The Absent Question Mark: How Have We Got Here?

Vasıf Kortun and Sezin Romi, How Did We Get Here: Reading Vasıf Kortun. Edited by Sezin Romi. Berlin: Archive Books, 2026. 288 pp.

Few curatorial practices are as intimately bound up with the development of contemporary art in their geography as Vasıf Kortun’s. Any attempt to think through the trajectory of art practices in Turkey in the last thirty years must inevitably contend with the interventions he staged through the exhibitions he curated, texts he authored, and institutions he founded. In March 2017, he stepped down from his directorship at SALT, the interdisciplinary research and cultural institution he founded in Istanbul, and moved to a village near Ayvalık, a coastal town on the northwestern Aegean coast of Turkey, in a move oddly similar to many Turkish intellectuals of the past.(Kortun’s departure was announced as a retirement from his position as SALT’s Director of Research and Programs. He subsequently joined the institution’s board of directors, on which he continues to serve.) As his hold over Istanbul’s art scene has gradually waned since then, he has become something of a mythical figure to be either hated or admired, depending on one’s position within a scene where professional, institutional, and personal allegiances have often coalesced around a small number of influential figures.

It was this that motivated me to ask my friend Elmas Deniz, an artist who previously collaborated with him, to facilitate a visit to Kortun’s place in March 2023. I was soon to embark on a PhD on Turkish contemporary art, and it seemed essential to demystify this intimidating figure about whom I heard so much, and whose name would likely be etched into my mind for the next couple of years. That visit was short, but it eventually led to a longer one in the scorching summer of the same year. It was during this longer visit, which involved more gardening than discussion of art, that I got to know the committed intellectual behind his rather sensational art-world persona. Somehow, I thought, that garden, with both its failures and successes, had become a much better metaphor for his institutional practice than all the terms Kortun has used to describe it thus far.

Three years on, it was this committed intellectual that I was expecting to see in his recently published book How Did We Get Here: Reading Vasıf Kortun, which had a grainy image of him in the garden on its cover. The book’s premise is simple enough: through an extended conversation guided by Sezin Romi, Senior Librarian and Archivist at SALT and Kortun’s long-time collaborator in and out of the institution, he reflects on his curatorial and institutional practice, revisiting the ideas, approaches, and experiments that have shaped his work to date. Anecdotal contributions from his collaborators, such as his wife Defne Koryürek and curator Charles Esche, punctuate the interview, each appearing at the moment the conversation reaches the period in which Kortun first met or began working with them. The book’s title, however, contained the first sign of warning that I may have been misguided in my expectations.

How Did We Get Here, which is phrased as a question but has no question mark attached to it, gestures toward a negative diagnosis of the present, while leaving uncertain the extent to which the book will offer a critical examination of how that present came about. Implicit throughout is a narrative in which the openness to experimentation and international connectivity that characterized the early 2000s gave way first to an increasingly commercialized and market-driven art world, and subsequently to a cultural sphere delimited by what it calls “the tyranny of our times.” (p. 253) Yet the book itself remains reluctant to fully undertake the critical inquiry that its title seems to invite. This ambiguity continues throughout the publication: although Kortun occasionally refers to the shortcomings of his practice over the years, they are nonetheless treated as non-integral to this broader historical trajectory. There is little consideration of how they may have contributed to it, save for one instance in which his self-criticism remains more apologetic than analytical. (p. 109) The primary problem of the book therefore lies in its reluctance to reckon with the contradictions of Kortun’s institutional practice, which was itself implicated in the formation of the present toward which it takes a negative stance.

A similar ambiguity operates at the structural level as well. The book frames the presence of Sezin Romi as a strategy to offset the potentially spectacularizing effects of self-historicization, by anchoring the conversation in the intersubjective space that opens between Kortun and his interlocutor. (p. 6) Their conversation unfolds chronologically, beginning with Kortun’s early interest in art and his doctoral studies in the United States in the 1980s, before moving on to his curatorship of the Third Istanbul Biennial in 1992 and his directorship of the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (1994-97), where he oversaw the newly established center’s exhibition program. It then moves on to his subsequent work in Istanbul as an institution-maker through the stories of Proje4L (2001-03), a privately funded museum of contemporary art; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (2001-10), which combined exhibitions with a research library, archive and international residency program; and finally SALT (2010-17), the interdisciplinary research and cultural institution that emerged partly out of Platform and two other cultural institutions owned by Garanti Bank. However, the extent to which the intersubjectivity introduced by Romi averts any potential misrepresentation remains unclear, considering that Kortun’s answers to some of the more polemical questions raised in the interview are rarely challenged by Romi.

