Spaces of openness

This paper contributes to debates on urban citizenship and public culture. Drawing on detailed empirical research in Istanbul, Turkey, we analyse two key contemporary arts organisations that experiment with new organisational and curatorial practices in order to realise cultural infrastructures of common life in a city strongly shaped by urban development along neoliberal and neoconservative lines. Empirically, this directs attention to the near-complete absence of Turkish government actors and in turn the major role played by Turkish private businesses as well as public organisations, mostly from Europe, in supporting the contemporary arts in Istanbul. This particular institutional geography of funding and support sustains a local space of openness and autonomy from state intervention and enables these organisations to develop situated strategies of urban engagement. Theoretically, this paper develops the notion of spaces of openness and argues that these spaces are usefully conceptualised as experimental, networked and solidary.