DAVID TEH
Born in 1977 in Australia, David Teh received his BA from the University of Sydney in the History and Theory of Art in 1999, and a doctorate in Critical Theory in 2005. He lived in Bangkok from 2005 to 2009 and has been working in Singapore since 2009, teaching at the National University of Singapore where he is an associate professor in the literature programme. Teh’s research focuses on Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. Together with Ute Meta Bauer and Amar Kanwar he forms part of this year’s Istanbul Biennial curatorial team, which has taken the city’s neighbourhoods as its organising principle.
Interview by Thomas RouechéPortrait by Alex Davies
Thomas Roueché Where did you start? How did the three of you begin working together?
David Teh We began a conversation in early 2020. We hadn’t worked together as this group of people before. I live and work in Singapore, as does Ute. We’re both in the art scene, we’re both in universities, so we cross paths, a lot. Ute has worked with Amar in the past quite a few times. We’re not a collective; we’re just collaborating. Of course, 2020 was a very weird time to begin a collaboration! It has been imperfect, like I think most of them are. Our first year of preparation was entirely mediated. It was difficult even for Ute and I to meet. Amar, you know, I think from the beginning, was very comfortable having some distance, because he doesn’t identify as a curator. At first, he was sort of wondering, what am I doing here? But I think he’s been sort of dragged more and more into the fray. I think he’s enjoyed it. It’s been a very difficult process; and that’s something nobody’s going to try to hide. It’s not just our remoteness from each other and from Turkey, but also because Turkey has been going through a tumultuous time. The Biennial has faced crises of various kinds in the past, but without being able to get your feet on the ground, to try to plan something for a city that was going through this tumult, is a very weird experience.
TR So how did you approach the collaboration?
DT It was extremely conversational. Ute basically had had conversations with Bige Örer, the director of the Istanbul Biennial, and she wanted to bring the two of us in. So early on, we had a series of conversations where there was no agreement that we would be the curators, but fairly quickly, I could see that it was an opportunity that I wanted to take. So we just kept talking. In that period, there was a lot of uncertainties in everybody’s personal lives. I was home-schooling a two-year-old with Zoom. Ute was struggling with the shrinking of her organisation in Singapore. Amar had had 12 shows cancelled and was trying to make something remotely. Everything that you had thought you would be doing for the next year or so was evaporating. This was a strange context to begin a project. As a result, everybody we wanted to talk to and engage with joined us with the same set of uncertainties in their lives. We didn’t expect anything of anyone. The conversation continued for more than a year and branched out into maybe eight or ten conversations by the first six months. All of those conversations started to inform us and generated some refrains that we would discuss amongst ourselves, asking: why are we all interested in this? Overlaps started to emerge. There were maybe 15 projects after the first year of discussions and those refrains became six streams that we articulated to subsequent participants, with short blurbs that just said, “this is a concern of ours”; “we think your practice is interesting in that context.” Then, “Can we have a conversation?” At that point, more than a year in, no participations were confirmed. It was a huge, distributed exercise in trust. Because we didn’t want to say, at a time like that, what are you going to show in Istanbul? You know, so we didn’t ask that question at all, for a very long time. What we said from the beginning was, “Let’s have a conversation about these things, let’s keep talking; you keep us abreast of what you’re doing.” When the time comes, when we know we’re going to have an exhibition, we’ll talk. We didn’t even know we would have a physical show; we didn’t know we would be able to gather more than a dozen people in a room. Yet we had to start to plot out an approach to venues, public engagement and selection that would be able to absorb any kind of sanitary and travel restrictions, plus political restrictions, currency inflation, and so on. We were wary, so we built a very, very loose and flexible kind of fabric. Then, pretty quickly, it became clear that we needed to postpone the Biennial. We had our feelers out in Istanbul trying to figure out what the political and sanitary constraints were likely to be. Nobody felt like it was a good idea to just barrel on and make a show. The postponement gave us some latitude for those streams to mature and those conversations to lead further. It gave us a chance to grow as well. The list of collaborators and participants expanded after that; the Biennial organisation felt that it needed to have critical mass. The other thing is we didn’t have a picture of what participation would look like; it didn’t have to be an exhibition. If the conversation turned out to be what was important, then we’d find a way to have that conversation with Istanbulites, with the city, with Turkish interlocutors. In many cases our work in that first year was more focused on finding these interlocutors. The Biennial was furnishing us with options of who we could talk to. Dialogical-conversational was really the word that sort of sums up that first year. After that, it definitely changed once the postponement had happened. Our way of working had to change after that first year and a half, too. Intellectually, it was hugely stimulating to be so involved in these conversations and to be disagreeing constantly about what was interesting about these conversations and agreeing sometimes. It was exhilarating, but it was absolutely exhausting. After maybe 12 or 14 months, we fell off the rails and everybody wondered why we were doing this to ourselves. Then there was a question, can we continue? Eventually, we decided that yes, we can, but we can’t continue in this way. There had to be a little bit more division of responsibilities. Each of us became a little more focused on certain aspects of the programme.
