The 15th Istanbul Biennial will go ahead this autumn, insist the exhibition’s curators, the artists Elmgreen & Dragset. They were speaking after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s narrow victory in the constitutional referendum in April when 51.4% of voters cast ballots in Erdoğan’s favour, granting him sweeping new powers. The yes vote means that the country’s parliamentary system will be replaced with an executive presidency; Erdoğan could subsequently remain in office until 2029.
“The biennial is organised by IKSV [Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts], which is not a state-run institution, so we haven’t experienced any direct interference so far,” Michael Elmgreen says. “We have spent a lot of time in Istanbul meeting with people to get a clearer image of how institutions and artists deal with the situation. It is our impression from all these meetings that the art community really needs the biennial to take place.”
The Scandinavian artists say that the biennial, which is due to open on 16 September (until 12 November) and is entitled A Good Neighbour, will deal with multiple notions of home and neighbourhoods, “exploring how living modes in our private spheres have changed throughout the past decades”.
Kerimcan Güleryüz, the founder of the Istanbul-based commercial gallery The Empire Project, says that international support is more important than ever. “The darkness that encompassed Turkey during the 1970s has crept back,” Güleryüz says. “I honestly don’t see anything getting even slightly better for a very, very long time.”
