My last day in Istanbul took me to the exhibition World Factory, at IMÇ (pronounce eeh-meh-che), the Istanbul Textile Traders' Market. A complex of several blocks, designed in the 1950’s by Dogan Tekeli and Sami Sisa, it has been home to the Istanbul’s textile traders’ market for more than 4 decades. The place is littered with little shops, yet does not feel congested...actually, it feels very ordered, and somehow controlled in its own peculiar way.

The premise of the exhibition “World Factory” is that due to globalisation, the “Third World” has turned into a huge world factory, supplying the “First World” with cheap labour and production. While reading the concept text, I was wondering whether anyone at all still uses the idiom “Third World” any more. Haven’t we moved on to “developing world” or “emerging regions”? I am pretty sure many a Turk would wince at the idea of being categorised as a third world country. In any case, the idea was that conditions of globalisation evidently also affect artistic practice…artists and (independent) culture workers, being themselves part of the creative, but precarious, labour force. “World Factory” was first set up in San Francisco a year earlier as a trial, and then brought to Istanbul. The idea of having it at IMÇ, was for the works and their surroundings to blend, and be “organically integrated to the context”. This is exactly what did not happen. Certainly, it is a very interesting idea to place an exhibition at a site like at IMÇ. If successfully implemented the surroundings should strengthen and augment the characteristics of the work – be they formal, aesthetic, or semantic. Here, a white cube aesthetic/formalism was reproduced, and hence isolated the biennial shops from the other shops. In other words, there was no interaction – proper - with the surrounding happening. In addition, quite a few technical flaws plagued this part of the exhibition, such as malfunctioning earphones and screens, or works which were even not on display.

There also seemed to be a large “Made in China” part to this exhibition. Not surprising, since China is the fastest growing economy, and not particularly known for its good labour conditions. But most of the work was exhibited on sterile white walls, with slick graphics and technology. In addition, the sheer abundance of works dealing with precarious and migrant labour had a numbing effect, while the grime of the hard reality just didn’t manage to rub off. This is perhaps due to the (hyper)mediated character of most of the works (documentary, graphics, maps, photo collage). A good friend of mine commented this was all “television art”.

The work of Zhu Jia did stand out. Set up in a small room, with a narrow bed, a TV monitor playing interviews with ordinary citizens about their life in Beijing, and walls plastered full with small photographs of random people in Beijing; this installation managed to be visually, as well as conceptually, strong. It actually made you want to sit and watch the films, look at the photos, or just soak up the claustrophobic, but not entirely unpleasant crammed space, which could have belonged to a migrant worker or day labourer anywhere. No possessions except the TV, the photographs, the table and the chair, and a few plates and bowls. It combined the presence of all the photo portraits with an abstract anonymity, and the specificity of the room with the quality of a non-space. It installed layer upon layer, and actually came close to being a symbolic representation of a lived reality.

I was very much impressed by the 4-channel video installation “Obstructions” by Turkish artist Ömer Ali Kazma. Though not ideally presented (here we go again!), it definitely is in my opinion one of the strongest video works featuring in the Biennial. Each screen showed respectively the “labour” of a ceramist, a clock master, a surgeon, and a butcher working at an abattoir. Though these professions are very different, and there’s ‘otherness” within class and demographics, Kazma has managed to capture their similarities and sameness in their repetition, in their meticulous precision, and – most surprisingly – in how each of these “jobs” are manual and dissect, repair, create. Whether it’s a vase out of clay, the fixing of a clock, cranial surgery, or processing a bovine carcass into same-sized cubes of meat. In effect, he has put before us the endless cycle of production and consumption, in a very poetic way.

Housed in the same shop as Kazma’s piece, was Korean artist’s Sora Kim’s CapitalPlus Credit Union: the first financial institution to accept credit deposits in units of weight, length, quantity and amount, with an interest rate of 3% per month. I opened an account, filled in a deposit slip, and my “currency” was an empty plastic chewing gum container of 9cm. This means that after 2 months, after the closure of the biennial, the artist will mail me back my interest: 27mm…no least! I just hope she won’t mail me back 27mm of masticated gum! I liked how all deposits were sealed in plastic bags and suspended in the air. It materialized the abstract idea of capital, so to speak. I saw deposits ranging from toothpaste tubes, hairpins, pens, to ear phones. Kim is known to focus her work on everyday life consumption by recreating fictional social – and other - institutions. As far as I can tell, her work was the only “interactive” piece, which required the audience to trade something: personal data and a possession for experiencing the work and the interest reward at the end. It’s a playful way of engaging with consumer culture…in which the art world of course partakes.