Istanbul biennial offers citywide exhibitions

ISTANBUL

Istanbul’s highly anticipated two-month long art attraction, the 14th Istanbul Biennial, will showcase more than 1,500 works of artworks from over 80 participants in a citywide exhibition for free of charge, an organizer said Wednesday.

Titled Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms is organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and will take place between Sep. 5 and Nov.1 in four locations - Istanbul Modern, the Arter contemporary arts center, the Galata Greek High School and the Italian High School -- as well as in various boats, hotels, former banks, gardens, schools, shops and private houses.

“Like glass, Saltwater is transparent, durable and yet can break,” said American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at a press conference. “It is primarily an exhibition of artworks, but there is an outside that enters into it in many ways, pressuring its borders, which become fragile.”

Artists around the world will display their works in more than 30 venues both in the Asian and European side of the Bosphorus.

Speaking at a press conference in the courtyard of one of the exhibition venues, the Italian High School in Istanbul's Beyoglu district, American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev said:

“To see this exhibition, (...) you can take a ferry towards the Marmara and the Mediterranean and visit the Asian side of Istanbul in Kadikoy and Buyukada, one of the Princes’ Islands where ancient Byzantine emperors exiled their enemies and where Leon Trotsky lived for four years from 1929 to 1933.”

Christov-Bakargiev said that the Trotsky house in Buyukada, one of the Princes’ Islands, was the first venue picked for the biennial. Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk showed her the site, she added.

Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, which was named after his 2008 novel, will also be one of the exhibition sites.

According to a press release, works at the biennial will range historically from a 1870 painting of waves by Spanish Nobel prize winner and neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, to a new work by Turkish artist Fusun Onur, in which a poem is heard on a moving boat.

This year’s biennial will see a strong participation from Armenia. Agos, the newspaper for which Hrant Dink -- a Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in 2007 in front of his office -- worked as the editor-in-chief, is also one of the exhibition venues.

A number of seminars and panel discussions, in which public participation will be encouraged will be held during the biennial.

A film program will take place free of charge throughout the biennial at the Istanbul Modern cinema hall.

The last edition of the Istanbul Biennial in 2013, was supposed to take place in public spaces, but Gezi Park anti-government protests made this impossible.