Last week I spent a few days in Istanbul, in preparation of a media art project I am organising at Garaj Istanbul, September 20th and 21st. Istanbul just never ceases to impress me with its stunning cityscapes. And so as all good art professionals do when also trying to have a few days of holiday: I went museum hopping. Istanbul Modern, to be more precise. The museum is located in Tophane along the Bosporus in a former shipping warehouse. Founded in 2004, the building previously hosted sections of several Istanbul Biennials, and is now – as its homepage claims – “the first private museum devoted to modern and contemporary art in Turkey”. I do have to admit that the cocktail of industrial dockyards, the stunning view on the Golden Horn and contemporary art is hard to resist, and combines very seductive ingredients. Too bad that the exaggerated proliferation of museum guards pacing up and down the spaces makes you feel an unwelcome intruder, and have turned the microcosm of the museum in a police state. A friend of mine managed to make the photograph pasted above. Photography is – of course – strictly forbidden.

There were a few shows on, a.o. an interesting one about 100 years of design. But actually I just want to mention one artwork, which caught my attention: British artist Richard Wentworth’s “False Ceiling” (1995-2005). Now part of the permanent collection of Istanbul Modern, and strategically positioned next to the institution’s library, this impressive installation (though Wentworth hates it to be called an installation) which comprises a few hundred books from East and West suspended from the ceiling beautifully embodies my idea about the circulation of knowledge and contemporary publishing.

“False Ceiling” has oft been criticised of not making the books it shows accessible – indeed one can only read the covers. Or it has been interpreted as a warning, “that a world made up of solely intellectual thought and theory may end up hindering freedom and liberty”. In other words the essence of the work has been understood to lie in “the contrast between the dark, oppressive layer of books and the light-filled void above. Here, Wentworth appears to be implying, we can find room for our own thoughts, unconfined by the published texts threatening to limit us below”. By corollary, Wentworth has been accused of anti-intellectualism. I fail to subscribe to these interpretations. To me this free-floating book sculpture appears as a false ceiling because it goes against the grain that one can ever learn everything. Knowledge is in that respect infinite, and one certainly does get the impression that the surface of suspended books could go on and on forever.

In addition, placing it next to an institutional library - neatly cordoned off by a glass structure – and hence only available to those who can pay the entry fee, is a nice ironic gesture. It is not about being able to leaf through the books in this installation, but it is its form that makes a statement, namely the horizontal distribution of knowledge. In effect, Charles Darwent, a critic who writes for the Independent, wrote about the piece the following: “When books are displayed, it's vertically on walls, not horizontally on ceilings and certainly not horizontally as ceilings. By taking them out of context, Wentworth does something magnificent. He makes books lofty: no longer just wondrous for what they contain but for what they are, capable of an entirely new reading.” it is indeed the inversion of the spatial axes, which makes this work so arresting.

One could also argue that physically Wentworth creates a faux ceiling in the space, but when we think of book publishing and its categories of fiction and non-fiction, the concepts of truth and false feature strongly. What then is the falsity the artist is alluding to? Is it a dent in our knowledge production, or does everything again boil down to how we “read” things?