A Courageous Art Move: Borusan Contemporary

For the last five years, Istanbul’s art scene has been flourishing faster than ever. New galleries, institutions, and venues are opening and there are rumours that new museums are to be opened by generous collectors and conglomerats. Borusan Contemporary could be called as an office-museum, turning into a Headquarter office on weekdays, and serving as a contemporary collection museum on weekends.

Borusan Contemporary has an important role both being Turkey’s first weekend museum and first museum dedicated completely to contemporary arts. With its great Bosphorus view and distinguished architecture, the 100-year-old Perili Köşk (Haunted Mansion) is great to spend your weekend, enjoying arts and the glorious scene of the city.

The transformation worked well both ways: the employees enjoy working in a museum environment, while sharing their space and art works with the public on weekend. The employees even founded an art club to have more knowledge and perspective of arts and started taking art courses and touring other museums and galleries.

Stating their aim as to share the Collection with the public, and to increase people's interest in contemporary art in Turkey, Borusan Contemporary has a dinamic exhibiting function that changes all the art works in every three months.

Office & Museum in one

The office environment has selections from the Collection and there are also gallery spaces for temporary exhibitions. While so called ‘Segment’ exhibition series help us to look closer to the Collection’s important artists, there are also curated projects of a single artist from the Collection or a group of artists.

The Museum takes educational programs very serious and plans weekend tours and workshops for children of all ages. The best opportunity served to the museum visitors is that everybody is offered a free guided tour, besides that you have a great museum cafe with the beautiful view of Marmara Sea and Black Sea.

Borusan Ahmet Kocabıyık

As Borusan Ahmet Kocabıyık declares, ''Borusan Contemporary aims at increasing people's interest in contemporary art in Turkey.'' While doing so, Kocabıyık had courages steps by collecting the most experimental pieces of contemporary art. He claims the risks of inventing in the experimental works by saying: ''Nevertheless, this risk gives us the opportunity to get closely acquainted with the experimental features of a young and different form of art as an outcome of pursuing the values of our time. Furthermore, we want to share our artistic experience with our nation, especially with young people.''

Borusan Contemporary, supporting new art productions, mediums and forms by bringing globally known contemporary artists’ works and having some of the artists to produce site-specific works shares actual winds from the world with its visitors.

Credits

Installation view from Borusan Contemporary

Ivan Navarro, EXODO, 2008

Ahmet Kocabıyık, Chairman of Borusan Holding and Founder of Borusan Contemporary