CitySense @ Garaj, Istanbul (announcement)

CitySense: Surveillance, Secrecy, Security, Control

[A playful evening pondering media, control, surveillance, secrecy and art in urban environments]

Curator: Nat Muller in collaboration with NOMAD

Introduction

It is no big secret that urban centres have become sites of surveillance and control. Gone are the days that the urban city dweller could carelessly drift – as the 19th Century flaneur, strolling from one area to the other, and then disappear anonymously into the crowds. As our urban experience might have become more anonymous in regard to social interaction, our behaviour – how we move, what we see, hear, taste and smell - is becoming more regulated, watched and controlled. Anonymity it seems, is no longer an option. Our urban sensibilities are often directed, mediated and pre-programmed, either by security measures or by other overt or hidden codes of conduct. It is no coincidence then that how we consciously sense our cities – our “City Sense” – ultimately defines how we position ourselves as citizens.

CitySense offers a playful interpretation on how to actively engage your urban senses and reveals the hidden and questions the exposed in an evening choc-a-bloc with video screenings, live food and smell installations, live audio-visual performances, and party to close off the night. It also is an event where the practices of Dutch artists (predominantly from Rotterdam) and Turkish artists (predominantly from Istanbul) come together. The event is followed by a panel discussion on the 21st of September with the participating artists.

Program Day1: CitySense 20 September: 20.00-1.30am

20.00: doors open

20.00 – 23.00: Body Odor No 5 - Maki Ueda; Urbanopathic Confection - Wietske Maas, My Pocket – Burak Arikan [on-going lounge/bar area]

20.30-21.15: video screenings: Mediashed “The Duellists”, Nicolas Provost “Plot Point”, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay & Pascal Lievre “Patriotic”, Melse, Venet, Geurts, van Loenen “Published Security”, Basak kaptan “Terrace”, Efe Hizir “Bidi”, Dilara Kurtoglu,”Stimulasyon”, Denizcan Yüzgül “Aquarium” [main stage]

21.30 – 22.00: 20-20000: The Infra Ultra Sound Society - Sasker Scheeerder & Radboud Mens [main stage]

22.15 – 22.45: LSP - Edwin van der Heide [main stage]

22.45 – 23.15: Koray Tahiroglu [main stage]

23.15 – 1.30am: Not at Home [main stage]


Body Odor No.5 - Maki Ueda (NL/J)
[Performance Installation – bar/lounge area, 3h]
For Japanese Dutch artist scent and smells (the olfactory) are a “new” medium. She creates scents which capture childhood, identity, a mood or a historical event. Within this context a person’s body odor can be used to identify the person, and is as distinctive and traceable as a fingerprint. The character of the smell is determined by many conditions, such as for example diet: we smell of, what we eat. So the Europeans are supposed to smell like cheese, and the Japanese like soy sauce. During the event Maki Ueda will, with
her unique combination of skills and the mini-laboratory setup, extract the smells of different foodstuffs. The audience will then witness the live process of composing a "perfume" with the latter ingredients, which will replicate body odors, personal smell tags, if you will.

Bio Maki Ueda (NL/J)
Is an artist who in her current practice incorporates the olfactory sense in art. She is one of the few artists using smell as a creative medium. She has developed a unique combination of chemical and kitchen skills in order to extract scents of daily life, ranging from food, space, to bodily scents. She has participated art exhibitions concerning smell, such as “There Ever Was” (U.K., 2008).Previously Maki Ueda worked in the field of new media art. Her well-known work “Hole in the Earth” (2003) is a permanent public installation with realtime video, connecting Indonesia and Holland. She studied media art at The Environmental Information Studies Department (B.A., 1997) and at The Master School of Media and Governance (M.A., 1999), Keio University, Japan. She also attended courses at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery in France.
artist's up-to-date(blog) [EN]: http://scent-lab.blogspot.com

Program Day2 CitySense: “Security’s Spectacle: The Seen and The Unseen” Sunday 21th September
Time: 15.00 – 17.30

Format: audio-visual presentations, panel debate with moderator (Nat Muller/Basak Senova)

Presentations by: Lemi Baruh (TR), Maki Ueda (NL/J), Wietske Maas (NL/AU), Sasker Scheerder (NL)

Moderated and introduced by Nat Muller (independent curator) and Basak Senova (NOMAD)

In cities in The Netherlands, as well as in Istanbul, we see an increase in the “spectacle of security”: more police, more metal detectors, more bag&body searches, more surveillance cameras, etc. This visual performance of surveillance and security significantly changes the outlook of our cities, but also how we experience them, conduct ourselves in and through these controlled zones, as well as how our conceptions of private and public are affected. Within the current obsession of assessing and exposing (=visualising) that which cannot be seen, i.e. the threat, how do the senses fare which are invisible, such as sound, smell and taste? Are they part and parcel of the system of control, and is what we hear, smell and taste pre-configured. Or can we, as is the case with counter-images, always find a system hack?