santralistanbul, 01 September – 30 November 2007
curated by Basak Senova, NOMAD
The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, santralistanbul, ZINC – ECM de la Friche Belle de Mai, NOMAD and SCCA.

Involving the transformation of the city’s first power station –Silahtaraga Power Plant- into a cultural and educational center, santralistanbul aims to be a new source of energy for production and distribution of art and knowledge through a program of collaborative and interdisciplinary projects and activities. ‘Light, Illumination & Electricity ’, supported by Anna Lindh Foundation and organized in collaboration with The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo), ZINC – ECM de la Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille), NOMAD (Istanbul) and SCCA (Ljubljana), is the first platform for such collaborative work and will bring artists together from Beirut, Istanbul, Paris, Ljubljana, Cairo, and Leipzig to work together in Istanbul during the entire duration of the project. In the mean time, The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art hosts an artist from Turkey in Cairo. The project's foundation is based on the vague but inspiring substances of electricity and light. Therefore, the energy museum and this specific site of santralistanbul provide multilayered inputs for an accumulation of ideas and praxis. Accordingly, the residence project involves a series of talks and workshops along with the open studio exhibition.

10.29.2007

artists, working at the energy museum


The artists started to work at the energy museum in sync with their work in the residency studios. Most of them process the log of their visit to their works. Istanbul takes a noticeable part of their research. Some of them challenges the limitations of the space as a "preserved museum".


Little Buggers of Carlo Crovato are examples of Photovores. Photovore is a light-eater. Any robot that uses light (rather than batteries) as a source of energy. Little Buggers feed off light. They feed and instantly turn their food energy into sound energy. There is no storage system, no battery. So no light means no sound. The sound intensity is dependent on the light intensity.

credits to Mark Tilden, Ralf Schreiber & the BEAM community.


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