Hale Tenger, We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/
We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside, 1995
Installation view at Westbeth Building, New York
There is a contemporary preoccupation that our culture — global, Western, ‘modern’ — will not survive. This crisis is not necessarily centered on specific issues, but on the condition that our issues seem to have no readily available solutions. Such simplification points to an almost tragic paradigm: there is no exit. In a new iteration of her installation “We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/ We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside” (1995/2015), Turkish artist Hale Tenger attempts to open up a dialogue across 20 years about what it might mean to exit our contemporary situation. The title of the work draws on a line from the poem “Sera Hotel” by Turkish poet Edip Cansever, whose subject matter is very familiar to us now: the transformation of a big city, in this case Istanbul, under the weight of modernization and tourism, into a new urban space where we’re never at home but only in transit.