Interview with Banu Cennetoglu, artist and founder of BAS
by Anna Zizlsperger
As both a practicing artist and founder of the BAS project space in Istanbul, can you tell us more about your work and this significant venture?
When I look back at my last 3-4 years of practice, quite formally and roughly put I have been persistently compiling, sorting, arranging, classifying, editing, rearranging, re-editing, displaying, and in between occasionally recording… Departing mostly from site-specific configurations and questions, I am interested in those rigid but fragile extracts that might potentially generate more than the messy ‘allness.’ Speaking of messiness, I am not able to produce as an immediate reaction; I can do a lot as an immediate reaction but not art. So cooling, delay and distance are vital.
During the past few years, the medium has become quite variable and the collaborations more frequent. Volumes of Cypriot and Arabic newspapers all dated the same day, a hand-blown glass sex toy containing 25 grams of dust from an army barrack in Murcia , books and photographs and free offers, a video recording of an energy scan of a nuclear bunker, a library of home-made spirits… and then there are irregular regularities such as The List and BAS (…)