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An interview with Jérôme Sans on Naked City

25 February 2025 Tue

Naz Cuguoğlu explores Doug Aitken's Naked City exhibition with curator Jérôme Sans, delving into urban life and modern loneliness.

NAZ CUGUOĞLU
nazcuguoglu@gmail.com

Naz Cuguoğlu: How did you conceptualize Naked City as a reflection on urban life and connectivity post-pandemic?

Jérôme Sans: Naked City speaks of the world in which we live, of today’s megacities and digital landscapes. While the world is increasingly ultra-connected, and we serve as conduits for an endless stream of information, we still find ourselves increasingly isolated. Doug Aitken explores this paradox of contemporary life—how the more connected we become, the more isolated we feel. In a world that is constantly accelerating, where our condition is changing at unprecedented speed with new technology, he invites us to “Slow down to breathe” – just as his sculptural piece 3 Modern Figures (don’t forget to breathe) (2018) suggest. His films are like mirrors of our own conditions and the changing landscapes around us: Flags and Debris(2021) shows an eerily empty city during the pandemic, while sleepwalkers (2007) captures the frenetic energy of New York City with ghostlike characters. Works like don’t think twice II (2006) serve as time pieces one can fall into, and just like the title of one of his textile works suggests: should we regularly do a “Digital Detox” to feel the world, to feel others? Doug Aitken is inviting us to reflect on ourselves, on what we are living, on how we are living, and on the changing faces of cities, those of today and of tomorrow.

NC: Aitken’s works often contrast isolation and hyperconnectivity. How do you see these paradoxes playing out in the context of Istanbul, where Borusan Contemporary is located?

JS: Facing the Bosphorus, Borusan Contemporary exists at a crossroad - between multiple different realities, between Europe and Asia, between the past, present and future. Within this unique overlapping of cultures, there is a proximity with Doug Aitken’s work that acts like a beacon in the city and the future. Naked City is not the portrait of one city – but that of a global territory, which built this project, between Istanbul, Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Spain and more. This exhibition was made on the move, without geography - like the world of today.

Doug Aitken, Ascending Staircase, 2024.
Installation view; Courtesy of the artist; Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, İstanbul;
Photo credit: Hadiye Cangökçe.

NC: Can you share your approach to creating a "site-specific journey" within Borusan Contemporary's architecture?

JS: Borusan Contemporary is an interesting nontraditional disconnected exhibition building with offices and other areas that are not dedicated to art. Creating this journey within the architecture was all about working in this real-world configuration, with these disruptions, and connecting it all to create a flow that continues. For this, we worked with a global understanding of the building space, logically starting right at the entrance with a fantastic new commission piece Ascending Staircase (2024) – as a reverse reference to Duchamp’s iconic Nude Descending the Staircase (1912). This constantly shape-shifting work records the viewer, while simultaneously reflecting the context around them. Always moving, like the contemporary flow of information, it's almost like a living, rotating surveillance camera that has no memory—like data that doesn’t create any archives, that self-destructs all information after mirroring them, re-capturing new things all the time. The other works included in the exhibition all hold different mediums and narratives, often immersive. The project was conceived with Borusan’s space in mind, like an immersive journey one can fall into.

NC: Aitken seems to inherit the Beat Generation’s ethos while addressing 21st-century concerns. How do you think his work reconciles these historical and contemporary influences?

JS: Doug Aitken’s works bring back a Jack Kerouac kind of philosophy to today’s era. He is always taking us “on the road again”, making us relive the landscape and the freedom of crossing through it. Respectful of their environment, his interventions always blend smoothly into the landscape. For Doug Aitken, everything happens in motion. His work is about this crossing of a landscape. A special kind of magic persists in his work, in its power to transport us elsewhere, to another realm. While heir in this way of the 1960s Beat Generation modus operandi, the themes he explores in his work are deeply contemporary. He responds to the fast pace and fluidity of modernity, while still resisting today’s hyper-acceleration in his very way of working. In fact, he relies on slow, almost anachronic, processes to produce extraordinary encounters and moments, like hot air balloons in New Horizon (2019) or trains in Station to Station (2013). The latter, a three-week-long train ride from New York City to San Francisco, was designed as a moving light sculpture, which broadcasted content and made nine stops on the way with happenings. Like a unique kind of festival, a nomadic incubator for artists, musicians, and cultural icons, this traveling work embodies his approach as he retraces the American epic and reenacts the underground culture of a certain era. By including people in exceptional immersive events, he pushes the boundaries of art to relive the adventure of another possible world, close to the utopias of the 60s, yet rooted in the reality of today's world. His world is one of sharing, of living together.

