a century’s modern artistic practice and its disposition to revolutionary, nationalist, modern order, and its rational and progressive character. The project transmits the belief of modernist thought as an inherent outcome of scientific and technical understanding. It connects the avant-garde, and formalist perspectives of modern art with the perception of modern times proposing the demolition of the old and the construction of a new order.

In this historical voyage of sorts, the exhibition presents competing modernities of the centers instituting their social and political agenda on the peripheries, along with the aesthetics, forms, contradictions and localities of interaction. Selected works from Turkey are expected to enter into a dialogue with works from the the Van Abbemuseum collection and provide clues about how political and cultural modernisation was perceived and interpreted in Turkey.

The exhibition includes works by Pierre Alechinsky, Hakkı Anlı, Avni Arbaş, Yüksel Arslan, Ferruh Başağa, Jean Bazaine, Nurullah Berk, Roger Bissière, Georges Braque, Marcel Broodthaers, Jean Brusselmans, Cihat Burak, Corneille, Adnan Çoker, Robert Delaunay, Nejad Melih Devrim, Abidin Dino, Victor Dolphijn, Raoul Dufy, Edgar Fernhout, Leo Gestel, Juan Gris, Hans Hartung, Zeki Faik İzer, İlhan Koman, Herman Kruyder, Ger Lataster, Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, André Marchand, Fikret Mualla, Mübin Orhon, Pieter Ouborg, Pablo Picasso, Serge Poliakoff, Selim Turan, Theo van Doesburg, Geer van Velde, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, Theo Wolvecamp, Andrzej Wróblewski, Ossip Zadkine, Fahrelnissa Zeid. There is also archival and documentary material from the period.

This first exhibition in the series İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe: Post ’89 was followed by İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe: 68-89.

İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe: Modern Times, curated by Zeynep Yasa Yaman will be on view through December 30 at SALT Galata.


NLTR 400: 400 years of diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Turkey



İstanbul Eindhoven-SALTVanAbbe is kindly supported by
the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.



Exhibition-related public programs are kindly supported by
The Mondriaan Fund.