“Public Collection of Modern Art” 2016

Choreography, Concept: Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş

Performance Artists: Mustafa Karadağ, Buyan Yağmur Memişoğulları and Müge Olacak

Photo: Mustafa Hazneci

Performed in Salt Galata Istanbul

“Manuel Pelmuş and Alexandra Pirici’s performative work proposes an overview of modern art by creating a dialogue between the history of discourses and important moments of modernity, via the enactment and combined choreography of three actors: Mustafa Karadağ, Buyan Yağmur Memişoğulları and Müge Olacak.

While the work may be performed in different spaces throughout SALT Galata, as an ongoing action-exhibition, it relies on the same convention as any display of material objects and will be cited as such. It thus reflects on questions of immaterial production and its economy in museum and gallery space, as well as on the very notion of what it means to hold, or — specifically in SALT’s case — to not hold, a permanent material collection that is traditionally seen as the cornerstone of the museum as a legacy-building institution.

Public Collection of Modern Art (2014) is loaned within the scope of SALT’s current exhibition One and the Many as part of the L’Internationale museum confederation’s reciprocal loan agreement from the Van Abbemuseum where it was initially commissioned for the exhibition Confessions of the Imperfect, 1848 – 1989 – Today.