‘Into the Unknown’ at SALT

ISTANBUL

A new exhibition, “Into the Unknown,” organized by SALT Beyoğlu and SALT Galata in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, explores art’s ability to disrupt established historical and cultural narratives in a post-1989 world.

Underlining the lively nature and altering use of the documentary and the archive within art, the exhibition traces the tensions and contradictions between mechanisms of social power and everyday life, the established history and personal memory, and regimes of truth and the unconscious.

The thematic group exhibition shines a spotlight on a body of work from the 2000s to the present central to the museum’s moving image collection. Following the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, the exhibition tackles what lies beyond the known in a post-1989 world.

Spreading across SALT Beyoğlu and SALT Galata, the exhibition features works by Diane Severin Nguyen, Nathalie Djurberg, Agnieszka Polska, Józef Robakowski, Duncan Campbell, Deimantas Narkevičius, Shana Moulton, Jananne Al-Ani, Oleksiy Radinsky, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska.

Borrowing its title from Deimantas Narkevičius’s work created for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Into the Unknown” offers a social insight into the former Eastern Bloc as well as modern-day Eastern Europe.

The exhibition explores alternative perspectives, through genres of the experimental, found footage and fiction. Rather than accepting the documentary and the archive as a fixed and objective representation of the truth, the exhibition utilizes such mediums to unravel the notion of the unknown.

The exhibition continues at SALT Galata with an extensive archive project, “Enthusiasts Archive” by Cummings and Lewandowska, celebrating the amateur underground film clubs in Poland before 1989.

With a selection of 10 short and experimental films highlighting everyday life from the early 1970s until the late 80s, the archive project poses a critical perspective on idealized notions of society and art, and it expands on the archive’s public function and the question of ownership in art.

The exhibition, programmed by Salt Research and Programs Director Fatma Çolakoğlu and Sebastian Cichocki, the chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, will be on view through Aug. 14.