Can and Sevda Elgiz, who have created the first private contemporary art museum in Turkey

Sevda and Can Elgiz are the prime philanthropists of the Istanbul contemporary art world, pioneers who, since 2001, have taken their private collection public via their eponymous private museum. Here, they tell LUX about supporting Turkish artists, and showing Turkish art to the world

LUX: Are you philanthropists, or collectors, or both?

Sevda Elgiz: We began our journey as collectors. Over time, we realised that supporting artists also requires a philanthropic commitment. Today, we see ourselves as both.

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LUX: Can, you come from a family with a significant background in art and culture. How has this affected your desire to do what you do?

Can Elgiz: As an architect, I believe that contemporary art is a part of architecture. My family has origins in Lesvos island, where it is said that my great-grandfather was also a philanthropist in his time. In honour of his memory, we organised exhibitions there at the Municipal Gallery of Mytilene.

A portrait of Sevda Elgiz at the Elgiz Museum

LUX: How does what you do support artists and how do you feel when you see the effects?

SE: In our space, which is open to the public as a private-collection museum, we give visibility to artists. We show both local and international artists with equal importance. One of our most significant initiatives is the open call, which we announce every year for sculptors to exhibit on our terrace, where large-scale works find a rare platform.

LUX: Is private patronage always essential for artists?

SE: Definitely. Artists need to be properly exhibited in national and international shows. They need catalogues, beautiful artist books and organised talks that help them become recognised.

LUX: How different is it supporting sculpture, and what are the complexities?

SE: Since we support large-scale sculptures, we face logistical and exhibiting difficulties. We can only exhibit around 30 sculptures at a time, and these are selected by a jury. We regret not being able to include many of them.

Sevda and Can Elgiz amongst the collection

LUX: Do you ever work with other art philanthropists?

SE: There are few non-profit art institutions that act as philanthropists. The major one is Lucien Arkas. He is a successful businessman from Izmır and has a wide collection of art, glass, sculpture, carpets and so on, and he has made museums in Izmir to share these with the public.

We did an exchange of our collections and exhibited them in our respective museums. That was a great project – and is to be continued in future. With T-One Association, of which I am a co-founder, we send young artists for residency and educational courses abroad.

Read more: Artists through the eye of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

Recently we also did a collaboration with Alejandra Castro Rioseco’s MIA Collection to support women artists. We have around 150 friends and benefactors of Elgiz Museum who support our projects, and we extend our resources to art students.

LUX: Do you still acquire and collect and, if so, what is your focus?

SE: A collection never seems complete. Contemporary art collections are eclectic and reflect the inner world of the collector. Rather than a focus, our collection is guided by personal emotions.

Can Elgiz on the terrace, where sculptors have the opportunity to exhibit their large-scale work

LUX: What is your relationship with museums and institutions in Turkey and globally?

SE: Over the past 25 years, we have organised significant exhibitions by borrowing important works from major museums abroad, and we have also supported Turkish artists to exhibit internationally. The most significant one was a solo exhibition of Abdurrahman Öztoprak at Ca’Pesaro museum in Venice in 2008.

LUX: Are Turkish artists under-recognised locally and also internationally?

SE: We have many talented artists. Thanks to the Istanbul Biennial, as well as the growing number of foundations and museums, Turkish artists are gaining more recognition.

LUX: Do you feel you have made a significant difference – and how?

SE: We believe we have made a meaningful contribution by dedicating our terrace as a consistent platform for sculptors to present their work to the public.

Can Elgiz at the Permanent Collection, with works by Turkish and international artists

LUX: What has been your greatest challenge?

SE: Converting our contemporary art collection into a private museum open to the public was a challenge, when such initiatives were rare in Turkey. We think this has inspired other collectors to engage with contemporary art and open their collections to the public.

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Today, we are extremely happy when we see children and students coming to our museum and making use of our library, Archvarium.

LUX: What do you plan next?