The generative spaces for potential disagreement that present themselves are not exhausted, and at times Kortun’s answers seem to partially evade Romi’s questions without any follow-up. Moreover, there is an undeniable harmony in the way the pair reconstructs the past, likely due to the close working relationship they maintained over the years and the inevitable convergence of their frame of reference. The book therefore performs an ambiguous relation to its subject matter, with Kortun himself often oscillating between his overconfidence that Romi’s presence prevents him from rewriting history, and his characterization of the effort as part of a historical “correction” that was triggered by “a need to tell history as [he] remember[s] it,” therefore revealing the personal motivations behind the publication. (p. 99)

These ambiguities constitute the book’s biggest weaknesses, precisely because they obstruct a critical perspective that would otherwise be highly generative. In Turkey, where there is no strong art historical tradition that can be readily inherited and where canonical narratives remain weak and tethered to the market, such first-hand narratives present unique opportunities through which actual histories can be recuperated from the polarizations and factional allegiances that otherwise risk distorting the historical record and foreclosing critical assessments of individual practices and their legacies. These opportunities are rarely utilized, however, and such projects generally end up becoming glorified narratives that reserve no room for complexity. How Did We Get Here certainly moves beyond this, and Kortun remains generous for the most part of the book, but its reluctance to address contradictions inherent in Kortun’s practice as implicated in the negative outlook it assigns to the present nevertheless jeopardize the contribution it could have made to the literature.

This lost potential is made all the more evident considering that the book implicitly provides an account of the specific shape new institutionalism took in Turkey through Kortun’s practice. First coined by Jonas Ekeberg in 2003, new institutionalism came to be used as an umbrella term encompassing a variety of critical positions with regards to the role of cultural institutions at the turn of the millennium.(Jonas Ekeberg, ed., New Institutionalism Verksted #1 (Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 2003).) Largely practiced by curators of the same generation as Kortun, such as Maria Lind and Charles Esche, these practices sought to revolutionize the traditional white cube, top-down models of exhibition-making toward more experimental methods that prioritized process over outcome, research over exhibitions, and participation over spectatorship.

 Since its coinage, the term has had a contested history and generated much discourse around the topic, particularly because its boundaries remained ambiguous and its definitions incomprehensive.(Lucie Kolb and Gabriel Flückiger, eds., “(New) Institution(alism),” special issue, ONCURATING, no. 21 (January 2014). See also, James Voorhies, ed., What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).) The concept drew criticism from its named protagonists, despite being generally accepted as a loose descriptor for the project. In the mid 2010s, the momentum behind it had begun to wane, due to the shrinking of public funding in arts throughout Europe, and the term gradually lost its purchase as a concept, even while the phenomena it sought to describe continued to live on. Admittedly, Kortun always retained some distance from the generic use of the concept, even though he closely collaborated with the same group of people whose practices were often clustered under it. Instead, he preferred to define the kind of cultural and institutional practice advocated for at SALT as “post-curatorial,” which he put forward as a non-hegemonic term intended to describe a form of cultural practice rooted in research, whose trajectory and potential outcomes are not determined from the outset, but rather unfolds through time and depending on the needs of the specific questions being asked.(Vasıf Kortun, “Post-Curatorial: Testing Site,” springerin, no. 1 (2017), “The Post-Curatorial Turn,” accessed August 7, 2026, https://www.springerin.at/en/2017/1/post-curatorial-eine-versuchsanordnung/.)

While neither Romi nor Kortun focus specifically on the discussions around new institutionalism in the book, the connections between Kortun’s practice and the wider context of institutional change in the 2000s is implicit. Kortun himself recalls his experience of working with people like Manuel Borja-Villel, Maria Lind, and Charles Esche, and finding inspiration in their work at institutions such as MACBA in Barcelona, Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, as well as in the aims and concerns they shared among themselves. The fact that most of these institutions are today part of L’internationale, a European confederation of cultural institutions, speaks to the relative convergence of their missions. Even as the book’s primary focus remains on Kortun, it offers a personal look at the entangled careers of those associated with new institutionalism through Kortun’s anecdotal recollections, therefore providing glimpses into the early 2000s moment in the story of contemporary art and the shaping up of its promising internationalism at the time. This is precisely why a more critical approach would have been invaluable, since it would have provided the first retrospective look in Turkey on the premises of this formation by someone who is in close connection to the movement’s European protagonists and whose practice is based on similar principles.

