The opening of the Dulcinea Gallery, which is in the very capable hands of Frenchwoman Claire-Lyse Bucci, and the new İstanbul Contemporary Art Project in Asmalımescit, founded by the equally evolved Vasıf Kortun, are but two semaphores heralding a palpable shift in consciousness in the city's visual arts scene. The question is whether the audience and the media in Turkey are quite ready to rock with a future where "art" is more about what takes place in the gap between the product and receptor than collections or sales. No surprise that much of this new work is photo or video-based, and many seem at first as eerie and depersonalized as the wrong side of the Fassbinder's camera; the cyberworld is rapidly helping to efface the sender and put the weight in the slippery stuff of the message, including the lies. It can be frightening.

Istanbul's Biennial has already established itself as equal to any in the world; the 1997 exhibition contained a great deal of conceptual work much of it by woman. Even the corporate galleries are catching on to a world where art doesn't have to hang on the wall or match the furniture; in fact selections from Rome-based Turkish artist Şükran Moral's Biennial contribution are among those on show at Borusan's "Roundtrip İstanbul" exhibition (continuing until Dec. 12) and Mehmet Gün's light box and voice installation at Yapıkredi is another middling example.

In keeping with the trend of the times, Claire-Lyse Bucci for example, doesn't refer to herself as a curator but as a mediator, and the French painter Sébastien Gokalp (he has a Turkish father) doesn't even feel entirely comfortable calling himself an artist. Owing something to the tradition of photobased "reference to reference" work such as that of Sheri Levine and Cindy Sherman, his "14 famous Woman" exhibition, which runs at Dulcinea until Dec. 20, is described by him as "disturbing estrangement" based on trash-mag disposable photos which indicate "that the painting do not have a great deal of pictorial value." They concern a "question of identity" as they are pictures of hands and hips; "the faces in which you seek the expression of genius are absent." He also freely admits that the series resembles Gerhard Richter's "48 Portraits of Famous Men," which in turn was inspired by And Warhol's 1964 Geuggenheim exhibition, "Thirteen Most Wanted Men." Nothing original under the sun?

Gökalp prefers working from photos that have a grainy, sordid quality and plenty of flash burn, giving a sterile, tabloid effect even tough the women are primarily well-known artists and writers. His previous work involved swimming pools, and his newest follows on from "Famous Women" with chillingly bare reproductions of crime scenes. And he doesn't really care much if they sell; he teaches history for a living. His style of work, he agrees, breaks down the consumerist aspect of the art world and the myth of "original genuis," for every artist is truly working through bricolage, pasting together a consciousness of materials handed down by others or acquired in the environment. Such honesty is refreshing.

Molly Mcanalilly Burke, Istanbul - Turkish Daily News - Aralık 1998