SE: Our main commitment will be to support sculptors, which remains a vital part of our programme. We hope for a world shaped by peace, so that people can continue collecting, sharing and celebrating a passion for art.

elgizmuseum.org

The airy and historic lobby area

The majestic Four Seasons Istanbul in Sultanahmet is a quiet sanctuary shouldered by the city’s historic marvels. Darius Sanai checks in

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Those who have been to Istanbul, presumably including the original Byzantine and Islamic conquerors, will have noted that, despite its many undoubted wonders and thrills, this is not an easy city to navigate. The modern city, in any case, sprawls on two sides of what is basically a sea, and each side itself is split into distinct and distant areas of interest. A fascinating city it certainly is, a walkable one it is not.

Which is why it was such a pleasure, privilege and surprise to stay at the Four Seasons Hotel, Istanbul at Sultanahmet. Slightly unbelievably, this hotel is situated in a palatial building literally next door to the celebrated Hagia Sophia mosque (until 700 years ago a Byzantine church), the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace, the three greatest and most unmissable sights in what was once Constantinople. This is, in fact, the only truly walkable area of Istanbul. It is so close to these landmarks that you could easily zip wire into any of them, although the security officers patrolling the area would probably have something to say about that.

The palatial exterior of the Four Seasons Hotel, Istanbul at Sultanahmet

Arriving at the Four Seasons Sultanahmet from the hub of the city is an utterly tranquil experience. It is a boutique hotel, and you are greeted by your personal receptionist and taken up to your suite to sign in, via a delicate garden courtyard with plenty of shelter from the summer sun. Our suite had views over the courtyard to the tops of a few historic buildings nearby. There was not a sound apart from the birds.

Read more: A trip to D Maris Bay

The interiors of this palazzo (part of it was once a prison, although you would never guess) are artfully done, with clusters of paintings and prints along the corridors. It feels as if you are in the home of an aristocrat. Downstairs, the spa is probably the most pleasant luxury hammam experience in the world. A hammam, an old Turkish experience combining elements of Roman spa baths and much else, is always an invigorating experience but not always a luxurious one. Here, it is both, as you have your own wet solarium to yourself where you lie on a warm marble bed and are scrubbed, washed, exfoliated and splashed by your hammamiste. Much more involving and, we thought, relaxing than any regular spa experience.

The hotel’s bi-level Beyzade suite

The restaurant, Avlu, is delightfully located in a pavilion in the courtyard, sheltered in summer and warm in winter. The Tarhana soup and Topkapi chicken were highlights of the modern Anatolian menu. On the following night, just as enjoyable, in the boutique-like bar area elevated slightly above the courtyard, we experienced beautiful service accompanied by the find of our stay – a dry, focused Turkish sparkling rosé wine from the Ankara region, which we felt was more than a match for any rosé Crémant, and more interesting to boot.

Read more: A sojourn in Egypt

In our minds, the Four Seasons Sultanahmet (there is another, bigger Istanbul Four Seasons on the city’s main waterfront, with more facilities including a swimming pool) is a city resort with a distinctly peaceful, holiday air. Unlike some city resort hotels, it is not trying to be a business hotel for some and a leisure hotel for others. It is a place where you can go to get away from it all, right in the middle of the oldest part of Istanbul, with city walls, and a few paces from three of the world’s most historic wonders.

fourseasons.com/sultanahmet

Eran Hadas, Tel Aviv-based new media artist, poet and experimental software designer

Tel-Aviv based poet Eran Hadas uses his skills as an experimental software developer to build ‘augmented poetry’ generators, where algorithms assemble poems. His methods anticipate the dawn of artificial intelligence which will revolutionise concepts of personhood in the future, and demonstrate how poetry will nevertheless retain a vital role in helping us understand and explore these new terrains. In this month’s Poetry Muse, Rhiannon Williams speaks to Hadas about the the Tel-Aviv poetry scene and creative technology.

‘I think [poetry] should both reflect and affect reality,’ explains Eran Hadas in our interview, something that could be taken as insightful not only about poetry but also on the role of technology. Striking a fascinating figure on the Israeli literary scene, Eran is literally reconfiguring poetic function, fusing his technological and literary skills to create radical and intriguing works. For the Mind Your Poem project, for example, Eran used a special headset to record brain waves and create poems from the readings of people’s emotions: a kind of poetry that is as utterly post-modern as could be.

