After a turbulent period of reorganisation, the 18th Istanbul Biennial favours futurity over futility – The Art Newspaper

Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s video set up, Resilience TiacuacheOpposum Resilience (2019), completely encapsulates the hopes of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, an area the place “self-preservation and futurity are interdependent”, based on curator Christine Tohmé. Utilizing survival-seeking opossums as a metaphor for mankind, this extraordinarily humorous and imaginative set up sees the creatures stand as much as violent enemies that threaten their happiness and lives, bringing a few child-like pleasure within the viewer.

This version of the biennial is titled The Three-Legged Cat as a result of, for the primary time since its founding in 1987, it is going to unfold over three somewhat than two years. This leg options 47 artists, together with solely six from Turkey, however many extra from the Center East.

The present would look like a bid for stability by the Istanbul Basis for Tradition and Arts (IKSV), the non-public basis that administers the biennial, following a rocky interval of reorganisation. In February 2023, the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory board unanimously selected Defne Ayas, now the director of The Van Abbemuseum, to supervise the 18th version. Nevertheless, the IKSV rejected the board’s choice and as a substitute appointed a member of the choice committee, Iwona Blazwick of the Whitechapel Gallery.

After an outcry within the arts group, Blazwick stepped down from the function and Tohmé, a much-admired curator based mostly in Beirut, was lastly chosen. She proposed spreading occasions over three years and initiating an open name to encourage transparency. The biennial’s finances was raised from €2m to €6.5m to cowl the prolonged programme, largely paid for by Koç Holdings, the one Turkish firm listed on the Fortune 500.

Cautious optimism

Throughout a gap speech, Tohmé spoke bravely of how genocidal violence makes all makes an attempt at a satisfying life—together with artwork—appear trivial. Although she didn’t particularly point out Gaza, the place the United Nations fee lately discovered that Israel has dedicated genocide, the battle there was the elephant within the room. Regardless of this, her biennial favours futurity over futility, leaving the door open for fantasy, playfulness and even a cautious optimism.

The exhibition is unfold out between eight venues, all in shut proximity to one another, and together with a former cone manufacturing unit, a deteriorating theatre constructing, a school-turned-museum and the shell of a French orphanage the place Khalil Rabah’s Crimson Navigapparate, (2025) is put in. This site-specific intervention of shiny purple oil barrels holding bushes and saplings affords a regenerative follow, in response to the horrors confronted by the Palestinian individuals.

As if in dialog with Rabah, Sohail Salem has created anxiousness scary drawings depicting his life-and-death wrestle in Gaza, utilizing ballpoint pens to scratch within the particulars. Compared, the black humour of Tomorrow, once more (2023) by Mona Benyamin proves cathartic. On this quick video, clownish actors play Palestinian information announcers who giggle to the purpose of sobbing towards a backdrop of perennial destruction.

It is a work that deserves to be proven broadly, particularly to audiences who stay divided on the time period “genocide”. ​​But, as many museums within the west proceed to consciously keep away from such materials, ignoring the wealth of artwork created in response to the horror at hand, it is going to in all probability not obtain the eye it deserves.

Censorship and queer magnificence

In the meantime Akram Zaatari’s contributions, Olive Inexperienced (2020) and Crimson Crimson (2021), painting scenes of wrestlers, a sport practiced in Turkey since historic occasions. The works are painted deftly with a modest contact, as if to disregard that their homo-eroticism may very well be labeled as resistance in a rustic the place LGBTQ+ imagery is frequently censored, and thought of counter to the picture of household promoted by faith and the authorities.

Elif Saydam affords Hospitality (2024-2025), the place layers of laminated sheets with photographs of flowers grasp from the ceiling and seduce the viewer to enter a maze of queer magnificence. Nonetheless extra brave is the curator’s alternative to incorporate a satirical have a look at homo-eroticism in Greek tradition by artist duo VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), featured prominently in a avenue stage window on a significant thoroughfare.

The viewers is led to the sunshine on the finish of the tunnel by Valentin Noujaïm’s good movie, Pacific Membership (2023), during which a French-Algerian man relates the story of a nightclub, a refuge for immigrants through the Eighties. His tales of discrimination and group, of residing by means of the AIDS disaster and the ravages of heroin habit, appear to be of a earlier time when loss of life appeared imminent.

This testimony is filmed towards modern footage of the identical neighbourhood, the place the previous has now been erased by towering glass buildings and geometric plazas. The juxtaposition means that we can not predict the longer term and that life can go on, even when the tip appears close to.

Regardless of in depth censorship on this more and more authoritarian nation—together with the imprisonment of Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and cultural minister Mahir Polat earlier this yr—there isn’t a proof that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan interfered straight with the organisation of the biennial, or the number of artwork works. Maybe artists and cultural employees organising exhibits in Turkey have discovered to insinuate somewhat than to accuse, as a way to keep away from direct confrontations with the authorities.

Nonetheless, it’s actually a significant problem to create a biennial providing optimism below an oppressive regime. Even when the curator’s selections appear random and disconnected, as when VASKOS’s work shares an area with Pilar Quinteros’s extra conceptual pile of sculptures, Working Class (2025), this exhibition gives a captivating various to bleak biennales. In truth, this technique could be a liberation, releasing viewers to type their very own interpretations.

18th Istanbul Biennial, varied areas, Istanbul, till 23 November