MoMA acquires work of Hüseyin Alptekin

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

Turkish artist Huseyin Bahri Alptekin’s ‘H-Fact: Hospitality/Hostility’ artwork has been accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. AA photo

Turkish artist Huseyin Bahri Alptekin’s “H-Fact: Hospitality/Hostility” artwork has been accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work consists of seven pieces in 3-D, and is the first work by a Turkish artist to be acquired for the museum’s permanent collection since Zühtü Müridoğlu’s sculpture “The Unknown Political Prisoner” 54 years ago.

MoMA also acquired Cengiz Çekil’s drawing “Diary” (1976) last year, which was shown in the temporary exhibition titled “I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing.”

Born in 1957 in Ankara, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin was an artist, writer, educator and curator. He died of a heart attack in his office in Istanbul on Dec. 31, 2007.

“Hospitality/Hostility” is a part of the larger “H-Fact” series. “Hospitality/Hostility” refers to hotel signs, which reappeared in Alptekin’s works in various media over the course of his career. Alptekin started taking photographs of hotel signs in the 1980s. The names of the hotels in the photographs were taken from cities all around the world. He was fascinated by the aesthetics of the down-market, gaudy sign systems, and the hotel names that had no bearing on what they hosted. The piece therefore muses on the contradictions inherent in urban politics.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York is internationally recognized as having the world’s most prominent collection of modern art, and is also credited for narrating the canonical story of the art of the twentieth century. The museum’s collection includes a wide range of works by eminent artists such as Picasso, Miro, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Naumann, and many others.

“Hospitality/Hostility” was also exhibited in Vienna at Bal/Kan: Blutt und Honig (Essl Museum, 2003) in an exhibition curated by Harald Szeeman, and at Platform Garanti (Istanbul 2003). It was also installed at Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, 2004), the 1st Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla (2004), Santral Istanbul, (2007) Maison de Folie de Wazemmes (2009, Lille, France), as well as elsewhere.