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”, in response to 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 can 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 personal 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 resolution and as a substitute appointed a member of the choice committee, Iwona Blazwick of the Whitechapel Gallery.
Curator Christine Tohmé has centered on selling transparency
Tanya Traboulsi
After an outcry within the arts neighborhood, Blazwick stepped down from the position and Tohmé, a much-admired curator primarily based in Beirut, was lastly chosen. She proposed spreading occasions over three years and initiating an open name to encourage transparency. The biennial’s price range was raised from €2m to €6.5m to cowl the prolonged programme, principally 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 facility, 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 timber and saplings affords a regenerative follow, in response to the horrors confronted by the Palestinian individuals.
Khalil Rabah Fransiz, Crimson Navigapparate (2025), Yetimhanesi
Sahir Ugur Eren
As if in dialog with Rabah, Sohail Salem has created nervousness upsetting drawings depicting his life-and-death battle in Gaza, utilizing ballpoint pens to scratch within the particulars. As compared, the black humour of Tomorrow, once more (2023) by Mona Benyamin proves cathartic. On this brief video, clownish actors play Palestinian information announcers who chuckle to the purpose of sobbing in opposition to a backdrop of perennial destruction.
It is a work that deserves to be proven extensively, 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 can 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 could possibly be labeled as resistance in a rustic the place LGBTQ+ imagery is repeatedly censored, and thought of counter to the picture of household promoted by faith and the authorities.
Akram Zaatari, Crimson Crimson (2021), Galata Rum Okulu
Sahir Ugur Eren
Elif Saydam affords Hospitality (2024-2025), the place layers of laminated sheets with photos of flowers dangle 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 take a look at homo-eroticism in Greek tradition by artist duo VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), featured prominently in a road stage window on a serious thoroughfare.
The viewers is led to the sunshine on the finish of the tunnel by Valentin Noujaïm’s sensible movie, Pacific Membership (2023), by which a French-Algerian man relates the story of a nightclub, a refuge for immigrants in the course of the Eighties. His tales of discrimination and neighborhood, of residing via the AIDS disaster and the ravages of heroin habit, appear to be of a earlier time when dying appeared imminent.
This testimony is filmed in opposition to up to date 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’t predict the longer term and that life can go on, even when the top 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 12 months—there is no such thing as a proof that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan interfered instantly with the organisation of the biennial, or the choice of artwork works. Maybe artists and cultural employees organising exhibits in Turkey have discovered to insinuate somewhat than to accuse, so as to keep away from direct confrontations with the authorities.
VASKOS, The Jug Goes to the Effectively Till It Breaks (2021) and Pilar Quinteros, Working Class (2025), Meclisi Mebusan
Sahir Ugur Eren
Nonetheless, it’s definitely a serious problem to create a biennial providing optimism beneath an oppressive regime. Even when the curator’s decisions 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 different to bleak biennales. The truth is, this technique could be a liberation, releasing viewers to type their very own interpretations.
18th Istanbul Biennial, varied areas, Istanbul, till 23 November
