With the increase in the marketization of art, with the introduction of galleries, art dealers, auction companies, collectors and institutions such as museums and archives as official or private initiatives, the history of art expressing an economic value and being seen as a means of investment goes back far enough to be easily analyzed. Art, in one way or another, is privileged as a phenomenon belonging to the upper classes in society; thus, about wealth, it can be seen as an activity of the bourgeoisie, which has the power to buy art and enough free time to watch and enjoy it.
As observed in Turkey in recent years, the art sector, shaped by the increase in the number of galleries, museums, art initiatives and institutions together with fairs, affects not only the artist, the work, and the institution, but also the collections and museums. Just as the concept of ‘curator’ today includes a large-scale definition, the collector today takes on the identity of an investor beyond an ‘aesthetic’ pleasure, and the doors are thus opened for yesterday's merchants to become today's collectors and to access the power to shape the art market.
In this context, I was thinking that Proje4L, which has a ten-year history and is recognised as the first contemporary art museum in Turkey, could develop a project in which the concepts of ‘museology’ and ‘the museum as an ideology’, which have been very much on the agenda recently, could be questioned. The project, which is gathered under the title ‘Museum within the Museum’, consists of works that contain minimal but maximum ironies and thus question and decipher the phenomena of the museum or collection. The group of twelve artists working with interdisciplinary methods in Turkish Contemporary Art has a scale that questions the museum in terms of content and produces works that make various references to it.
There is no end to accumulation. On the other hand, the importance that the art market attributes to constant innovation, the speed factors in the increase in the number of contemporary art productions and artists, together with the construction of popular culture, function under a kind of crazed capitalism that becomes obsolete as soon as it is produced. so which objects are worth collecting? What kind of ideology is behind the order that museums create by hanging or placing art objects side by side with serious dignity and in an orderly manner? And can new channels of enquiry be opened that challenge the connections in such an order, or even desire a disconnection between the works?
Curator: Fırat Arapoğlu
The artists in the exhibition are anti-pop, Rafet Arslan, Mehmet Çeper, Orhan Cem Çetin, Eda Gecikmez, İnsel İnal, Alper İnce, Ali İbrahim Öcal, Elif Öner, Hülya Özdemir, Çağrı Saray and Özlem Şimşek.
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