Nevertheless, the book provides important insights into what distinguished Kortun within Istanbul’s art scene, by making an implicit case that it was this very promise of an international artworld devoid of colonial hierarchies and center-periphery models that was the hallmark of Kortun’s practice since the 1990s. This comes through Kortun’s anecdotes on the projects that shaped his career, where he exposes his critical stance as it manifested itself in his practice. For instance, Kortun recalls the opportunism of Tate Modern, when the latter approached him for his opinion on a work by an artist from Turkey, only to admit, after agreeing with his negative statement, that the work would nevertheless by acquired as part of a supporter’s donation.(Kortun was part of Tate Modern’s acquisitions committee for works from the Middle East and North Africa in 2010.) (p. 192) Likewise, when questioned by Romi about his thoughts on the series of exhibitions on Turkey that occurred throughout Europe in the 2000s, Kortun notes the sudden emergence of romantic Orientalist attitudes that remained careless to the context of art practices and put together well-packaged identity exhibitions to entertain the expectations of EU funders. (p. 114)

Beyond the usual criticism of the hegemony of “the center,” however, Kortun always insisted on what he refers to in this book as “autocolonialism,” which denotes the periphery’s complicity in the establishment of the center’s authority.(See also Vasıf Kortun and Cuauhtémoc Medina, “The Local Tango and The Global Dance” in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003), 28.) (p. 225) In the book, this finds its concrete example in the instinctual adoption of European models in the structuring of cultural institutions, which in turn becomes the prism through which art museums currently operating in Istanbul are evaluated. For Kortun, both Platform and SALT were experiments that sought to go beyond this provincial bind, to not replicate or adopt a model developed in and for a different place, but to begin thinking about institutions “from a different place altogether.” (p. 225)

Throughout the conversation, Romi poses further questions about specific events and projects that further illuminate what this “thinking from a different place” may have meant in practice. For instance, Platform’s participation in Frieze Art Fair in London in 2006 is positioned as one such instant. After receiving an invitation from Frieze to partake in the fair’s non-profit section, Platform decided to join with a project titled Collecting Point, where the institution, already operating under a limited budget, asked the fair visitors to donate books to be brought back to Istanbul. (p. 131) A total of 1100 books were collected at Platform’s stand in the area designated for non-profit institutions, and we learn that today this collection forms the backbone of SALT’s research library. Other such projects are also examined in detail, from Platform’s Open Library to Kortun’s co-curatorship of the 9^th Istanbul Biennial with Charles Esche. If there is one area in which the book significantly underdelivers despite its best intentions, it is in its treatment of these projects in quick succession, each of which warrant a study of its own and cannot possibly be explored in sufficient depth within the scope of the conversation, as Kortun himself acknowledges. (p. 189)

The expansion of the book’s frame to encompass such histories of new institutionalism, or rather the specifics of how some of its ideas were already manifest in Kortun’s practice, becomes even more pronounced toward the last quarter of the book, and this is also where Kortun’s answers would have benefitted most from a strong challenge. For it is here that the reader learns about the most compelling aspects of Kortun’s institutional practice, while also beginning to sense the contradictions that a more probing conversation might have brought to the surface. These contradictions shared the same core that brought the new institutionalist project in Europe to heel, namely, its dependence on the economic imperatives and operational logics of neoliberal globalization in realizing its internationalist aims. The contradiction lay precisely in pursuing a non-hierarchical model of international exchange through conditions that were themselves structured by the economic and institutional asymmetries it sought to overcome.

