Insights from Istanbul

Nadine Khalil asks whether the 17th edition of the Istanbul Biennial hits its curatorial intentions or reduces it to stereotypes of the region.

There have been celebratory moments for underrepresented regions this year. Documenta 15, a wide-ranging international art exhibition that takes place in Kassel every five years and considered the barometer of contemporary art movements, was led by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, offering a lens on Southeast Asia. This was preceded by the Berlin Biennale that was curated by Algerian-French artist Kader Attia, which focused on decolonial thought. Even with the political controversies around anti-Semitism in the former, and withdrawals by Iraqi artists in the latter, dampening this spotlight, 2022 will be remembered as one in which artist practices culturally located in the Global South, also known as the SWANASA region (Southwest Asia, North African, and South Asia) took centre stage.

'How can it be anything but salutary that these important institutional centres explore, discover and reckon with the contemporaneity of other geographies,' David Teh tells me at a coffee shop in Singapore. Teh is co-curator of the latest Istanbul Biennial (September 17-November 20) along with Uta Meta Bauer and Amar Kanwar. 'For us, it’s not a geopolitical or representational exercise. I think we are still, for better or worse, operating under a globalist paradigm in the art world. What we see at the moment are [many] interesting experiments that don’t just include other geographies from the Euro-American axis but [those that] try to incorporate the intelligence of these geographies.'

Thinking of these embedded forms of knowledge that emerge from, and are unique to particular regions or cultural landscapes, it’s fitting then that Istanbul’s biennial was loosely structured around the idea of composting, which lends itself to notions of fermentation and the harvesting of grown seeds. 'Compost is about artistic process - not a theme, image or particular smell. It gives a character to this biennial,' explains Teh. 'There’s a selection in good compost but also a laissez-faire and I think some of the rough edges of this exhibition do justice to the idea that not everything is finished.'

Reading Rooms

And truly, as this curatorial approach focused on community activism and protest art, the biennial felt like a documentation of ongoing conflicts through endless clippings or videos. These were presented in clusters of visual information that were at times crowded spatially, accompanied by heavy blocks of text. Take the Disobedience Archive by Marco Scotini and Can Altay, which was a series of laid-out electronic tablets on desks, and screens on blackboards at the abandoned Central Greek High School for Girls. A dizzying documentation of footage of resistance and social disobedience worldwide, it was a lot to take in at once. Such information overload appeared elsewhere, such as Ahmet Öğüt’s ‘The Silent University Orientation Program’ at Istanbul’s Gashouse Museum, Müze Gazhane. Presented as a series of talking heads on multiple screens, it featured displaced people who brought the invisible aspects of asylum-seeking to light. This was a biennial in which groups ー larger organisations and grassroots movements (Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Bread and Puppet Theater) ー took precedence over individual artist practices.

Other presentations required a slower, careful reading, such as that of The Feminist Memory Project’s photo-archives by the Nepal Picture Library (NPL) in Pera Museum. Depicting women who shaped feminist discourse during Nepal’s Rana dynasty (1846-1951), many of whom were part of the underground Communist Party, the NPL told stories through peasant revolts, women’s education and suffrage. Installed alongside In Time/On Ground (2022) by Merve Elveren and Çağla Özbek, a selective interpretation of the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation archives in Turkey by journalists, artists and academics 一 a veritable claim was being made for women-centred histories.

Unfortunately, this documentary aesthetic belied the subjectivity of these unofficial narratives, flattening the overall display, which presented a library or media room feel. In this grand sweep of collective histories and movements however, singular testimonies stood out, such as Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s multi-channel installation The Insane (2006) of five female psychiatric patients, each revealing the harrowing conditions that led to their institutionalisation. Depicted as blurry, anonymous seated figures in the magnificent Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, these women sang, cried, and manufactured myths. It was a powerful way to reveal abuse, neglect and systemic violence against women, while protecting their anonymity. The vignettes felt personal, like shared secrets which resonated with the embracing spatial architecture of the bathhouse. They were coupled with cascading sounds from Tarek Atoui’s Waters’ Witness (2015-22) ー a series of field recordings of Istanbul’s buzzing harbour. Sounds travelled across Atoui’s vessels of dripping water to Rasdjarmrearnsook’s filmed cries of anguish, echoing and shifting in the space to create a sonic language of nature and suffering.