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His innovative projects and poems have featured in the Venice Biennale, the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art and the Warsaw POPełnione exhibition among others. He was the Binyamin Gallery poet in residence in 2016, the 2017 Schusterman Visiting Artist at Caltech and is an exciting part of the biannual Tel Aviv Poetry Festival.

Rhiannon Williams: Could you explain a bit more what you mean by your term ‘augmented poetry’?
Eran Hadas: The inventor of Hypertext, Ted Nelson, said that he felt the four borders of the page were walls of a prison of which he tried to break free, and I feel the same way about poetry. I think it should both reflect and affect reality, and in our time the way to go about it is to step in and out of the printed format, and in and out of the virtual (and mixed) world. For me, poetry involves both print, web and interactive works, involving chatbots, automatic poetry generators, text mixed with other media, but always circling around text and textuality, and striving to explore new possibilities of text.

RW: How did you first become interested in the possibilities for collaboration between
computing and poetry?
EH: I studied computer science, yet poetry has always been my passion. When I got into the literary circles of Tel-Aviv I realised there was some kind of a recurring pattern in the writing of a certain celebrated poet. I decided to devise a simple set of rules that would generate a poem similar to his, but when I got to the technical implementation, it felt so emotional and deep, that I felt I had to do such things for myself, rather than to match or compete against someone else.

The Pop/Kolor exhibition in Warsaw, 2016

RW: What would you say has been one of your favourite projects to work on?
EH: My sixth book Code was programmed to reveal all the Haiku poems in the Pentateuch; The Hebrew Torah. These are the five books of Moses which are the foundation of the Jewish holy law and behavioural code of conduct. The book is comprised of 5341 short poems and all are quotes from the Torah that adhere to the Japanese scheme of 17 syllables in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 respectively. This mechanical rewriting tries to turn the religious text from one that separates people, to one that brings them together. It is written in Biblical Hebrew, and the first poem is: Abyss and spirit / God she is floating upon / The face of waters.

RW: How would you describe the poetry scene in Tel-Aviv?
EH: Tel-Aviv is a very cool city, deeply hated by most of the rest of Israel. Many poets are politically and socially involved. I am a member of a group of poets titled “Cultural Guerrilla”, that organises activities against violence and wars, and supports social causes. On the other hand, because of the small number of Hebrew readers, and the very concentric structure of Israel, Tel-Avivian writers are not always aware of current trends around the world, or even in our Arab neighbouring countries.

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RW: Which writers/artists/playwrights/musicians are you excited about right now?
EH: There is a big hype lately around Artificial Intelligence, and I really admire artists who deal with the core of it without believing the hype, such as poet Allison Parrish who deals with Word Embedding. In the same way that people treat colours as a combination of Red, Green and Blue, she treats the English vocabulary, and her experiments are mind blowing. Artist and researcher Rebecca Fiebrink built Wekinator, a simple to use framework that enables artists to create AI works without coding, but rather by feeding examples of the desired behaviour, and letting the computer generalise from them. Greek conceptual Artist Ilan Manouach has made up a tactile language he uses to create comics for the blind, using various 3d printing methods.

RW: Do you think computers may be the future of poetry? Or will there still be a vital place for page and performance?
EH: I don’t know anything about the future. However, as Machine Learning is growing, there is a chance computers will be able to make better predictions than me… I think humans have to respond to technology, so there is going to be a range of reactions on page and in performance. With the advent of the Internet of Things, technology is going to be more immersive and intrusive in the physical sense, and not just on screens. I really hope poetry remains forever as a state of mind.

Eran Hadas presenting his augmented poetry in Tel Aviv

Rhiannon Williams: Favourite place on the internet?
Eran Hadas: The avant-garde archive, ubuweb, is for me the largest and dearest treasure on the Internet. Amazingly, it is a one-man-show, run by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

RW: What do you do when you need to disconnect?
EH: To be honest, I download, backup, mark for using offline, and count the minutes until I connect again.

RW: Favourite city?
EH: Istanbul. It’s so real, it sometimes looks virtual.

eranhadas.com