12th Istanbul Biennial
17 Sep 11 – 13 Nov 11
Dora Maurer, Seven Twists, 1979
Biennials in the 21st century may well have become sprawling behemoths bogged down by abstruse titles and weighty thematic concerns.
But the curators of the 12th Istanbul Biennial (17 September-13 November) aim to challenge how these vast exhibitions are conceived and developed worldwide.
Rio de Janeiro-born Adriano Pedrosa, the co-curator of the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006), and Jens Hoffmann, the director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, will present works by more than 110 artists in five group shows surrounded by clusters of solo exhibitions, 56 in total, at a single central site.
The Antrepo complex of former warehouses, dating from the early 20th century, is on the banks of the Bosphorus alongside the Istanbul Modern.
The art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the Cuban-US artist who died of an Aids-related illness in 1996, is the stimulus for the exhibition.
The group shows are organised under the titles “Untitled (Abstraction)”; “Untitled (History)”; “Untitled (Passport)”; “Untitled (Ross)” and “Untitled (Death by Gun)”, with the latter three sections specifically referring to works by Gonzalez-Torres.
“The beauty of his work is that it was always very political and at the same time very personal and formally progressive,” said Hoffmann.
The art of politics
The 12th edition follows in the tradition of previous biennials that have also explored a political dimension.
Pedrosa and Hoffmann stress that they want to contextualise the event in relation to earlier Istanbul biennials and other international exhibitions.
“We read aloud the introductions of [a number of] Istanbul Biennial catalogues and noticed a strong interest in discussing the relationship between art and politics, specifically the politics of the region,” said Hoffmann during an Art Salon debate at the Art Basel fair in June.
“We discovered that the art became more and more political. The 11th biennial [“What Keeps Mankind Alive?”, 2009] was in some way a reconsideration of Marxism,” added Hoffmann.
“A lot of work exhibited was politically minded, but, in our opinion, lacked a lot in terms of aesthetic [considerations] and form.
We talked about art that has the possibility of being politically progressive as well as being aesthetically innovative.”
Gonzalez-Torres, whose work, stressed the curators, is simply a point of departure, is the motor behind this biennial’s selections.
The artist’s activist and social concerns dovetailed with issues in his private life, such as living with HIV, prompting works crafted from arte povera-esque everyday materials based on paradoxical ideals such as loss and presence, depletion and restoration.
“His use of the established and accepted visual vocabulary of post-minimal and perhaps conceptual art was a way for the work to enter mainstream art institutions, and, once there, to spread its radical ideas.
It was, if you will, a Trojan horse strategy. I think the biennial will be very political, but it will also be very open regarding what is actually political,” said Hoffmann.
“Untitled (Abstraction)” is based on Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Bloodwork-Steady Decline), 1994, a graph that depicts the reduced T-cell count of someone with HIV.
“This section includes artists who deal with modernist abstract references, particularly the grid, in an urgent, personal, bodily or political way,” said Pedrosa.
Hoffmann also pointed out that “we are looking [at the relationship between art and politics] again from a different point of view, away from the city as a backdrop and back into the gallery space”.
Mounting the show at a central site means that it is distanced from Istanbul’s historical baggage (most of the previous editions have spread across famous sites in the city).
But the biennial also reverts to tradition by opting for the white-cube space of the Antrepo.
Debunking the biennial
The pair are attempting to subvert the biennial model in other ways, with their decision to remove their names from press material and to withhold the list of artists.
This under-the-radar strategy appears to be working, with Vasif Kortun, curator of the 2005 Istanbul Biennial, observing that “nobody has heard anything about this edition in the local scene.
The curators are remarkably non-existent.” When asked if this edition is in a sense an “anti-biennial”, because of the blanket ban on featured artists and because of the lack of a title for the event—“Untitled”—the curators defended the move.
“There has been a lot of talk about our not announcing the names of the participants, and I guess that is just another one of those biennial things—that a ‘list’ has to be published to create expectations.
It is not such a big deal. All we wanted to avoid was the use of the names for marketing purposes. I have for a long time wondered about the obscure titles biennials have, and I didn’t want to come up with a title like that.
Actually, we first thought of not having any title and simply calling it ‘The 12th Istanbul Biennial’.
When Gonzalez-Torres emerged as the central inspiration, we decided that ‘Untitled’ was an even better statement,” said Hoffmann.
Surely the duo’s strategies are a ruse designed to draw attention to the curatorial team and its ideas? “That is an interesting idea, but the opposite is really what we had in mind.
Now it is being turned around, which is not what we wanted. But it is true that we wanted to make a statement of some form,” said Hoffmann.
The curators’ overhaul nonetheless chimes with soul-searching about how today’s gargantuan biennials are structured.
The UK artist Jeremy Deller recently said in The Art Newspaper (June 2011): “The theme and the big press release come first, and then you are approached, so you are part of the masterplan.”
Pedrosa is adamant that in the e-flux age where new biennials are announced most weeks, biennial titles have become preposterous because of the “need to be at once all encompassing and vague”.
“Untitled” is “open, you can project your own readings upon it, but it is also very precise”, he said, just as Gonzalez-Torres’s work invited multiple interpretations, acting as a springboard for further analysis.
“His work does not impose a single meaning or message,” said Pedrosa.
Artists?
So what do we know about the 12th Istanbul Biennial? The names of eight artists have been released: Claudia Andujar, Letizia Battaglia, Geta Bratescu, Teresa Burga, Mat Collishaw, Zarina Hashmi, Dora Maurer, Tina Modotti and Martha Rosler.
Such senior female figures “go against the grain” of the usual artists favoured by biennial organisers, said Pedrosa.
According to the Paris dealer, Chantal Crousel, the artists Claire Fontaine, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Mona Hatoum will also be showing works.
Raymond Pettibon is also thought to be on the list.
Twenty percent of the works on view will be new, while another 20% are reconfigurations of works that the artists made previously, said Hoffmann, with particular emphasis on Latin American and Middle Eastern art.
There are no Chinese artists and only one east Asian in the show, as the curators eschew the global sweep favoured by biennials in the past 15 years.
“We have come to a time where one is not expected to represent all regions of the globe in an exhibition, yet I do feel a responsibility to bring artists from outside western Europe and north America,” observed Pedrosa.
The exhibition design by the Japanese architect, Ryue Nishizawa, which interweaves the five group displays and solo shows, also challenges the conventional biennial layout of a large-scale group exhibition, as at the Arsenale at Venice.
“The Istanbul Biennial has a tradition of experimentation and innovation that you do not see in Venice,” said Pedrosa, who is confident that their curatorial concepts and “thematic threads” will be reflected in the five “cabinet-style” group shows which, though extensive, remain “intimate”.
Legacy
The main criticism aimed at biennials today is that they sweep into a city and leave just as quickly, without engaging with the immediate community.
“The exhibition addresses many subjects that I think are very important to the understanding of art today, many of which also relate to realities in Istanbul,” said Hoffmann, who also vouches for the biennial’s education programme.
Meanwhile, Hoffmann and Pedrosa have contributed to the publication “Remembering Istanbul” available from this month, which chronicles previous Istanbul biennial curators. The biennial’s main sponsor is Koç Holding.
Categories: Biennials