Seeing SALT

Rare is the cultural institution that combines an edible rooftop garden with a public library, walk-in cinema, e-publishing empire, gourmet restaurant and thousands of square metres of exhibition space, all encompassed within the walls of two 19th century palazzi. But SALT doesn’t do things by the book.   Since it opened in April 2011, the organisation has been hailed as a model for galleries, libraries and museums across the globe. In 2012, Art Review declared that ‘SALT has definitely changed the art ecosystem of Turkey.’ Aside from the rooftop garden and chic eats, SALT’s statistics speak for themselves. It has hosted 21 exhibitions, 158 public talks, 70 film screenings and 300,000 visitors, all in under two years. At the time of writing, Pippo Ciorra, senior curator at Rome's National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (MAXXI), is due to discuss contemporary architecture at SALT’s walk-in cinema. No event better sums up the institution’s declared motive that looks to ‘move away from one way communication.’   SALT may be a non-profit institution, but it fulfils its lofty aims not within one staggering building, but two. The twin cultural icons of SALT Beyoğlu and SALT Galata lie a ten minute walk from each other through the atmospheric streets of old Istanbul. SALT Beyoğlu is dedicated to large-scale public exhibitions. A good job it occupies a six storey mansion on Istiklâl Caddesi, the city’s premier shopping street. Entering is akin to browsing a cultural department store. Istanbul’s intelligentsia loiters in the bookstore or dissects art in the contemporary café.   Audio terminals lead visitors on artistic aural journeys. Short films shot on mobile phones offer a civilising injection to those who’ve dropped in from Mango or H&M over the road. Its current exhibition is a full-blown retrospective of Egyptian artist Hassan Khan. Participants in one of the accompanying shows – audience interaction is a big theme at SALT – are invited to write critical reviews of their own Khan experience on Facebook and Twitter.   If anything,  SALT Galata embodies even more of the institution’s collaborative aims. It’s housed in the old headquarters of the Ottoman Bank. Inside, the former bank remains a medley of marble floors and granite balustrades. The ceilings are twice the height of those in your apartment. The glass-fronted Ca d’Oro restaurant serves artichoke hearts artistically sandwiched between disks of beetroot. But in the basement lies the beating heart of SALT’s raison d'être: the archive and research zone that forms that basis of much of the institution’s activity.   Vasif Kortun, SALT's Director of Research and Institutions, explains how these archives influence so much of their work. Kortun is the enthusiastic overseer of many of SALT’s projects, and he remains one of the most prominent cultural voices in contemporary Turkey. But when we ask him what his favourite archive-based exhibition is, he’s momentarily speechless. ‘Aye, wow,’ sighs Kortun. ‘That’s a hard question.’   'SALT's second Open Archive project, It Was A Time Of Conversation, worked visually and spatially very well,’ claims Kortun, re-finding his voice. The show highlighted several key Istanbul exhibitions from the early 1990s, revisiting both art and archives to question collaboration, democracy and Turkish society two decades ago. More importantly for SALT, when the Open Archive exhibition was dismantled last year, it continued life in a new form, emphasising that ‘it’s not an end, never a finality.’   Here, all knowledge is processed for later use in films, discussions and publications of all descriptions. ‘We don’t look at archives in a classical way any longer,’ says Kortun. ‘We’re not a vault, and we’re not simply sitting on them.’ Instead, the director explains, it’s what you do with the archives that arouses interest.   So which archives are accessible to the SALT curators? The list is spellbinding, and includes archived materials from the Ottoman Bank, Istanbul Biennial, Atatürk Cultural Center, and archives from the city’s Italian consulate, which date from 1847 onwards, as well as key historical biographies of over 200 artists and digital copies of much of the Ottoman Empire's French press from 1850 to the 1930s.   Can SALT also access the archives of, say, the Turkish parliament or Dolmabahçe Palace, I ask? ‘Yeah,’ says Kortun simply, summing up the wealth of knowledge the institution has access to. In a word, wow. These archives are open to the public too. Visitors today may browse thousands of digitised pages on big screen iMacs at SALT Research in the Galata building’s basement. This research centre meets ‘Library 2.0’ standards, meaning its diverse literature can be searched and shared, watched as a video or debated in cyberspace.   More interesting still are SALT’s new research grants. The institution is offering six individuals – from any country and educational background – the means and encouragement to create a cultural product from its extensive archives. The recipients of the grant will be chosen by a five person selection committee, including three people from outside SALT. What sort of archival projects does SALT hope to assist, I ask? Perhaps Arabian influences on Ottoman cuisine? Or 1950s architecture on Turkey’s Black Sea coast? ‘Well, the programme just opened last Friday,’ laughs Kortun, ‘so we’ll have to wait and see.’ These research projects could expand into lectures, a video series, exhibitions themselves or even as part of SALT’s burgeoning ebook database. Kortun is keen to expand upon this latter platform.   Indeed, SALT really isn’t just about the exhibitions. The institution sees e-publishing as one of the biggest democratic revolutions in contemporary culture. Unlike printed books, ebooks are open to intervention, change, revision, online discussion and sharing. So passionate is Kortun about this new medium, he claims that SALT is a ‘post-paper institution.’ The days of perusing 60 dollar exhibition guides after touring the show are long, long gone.   'We're living beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy,’ continues the SALT director, in reference to the demise of the mass market printing press. ‘The days when the printed book was the main means of communication are over.’ More importantly, digital books are not only free to publish, but also cheap and easy to distribute. ‘When you print 1000 copies of a book, 500 remain in your attic as you don’t have space to store them!’ laughs Kortun. ‘Then you send a copy to colleagues which costs another 20 to 30 euros per piece. It becomes an extremely inefficient way of communicating with the world.’   Coverage is another key factor in today’s linked-in cultural world. By digitally publishing catalogues, guides, biographies and art tomes, SALT’s ideas ‘could be put online and read minutes later in Mali or Hong Kong or Kiev.’ With this in mind, SALT are creating an e-shelf of books, with three new titles available in spring 2013. Does Kortun see digital publishing as an aim for other cultural institutions? ‘It’s absolutely critical,’ he asserts. Like so much of SALT’s work.   Photography: Aydan Cinar