Good Things, 2003,
3 min 52 s, colour, sound (music: Götterdämmerung)
Courtesy of Upstream Gallery
The part played by the ‘Gothic’ and post-punk subcultures in the work of the Dutch artist Marc Bijl is as important as political activism. In this work, he appropriates a song recorded by the British post-punk band The Sisters of Mercy in the 1980s and reinterprets it with his own band, Götterdämmerung, as the background sound for a series of images of depressed or half-abandoned outlying areas. Each video shot reveals details of public spaces previously covered in graffiti by the same artist which reproduces the lyrics of the song in their entirety, line by line. The counterpoint between the ‘good things’ the song speaks of and the images of outlying neighbourhoods and ‘non-places’ is an aid to reflection on the role of pop as an instrument of protest.
You try to remember the future. A bird painted on the ceramic panel in a historical palace has found its place on the wall. The tiles of a church and a mosque have been painted on canvas. The pattern of a centuries-old ceramic plate appears before you on a velvet curtain.
I remembered a game as I was waiting in the passenger lounge for the ferry to arrive just a few minutes ago. A game we used to play at home when I was young, in my country that is very far away from here, a relic from the distant past; I don’t even remember how we used to play it. The kind of game that makes me feel a thousand times lonelier than I already am among the crowd waiting to get on the ferry.
Pera Museum, in collaboration with Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), is one of the main venues for this year’s 15th Istanbul Biennial from 16 September to 12 November 2017.
Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 - 19:00
Friday 10:00 - 22:00
Sunday 12:00 - 18:00
The museum is closed on Mondays.
On Wednesdays, the students can
visit the museum free of admission.
Full ticket: 200 TL
Discounted: 100 TL
Groups: 150 TL (minimum 10 people)
