SALT Research uncovers artistic archive

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Designed by ŞANAL Architecture Planning, the library’s facilities have been developed to be user-centered, to meet Library 2.0 standards, and to reflect SALT’s desire to encourage research, learning and debate.

Opened in April 2011, SALT hosts exhibitions, conferences and public programs; engages in interdisciplinary research projects; while it also sustains SALT Research, a library and archive of recent art, architecture, design, urbanism, and social and economic histories to make them available for research and public use.

Comprising an extensive library that focuses on the arts, architecture, design, urbanism, and social and economic history, as well as an archive of physical and digital documents, SALT Research is the hub of the building and fills the 650 square meter central atrium of SALT Galata. The floor and mezzanine of the atrium previously served as the bank branch and still house the entrances to the original bank safes.

Designed by ŞANAL Architecture Planning, the library’s facilities have been developed to be user-centered, to meet Library 2.0 standards, and to reflect SALT’s desire to encourage research, learning and debate. Taking Vallaury’s fusion of diverse architectural styles as a starting point, ŞANAL designed the different elements of SALT Research to respond to the history of modern design in İstanbul. Users of SALT Research will be able to conduct online catalogue searches of the archive and library, watch art videos and other moving image material, and study archiva. 

SALT is not a museum, art institution, an architectural institution, research facility or gallery; it is everything that stands for innovation and alteration. 

Saying that SALT is only for culture is not exactly right, we might have a project at some point where we deal with something that we might see as a part of culture and others not,” Kortun said in an earlier interview that Hürriyet Daily News made. “SALT wants to stand for innovation and change and wants to work toward that direction,” he added.

According to Kortun, whether exhibitions, workshops, conferences or the like, SALT has an open mind for everything and seeks to provoke, challenge and encourage its visitors to become active participants rather than stay passive.

“SALT explores critical and timely issues in visual and material culture, and cultivates innovative programs for research and experimental thinking,” according to its founders. 

It is possbile to find documents and images of non-commercial, historically important exhibitions organized in Turkey since the 1980s, as well as exhibitions abroad attended by groups of artists from Turkey. The Exhibition Archive of Turkey has developed with the cooperation of artists and exhibition organizers, is shaped by research, and is continuously updated.

Salt Research also contains archival material such as brochures, invitations and booklets of various institutions in Turkey, as well as dossiers belonging to the now-defunct Borusan Art Gallery and Project4L Museum of Contemporary Art, İstanbul. The Institutional Archive also contains documents pertaining to all the exhibitions and projects of Ankara-based Siyah-Beyaz Gallery since its founding in 1984, as well as all the documents, posters and images of Gallery Zon and its exhibitions from 1990-1994, during which the gallery was active in Ankara.