AKM (Atatürk Cultural Centre) is located speck in the middle of Taksim square. It stands out like a shiny black box, authoritative, pensive, monumental and oozing a type of social modernist architecture that only a particular historical national mood could have produced. Designed by Hayati Tabanlıoglu, it burnt down in 1970 and was reconstructed to become Istanbul’s major house for opera and other high-art performances. Today AKM is once again facing the risk of being destroyed and knocked down, yet this time in favour of high-capitalist gentrification projects. The exhibition “Burn it or Not” engages international artists in publicly debating the fate of the AKM through their works. Some works were specially commissioned, others dealt more indirectly with how the nasty parts of globalization intersect with the architectonic and urban experience.

Till now (still one venue to visit!) this exhibition definitely feels as the most consistently curated part of the Biennial. The overall quality of the various works – for a large part photography - is high. Their subject matter begs contemplation, and invite to a second or third viewing. The photographs of Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan show the uninhabited and unfinished buildings of the Armenian city of Mush. Aghasyan has photographed these buildings, and has then decontextualised them by photoshopping a uniform sky, and replacing the ground these buildings stand on with water. This results in an eerie, and haunting timelessness. We could be looking at a structure that is a thing past, or that suggests a future. Aghasyan’s uniforming gesture also strips the building of site-specificity, and morphs it into a non-site.

Equally captivating, yet operating on a totally different plane, are the photos “After the Thaw” of London-based photographer Tomoko Yonedas, photographed in 2004 in Hungary and Estonia (the year of their EU accession!). I was particularly struck by 2 swimming pool photographs: the first one capturing a couple kissing in the corner of the pool, the second one, what looks like a swimming pool tea party with middle aged people. Both pictures are as striking in their composition, as they are in the treatment of their subjects. There is an aestheticised mundaneness to them: Yonedas finds moments of beauty in the ordinary, freezes them, and by corollary sublimates them. Still, this is a monumentality that is utterly (and critically) constructed…with a wink of the eye. Humour was also to be found in Nancy Davenport’s suggestive series “The Apartments” and “Weekend Campus”.

Before getting all too lyrical about the works, I should add that – once again – the presentation of the photographs was deplorable. Indeed, the AKM, with its brown 70’s furniture, worn-out rugs, and superfluous long past-glamour lighting is a difficult building to put up an exhibition. However, showing photography in corners that are so dark that one cannot even see the image, or using the wrong type of glass for framing the pictures so the omni-present little ceiling lights reflect in the image, and one cannot see it, is simply unforgivable. Erdem Hüner’s video “Boumont” was placed on a stairwell with a particularly bad projection image, and no place for the viewer to comfortably sit and watch the 14’ film. Its subtle sound track got completely polluted by Erdem Helvacioglu’s nearby sound installation “Memories on Silent Walls”. This is a pity, and really does not do justice to any of the selected works.

In effect, only Erdem’s and Aleksander Komarov’s installation “On Translation: Transparency/Architecture acoustique” were the only properly presented pieces, working in an interesting way with, and through, the building’s architecture.

Erdem Helvacioglu is an electro-acoustic composer and sound artist. He often takes on the role of a sonic anthropologist: blending field recordings, archival material, and other sonic registrations into a soundscape. Here he combined the recordings archive of the Atatürk Cultural Center, the sound of the empty building and its surroundings, and interviews about the centre, into an 8-channel sound installation. With the speakers paced across the whole stretch of the second floor, and with the floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking Taksim Square…it was if you were watching a movie with changing soundtracks; the mood and reading altering according to the emitted sound.

Last but definitely not least, Rotterdam-based Aleksander Komarov’s piece deserves to be mentioned. “On Translation: Transparency/Architecture acoustique” does what its title says: it translates and morphs images of glass façade architectural spaces into a mesmerizing audio-visual experience, where meanings become layered and multiform.

“Burn it or Not” does not deserve to be burnt down, nor does the AKM for that matter. But this building should have become a home for the art works, housing them and integrating them in uneasy and unexpected ways into its spaces, instead of devouring them so ruthlessly.