After being rescheduled from 2021 due to the pandemic, 17th the Istanbul Biennial announces its return during Saturday 17 September – Sunday 20 November organized by IKSV. Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh, the Biennial will showcase installations that include projects from different parts of the world in various districts of Istanbul. The venues include Pera Museum, PCSAA, arthereistanbul, Merkez Rum Kız Lisesi, Saha Studio, Müze Gazhane and many more. More information and tickets available via the organization website.
From the organizer:
Rather than a theme or title, what unifies this 17th edition is a process: composting. A wide range of artists and other initiatives have been invited to share and develop the raw elements of their practices. The biennial will serve as a seedbed or nursery for a few months or more, in which to sew, transplant, nurture and fertilise, to see what sprouts. Some green shoots will awaken new and old ways of doing, saying and listening, of reading, thinking and being together; others will settle into the mulch and become something else altogether. Conventional understandings of the biennial format as a show, of the audience as passive spectators, will be challenged. The diversity of invited projects offers a horizon for reorientation, for rethinking the platform’s formal and geographical parameters.
After more than a year of confinement and isolation, this biennial aims to revive the muscles of civic engagement and mobilise the people of Istanbul as active players and hosts in an inclusive conversation and fermentation process. An extensive programme of projections, soundings, dialogues and exhibitions, across the city and elsewhere, will follow six intertwined threads. Geo-poetics / Elemental Politics highlights struggles over our planet’s most basic resources. Projects centred on News and Pedagogy rethink how we become informed and educated in an age of privatised knowledge and shrinking public spheres. Ancient Solutions seeks insights into today’s intractable problems in unorthodox practices side-lined by modernity. Synaesthesia explores the trans-sensory pathways between disciplines and between art forms; while a thread called An-archiving finds artists mobilising the resources of the past by way of use, rather than collection. The exhibitions will support and deepen these public exchanges, rather than the other way round.
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More information and Tickets are available via IKSV.
Image sourced via event organizers.