As a whole, the biennial was pointedly concerned with language and legibility, with reading rooms allocated to almost every venue such as arthereistanbul, a cultural organisation run by Syrian artists. Here, a video work by Lida Abdul, Clapping with Stones (2005), showed Afghan men mourning the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. In this space, reading texts about war in a curated library became a political act. While Christian Nyampeta’s project, The Evening School (2022) offered translations of the Sound Archives of Black Literature of the 1970s and 1980s 'moving from one colonial language to another,' as Teh puts it, works of a multilingual nature demonstrated historical moments that are beyond translation. For example, Lamia Joreige’s Mapping a Transformation (2022) at the Pera Museum took the form of a wall of archival documents in Arabic and Turkish, dating from the end of the Ottoman Empire. They chronicled a time of tumult, famine and the rise of Arab nationalism.

In contrast to the archival displays that left little room for interaction or imagination was Elif Öner and Evrim Kavcar’s wonderful Dictionary of Sensitive Sounds (2019-22) — a participatory intervention that sourced everyday sounds in phrases and performance. Staged at Performistanbul, it included a video of statements such as 'The sound of holding your breath when you try not to cut into the conversation,' with a dancer performing the corresponding actions in an accompanying video. Often the movements were subtle, such as the scratching of the floor with all fingers to denote 'the sound of a municipal worker sweeping leaves on the road into a dustpan with a twig broom.' What was striking about this research was the employment of the body as a tool in the struggle against the act of naming, questioning who has the authority to define an action or experience. It resonated with another work that poignantly performed collective experiences, Burden of the Body is Directly Proportional to Dilation of Time (2022). Based on interviews with refugees, this delicate stop-motion film by Topological Atlas ー a collective that investigates displacement in the Global South and undocumented migrants ー attempted to measure the perceived heaviness of the body as a function of the long, unpredictable journeys undertaken by migrants.

The Viewer’s Lens

While Teh speaks of the necessity of curators in showing 'the archive as a living, breathing being,' many of the archives at the biennial took on didactic forms that alienated the viewer’s experience. It is interesting that the work that was the most abstract (and least textual) offered the most compelling encounter with history. A winding sound and light installation in the underground tunnel of the Metro Istanbul Yaklaşım Tüneli Taksim, Carlos Casas’ Cyclope (2022) drew from research on the 1930s ‘Long Pipe Experiment’ undertaken by Italian dictator Mussolini, for aeronautical research. The field recordings brilliantly evoked a universal pathos via conditions of burial, torture and horror. At a point, the sound changed to an intolerable, grinding screech of destruction, like an impending explosion concluding with metal on flesh. I heard a scream escape me, that reverberated across the passageway. Sited under Istanbul’s Gezi Park ー where protests against the park's urban development resulted in government-sanctioned violence and extreme police brutality injuring 8,000 people in 2013 ー the immersive work brought another layer of meaning to the notion of state power, conflict and suppression. 'It is incredibly subversive by channelling state violence and its histories in an aesthetic way in the guts of the symbolic corpse of Turkey’s democracy,' says Teh. 'I think sometimes histories need to be coded and abstracted, in order to be made present.'

In this spotlight moment, from Kassel to Istanbul, the aesthetics of the archive reign supreme - and it demands literacy. Much like a newspaper, the Istanbul Biennial needed to be read more than encountered, and it is this explanatory impulse that should be questioned. I was left wondering if this was the most impactful ‘reimagining of new formats’ the curatorial statement proposed, brought about by COVID’s interruptions of life, community and travel. By largely narrating the past rather than activating the present, the exhibitions were akin to pedagogical exercises instead of sensorial experiences, usually made richer with polyphony and illegibility, like the parts of the world they reflect.

Indeed as much as it is significant for places like Istanbul, situated between Europe and Asia, to fashion a post-Western art discourse, this biennial didn’t quite deliver. Evidently, the pandemic played a decisive factor in this. Granted, the focus was more on process than completed bodies of work, but the curatorial decision to favour activist art, points to socio-political problems that need to be solved, reinforcing reductive representations of the region as ‘troubled.’ This became a place where art required a rationale or justification mirroring the state of economic, political and environmental collapse we find ourselves faced with. And while the biennial leaves one with a sense of planetary urgency, it carved little space for art of the everyday; art as a state of being and becoming ー unexpected, unknown, playful and irrational. The hope would be to move from ‘reading art’ which limits the role of art to expository rather than transformative. And so remains the nagging question of what kind of harvest or new publics might the compost of our region and its invisible seeds yield? Will this biennial help seed experimental practices that go beyond what is, or simply use art as another mode of activist expression?