TR Could you explain a little bit about how you approached the neighbourhoods?
DT As a proviso I have to say that I haven’t been to all these neighbourhoods. I’m currently doing the crash course, the Istanbul neighbourhoods 101. Already, I can tell you from the experience of visiting the venues that Istanbul has a lot to tell you. The venues are participants in this edition; they have such personalities, so much charisma, and such impossibly layered histories. You have to bear in mind that for Ute and Amar maybe it’s different. In Southeast Asia, where I live and work, contemporary art emerged for the first time in the 1970s and 1980s, when no nation was more than 30 years old. Singapore, especially, which has this kind of tabula rasa mentality, has a very rich and interesting history but it is not accessible to most people. For me, Istanbul is intimidating. How do you get a biennial or an exhibition and plug it into the ground? It’s a really intense canvas. The city is spewing stories at you and the problem is not how you connect projects to the city, but how do you attenuate or modulate that conversation? And what frequencies are right for the constituencies around these venues? That’s something that you won’t get right in maybe 50% of cases, but that’s the work for me. To give you some examples, we were in the neighbourhood in Fatih, where two hammams are being used. Both are richly loaded historical sites, both very different sites. And I’m not just talking about an architectural history, but the social history of that neighbourhood is just spilling over your shoelaces as you walk. The venues need to be protagonists in this exhibition and in this Biennial, in a way that maybe you wouldn’t always expect. You wouldn’t always demand that of a venue. Some of the them, like Gazhane, fell into our laps. Its readiness to engage with the Biennial was like a godsend because we didn’t have much space; we didn’t have many places to put things. We had this strong intention from the beginning to explore the Asian side of the city, but we didn’t have a good anchor point over there. So it really was a godsend, but then again, it came loaded with stories, with 20th-century history. Clearly a lot of the projects were responding to similar history, so that was good, but also it came readymade with this buzzing crowd. With lots of activity, with programming that came from another direction. The municipality has its own stake, obviously, in the kind of programming there. With other kinds of ideological baggage about climate, and you can’t necessarily play well with everyone in that sandpit. So we’ve had to moderate our approach to some venues as well. Barın Han stands out as a venue where this moderating role is clear, because of what we’ve discovered in that historical neighbourhood. I think a lot of Istanbulites probably will discover things about neighbourhoods they might not have visited in their lives or which they might have only visited once, 20 or 30 years ago. In Barın Han we found this story, which is the biography of an individual, Emin Barın, an important figure in Turkish letters, an internationalised intellectual whose contribution to typography, book-binding and design was immense, from the Republican period through into the 1960s and 1970s. His house-cum-atelier and workshop was an important gathering point for successive generations of intellectuals. He articulated a kind of neo-traditionalism through his scripts that was extremely avant-garde, quite polarising in a way, but which gradually over his lifetime – over the course of the Romanisation of writing in Turkey – was synthesised with a wider modernisation and functionalism. This figure connected to so many histories, and we have this focus on the media, on the press, on the continuation of news by other means. How can you tell the stories that are important now, to people, when the list of things we can’t talk about is growing constantly, when newspapers are shutting down, when physical spaces are being closed off, when the public sphere is being eviscerated in so many places where we work? How can you set an agenda? What is an editor in this day and age? An editor is no longer what we still import when we use that word. We have a lot of projects that deal with publication, that are publications, that also touch on auxiliary crafts and industries around publishing and views and journalism. These are, it’s fair to say, global problems of the present, but we don’t want to have a confrontational conversation about the repression of free expression in Turkey. In this sense, the much-maligned globality of international contemporary art is an asset. No doubt about it, you know, we need to have that conversation in a larger terrain. I would say we have an editorial responsibility, in a way. What’s important now, as much as possible, is to involve organisations and people and for this reason, our approach is that the neighbourhood or the venue becomes a protagonist. It’s represented in print and in our digital interfaces. This is a way of accessing the city with the Biennial as a kind of lens. It’s up to us to kind of “itinerarise” that a little bit and point to things that will keep people in those neighbourhoods. If someone comes to Istanbul from overseas for five days, and they end up seeing two venues, for me, that’s a good outcome. If someone who lives in the city comes back to the Biennial five times or six times and still doesn’t see every venue, that’s a good outcome, too. ◉