NC: With works like Flags and Debris (2021), Aitken integrates craft techniques like sewing with digital aesthetics. How do you interpret this interplay of the artisanal and virtual in his work?

JS: Flags and Debris(2021)was made in the context of the pandemic. Doug Aitken worked with materials found in his own home, for the first time using discarded fabrics, which he carefully sewed and fashioned together to create handmade wall hangings. The fruit of meticulous labor, his textile works invoke a return to craft, the homemade, that defined the utopia of the 1960s, mixed with today’s ecological upcycling attitude. Like colorful tapestries that paradoxically echo digital esthetics, they form large-scale collages, mixing the artisanal with the virtual sphere. In the spirit of Brion Gysin and William S. Burrough’s cut-up technique, the artist inserts and mixes words into these fabrics, fashioning powerful slogans like “Digital Detox,” “Democracy,” and “Somewhere/Nowhere.” These poetically deconstruct familiar terms and tear the surface of language to expose its underlying mechanisms of power. Much like how he often challenges narrative in his work, the artist defies linearity in the visual results of these flags, which resemble digital glitches, suggesting that viewers are sometimes denied full access to the content. Again, aptly readapting the Beat Generation’s cut-up technique to the post-digital era, he responds to the contemporary, fragmented, chaotic ways of digesting information.

NC: Aitken's works often meditate on the impact of technology on human behavior. What insights do you hope visitors will take away about their own relationship with technology?

JS: Doug Aitken told me once: “I don’t think that our evolutionary process has allowed us the time to absorb and question what we want to discard in regards to technology, in our society.” In fact, in the span of 20 years, phones have gone from a rarity to an absolute necessity, so far as to become an extension of our body. This is what he explores in a work like 3 Modern Figures (don’t forget to breathe) (2018) which presents three isolated, static glowing figures, tightly grasping an empty portion of space where a phone should be. With changing hues of light pulsating within their bodies, the figures are both physically isolated and intimately interconnected through these internal rhythms, remolding our understanding of connectivity. Like an archeologist, excavating the modern landscape, Aitken freezes time and forces one to look at how phones have been affecting humanity, both psychologically and physically. Standing like relics, frozen in the phone-holding position that has come to define our era, these figures exemplify the new age where the boundary between body and digital are progressively blurred. While technology is the light that illuminates the world, here it literally crosses our bodies, with energies, waves that are not necessarily positive. In the era of screen addiction, Doug Aitken invites us to detox from it all, to go on digital cures, to relearn how to think about ourselves, others and the world.

NC: The exhibition delves into ecological themes, particularly in Flags and Debris (2021). How does Aitken's work address the environmental consequences of hyperconsumerism?

JS: By dealing with the most contemporary issues, with the new pace of modernity and our ways of connecting, Doug Aitken’s work – if not directly – has inevitable ecological implications. Like everything he does, nothing is frontal. The message lies within the strata of the writing of his work. Never with a spirit of protest, his practice rather confirms a way of life and of work, where the ecological message becomes a given. To quote him directly, he has told me: “My work does deal with ecological themes, but in a less literal way. I don't dwell on the specific ecological message but am interested in revealing landscapes and ideas differently.  With debris seemingly coming to life before our eyes and blowing with the wind’s movements, Flags and Debris(2021) is tinged with ecological significance, pointing to the detritus of human activity that results from hyper- consumerism. Eerie and elegant, these anonymous, invisible, and wrapped-up bodies seem to form a striking choreography of the modern condition. Moreover, his video installation sleepwalkers (2007)depicts the life of five protagonists as they move around New York City and whose stories are weaved within a fragmented narrative. As the narrative advances, the characters progressively disappear, vanishing into the world around them. The screens of the installation switch between characters, splicing and collaging fragmentary scenes from their stories to reveal the similarities and resonances between routines that at first seem far removed from one another. Moving like clockwork, the five characters represent the spectrum of those who work in New York: the delivery man, the postman, electrician, business man... It draws a micro-portrait of New York City, and of the non-stop work of today’s megacities. This rhythm and exploration of today’s new urban landscapes has an unavoidable resonance with ecology and hyper-consumerism, inviting us in the process to question our ways of being, of functioning, as well as the direction we are taking. 