While the book delves into the general domain of this contradiction, it does so primarily through the limited lens of what feels more like a pre-emptive framing of the question of private-sector sponsorships. Neither SALT nor Platform enjoyed the level of public funding that was available to their European counterparts, and both primarily depended on private sponsors, the largest and most consequential of which was Garanti Bank. SALT’s relative autonomy from Garanti Bank, its founding sponsor, had always been a matter of careful negotiation, and Kortun himself testifies in the book that the bank’s managers had always given him space to conduct the institution as he saw fit, and that public funding provided no guarantees against the curbing of an institution’s autonomy, especially in the context of Turkey. (pp. 100-101) He also clarifies that the key for him has never been to choose between public or private regimes of funding, but rather to share the same vision with whoever is providing funding for the work at hand. (p. 98)

While this is a commendable shift in perspective from an either/or approach to funding toward a methodological one, the problem remained that there was no structural guarantee for the continuity of such a benevolent relationship between parties. What would happen if there were a shift in the perspective of the funder, or a change in their ideological constitution altogether? Kortun admits to this much in the conversation, claiming that there was a lack of understanding of the risks involved and how to mitigate them among the practitioners of new institutionalism. (p. 109) Yet, this self-criticism remains insufficient precisely because it is not elaborated on in the book and the conversation quickly shifts toward a more celebratory tone, despite this being one of the central contradictions upon which Kortun’s practice hinged.

To be precise, there has always been more to the question of the regime of value under which institutions of this kind operated than the identity of their funders or the terms on which funding was negotiated. The problem was not simply that Kortun’s institutional model remained dependent on the benevolence of sponsors. Rather, the more fundamental contradiction was that the model risked reproducing aspects of the very regime of neoliberal governance it sought to resist, precisely because the economic conditions that enabled its experimental institutionalism were inseparable from that regime. For instance, Kortun presents the fact that SALT has no permanent collection of its own as a conscious strategy to prevent the institution from being bogged down by the tiring bureaucracy and preservation work that would have been necessitated by it. More importantly, he claims that this allowed SALT to operate not as an authoritative institution, passing judgment in a top-down manner and producing monolithic, impenetrable historical narratives that give no room for questioning or discussion. This diagnosis is by no means wrong, and if anything is a much-needed criticism of Eurocentric institutional models, but this does not necessarily mean it cannot be questioned and probed further.

The absence of a permanent collection effectively meant that SALT had to contend with being a welcoming host to the kinds of artistic practice that it sought to sustain, for it remained incapable of supporting them in a substantial way. More importantly, the absence of a collection does not necessarily diminish the authority of an institution, but rather replaces the object through which this authority is instituted. In the case of SALT, this occurred through the dissident and non-hegemonic forms of discourse that the institution hosted through its open-ended research programs. While itself a commendable gesture practiced in good faith, especially considering the hostile attitudes of most institutions in Istanbul toward such practices and their closed circuits of market-oriented cultural management, this also positioned SALT as the sole distributor of value to such practices, effectively subsuming them as forms of symbolic capital.

Here, my point is not to pass a final, negative judgment on the merits and political purchase of the operational logic that Kortun adopted at SALT, but rather to point to the fact that these tactics and methods are already ridden with contradictions that cannot be easily avoided or neatly treated within an ethical framework. Given its nature, the book’s reluctance to enter this polemical ground is understandable, but it could have benefitted from a more critical approach, if not for resolving these contradictions, then at least for introducing them as such. In refusing to allow what would have been a more generous conversational space, the book ultimately leans more heavily in legacy-building than providing a retrospective self-critical outlook on the part of Kortun.

Putting its many ambiguities aside, however, the book makes a significant contribution to Kortun’s growing corpus. Given the lack of any serious engagement and reckoning with his legacy in the academic circles, it provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of his practice to date, and as such remains a valuable source of information as well as providing further guidance for emerging artists, curators, and other actors in the cultural arena that seek new strategies to face the challenges of today. Its greatest strength lies precisely in the fact that it functions as a master narrative on the life and work of one of contemporary art’s most compelling protagonists in Turkey, for in doing so it opens this narrative up to critical scrutiny.

Ahmet Furkan Inan

Ahmet Furkan Inan is an art historian working on the historiographies of contemporary art in Turkey. He is completing his PhD in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the University of Oxford. He studied Archaeology and History of Art at Koç University and received his MA in History of Art from University College London in 2021. From 2021 to 2023, he was editor at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. His doctoral research examines the emergence of contemporary artistic practices in Istanbul during the 1980s and 1990s, their departure from established paradigms of Turkish modernism, and their subsequent entanglement with a globalising art establishment.