Doug Aitken, sleepwalkers, 2007.
Installation view; Courtesy of the artist; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London;Regen Projects, Los Angeles;
Photo credit: Hadiye Cangökçe.

NC: Naked City explores modern loneliness amidst hyperconnectivity. How do you think this exhibition resonates with audiences in a post-pandemic world?

JS: Solitude is the flag of our times. Unlike the 1960s-80s, when it was all about togetherness, we are living in a time of confinement today. The pandemic accelerated a process that technologies had already induced. There’s an inescapable withdrawal into oneself created by screens, which simulate the impression of being an active actor, but prevailing social networks create an inescapable feeling of not belonging, of exclusion. Today’s technological age confirms the Society of the Spectacle, creating a distinction between those who are in and those who are out. It inevitably creates a small center and a very large periphery. For the first time in modern history, the disruptive period of quarantine allowed for a global standstill — a moment of silence and respite amidst the otherwise incessant, overflowing flux of information and people. In this unrivaled moment of deceleration, time was put into question; slowing down became compulsory, leaving space to look inwards, introspect, and ponder on the state of the world. Cities became “naked” in ways that were completely unprecedented, and the ways in which we connect was entirely put into question. In a post-pandemic world, these themes have remained relevant, especially with the hurried advancement of virtual spaces that are creating new landscapes and ways of communication. This exhibition is precisely exploring all these themes that found unprecedented expression during the pandemic era, and that continue to grow exponentially today.

NC: Aitken’s kinetic and immersive pieces challenge traditional museum experiences. How do you think these works reshape the audience’s perception of art and space?

JS: Doug Aitken is always pushing the boundaries of art and the forms in which it can exist. He approaches every project in a unique, all-embracing, complete way. His artworks are about living, reproducing moments of grace collective dazzle. For this project, he used the interior spaces of Borusan Contemporary and sought to make expand it, to make it infinite. He described it as follows: “I didn't want to walk in and see a series of well-lit pictures on a bright wall, but rather to open the door and fall into this vortex.” His commission piece for the museum, Ascending Staircase (2024) directly plays with the architecture of the space. Recalling the Cubist movement, Aitken deconstructs, breaks down, and slices the space apart, like a kaleidoscope. In a move that nods to Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase(1912), Aitken reverses the movement by creating his own “Ascending Staircase”.Over a century before, the French artist had cut apart the world around him, captured it, and brought it into the canvas. Here, the American artist is doing the opposite, making the living environment around it become the subject. The moving sculpture is a metaphor of today’s world, where everything and everyone is recorded. Yet here, it has no memory and the visitor has the choice to participate in it or not. In his video installation sleepwalkers (2007),which he first showed in 2007 outside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, covering the museum’s exterior walls with projections, he shows it at Borusan for the first time inside the exhibition space. By adding mirrors, he includes the visitor in the story. It becomes a more immersive, intimate experience.

NC: Aitken frequently collaborates with other creatives, as seen in Station to Station. How does this collaborative ethos manifest in the works featured in Naked City?

JS: All of Doug Aitken’s projects are collaborations, with experts from all fields, such as engineers, architects, dancers, musicians, actors, etc. Except for his sculptural or photographical pieces, his work is based on this notion of collaboration. For his video sleepwalkers (2007),he brings together major figures of the cinema industry such as Tilda Swinton, Seu Jorge, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall and Ryan Donowho. Similarly, he involved the L.A. Dance Project in his video Flags and Debris (2021).Far from the traditional figure of the painter alone in his studio with his paint and palette, he belongs to a category of artists for whom collaboration is an integral part of the work. 

ABOUT THE WRITER
Naz Cuguoğlu works as a curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where her work explores themes of intersectional identities and diasporic experiences. In 2024, she was appointed to co-curate the inaugural American Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale and received the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant and the AAMC Propel Award. Her curatorial experience includes exhibitions and programs at documenta fifteen, 15th Istanbul Biennial, Taiwan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She has previously held roles at institutions such as KADIST, The Wattis Institute, de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. Her writings have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. As a co-founder of Collective Çukurcuma, she experiments with collaborative curatorial practices through reading groups and international exhibitions.

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