The Seventh Continent: The 16th Istanbul Biennial

With more than 220 artworks by 56 artists from 25 countries, the 16th edition of the Istanbul Biennial is titled “The Seventh Continent”, and takes over three spectacular venues in Istanbul: Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSFAU) Istanbul Museum of Painting and Sculpture, the 17,700 sq metres former warehouse on the waterfront in the Tophane district, the Pera Museum in the heart of the city, and Büyükada Island, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.

The 2019 iteration is curated by art historian and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, who explains the theme and title of the Biennial in his curatorial statement:

The title of the 16th Istanbul Biennial sounds like the title of a movie, so strong is the image conjured up by The Seventh Continent. As many people know, this term refers to a gigantic mass of plastic waste that now covers no less than 3.4 million square kilometres of our oceans – that is almost five times the area of Turkey. It is a new world, made up of debris. But unlike that other ‘New World’ discovered by Christopher Columbus, it is one that we ourselves have created, without even being aware that we were doing it. And what we have created is exactly what we did not want. A continent composed of everything we have rejected, it is the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene era.

He goes on to say that The Seventh Continent is an incredibly mixed and complex environment, which finds its analogy in “our new ‘decentred’ world”, where “are tribal representatives who modify and reinvent their cultures, and create new ones”.

Bige Örer, Director of the Istanbul Biennial, talks about how the event, founded in 1987, has functioned as “the trigger for transformational changes in contemporary art in Istanbul and Turkey”. She reveals how the lack of permanent venues for the biennale has prompted its organisation to look for and select buildings of “curatorial significance” that “make reference to certain social, historical, or urban issues and/or have special meaning in relation to the conceptual framework of the exhibition”. This integration between the artistic and urban landscape is an integral aspectof the Istanbul Biennial, which “believes in the ongoing support and development of concepts of ‘critical art’ that merge the political with the aesthetic and engage both the political and social environment”.

In relation to this belief, the Istanbul Biennal is since its 30th anniversary edition in 2017 contributing a permanent work of art to the city with the support of the 2007–2026 Biennial Sponsor, Koç Holding. The 15th edition’s permanent artwork was Ugo Rondinone’s neon-light sculpture Where Do We Go From Here?, once exhibited at the Taksim Square in 1999’s 6th Istanbul Biennial. The work now sits at the Mustafa Kemal Cultural Centre (MKM) near the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge over the Bosphorus. This year, British artist Monster Chetwynd has created a permanent new sculptural children’s playground called Gorgon’s Head Playground, located in the city’s Maçka Sanat Park.

With only a few days before the Biennial’s closure, ASIA has a look at a few highlights from the Asian continent, startign from the work on show at the MSFAU. Taipei-based En Man Chang (b. 1967, Taitung, Taiwan) presents a three-channel video installation entitled Ungrounding Land – Ljavek Trilogy (2018), for which she collaborated with the Balasasau family from Ljavek. The work captures one of the indigenous precariat communities that moved to urban centres in Taiwan in the 1950s to meet the labour demands. Their housing spaces were built from wooden boards, signs and other found objects, and played a key role in the physical construction of the city. However, the area was later repurposed by the local government, who determined that the community was living there illegally. Chang aims to raise awareness about the human labour of ignored communities that invisibly albeit crucially contribute to capitalist and urban development.

Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok, Thailand) has brought a series of paintings and a video, entitled with history in a room filled with people with funny names 4, which relates to two recent historical events, one in the West and one in Thailand: the rise of Donald Trump and the death of the king of Thailand. The film captures protest and mourning events, an epistolary exchange with a drone spirit called Chantri, as well as a depiction of the artist’s grandmother, who suffers from early dementia and is experiencing the loss of memory and materiality.

Turkish artist Deniz Aktaş’s (b. 1987, Diyarbakır, Turkey) drawings from his ongoing series “No Man’s Land” captures aspects of the traumatic transformation of cities and nature, documenting urban decay, environmental collapse, human evacuation and migration. Presenting work as a duo at the Biennial, Istanbul-based Güçlü Öztekin (b. 1978, Eskişehir, Turkey) and Güneş Terkol (b. 1981, Ankara, Turkey) are founding members of the HaZaVuZu collective in Istanbul, working across music, video, performance and design. Terkol creates sewn works, videos, sketches and musical compositions engaging with notions of gender relations, while Öztekin makes large-scale drawings and paintings on paper that he describes as a form of ‘recycling’. At the Biennial, they present WORLBMON (2019), a work commissioned by the biennale that creates a space where visitors and artists can meet and mingle in conviviality. The space contains paintings, tulles, curtains, sculptures, masks and costumes.

Haegue Yang (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea) sets her The Intermediates (2015–ongoing) sculptures in a space covered by the wallpaper piece Incubation and Exhaustion. The latter’s Version Istanbul incorporates Medusas, feathered angels, ‘broken’ tulips and adapted Secchi disks. The immersive installation includes moving lights, scented gym balls and sound, which is taken from the audio of the April 2018 historical meeting between the North Korean leader and the South Korean President in the DMZ. In the live press broadcast, all that was audible was the song of native birds and camera clicks.

Ozan Atalan (b. 1985, Gelibolu, Turkey) questions the impact of human activities and explores the effects of the expansion of civilisation and the resulting eradication of nature. In his multimedia installation Monochrome, commissioned by the 16th Istanbul Biennial, looks at the destruction of the water buffalo habitat in Istanbul, through the construction of a new airport, a third bridge across the Bosphorus and the urban intervention to northern forests. While in the exhibition space lies a real water buffalo skeleton with dirt and soil on it, signalling its death, the video shows the endemic species’ native abodes and the urbanisation that has displaced them.

Two Iranian artists are showing their work at the Biennial. At MSFAU, Los Angeles-based Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) evokes crowds and congregations of people in dark spaces in her paintings Corner Projection (Crowd Running) and Corner Projection (Lines), accompanied by her 2018 video animation The Audience, a compilation of seven short animations made in 2018, including The Crowd, Over Head Projection (the Crowd), Mr. Time, Spring, Cats and Cat Men, Plane Chaser and Over Head Projection (Digger).

At the Pera Museum, Brussels-based Sanam Khatibi (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran) presents a series of works including a new tapestry and a new painting as well as objects and sculptures. The tapestry I dreamed I stabbed you in the eye depicts the fraught relationship between nude figures in a natural setting, while archaeological stones and ceramic scultpures sit alongside the new painting Noon on a hot summer day, together pointing to a speculative archaeology of human-animal relations.

Hale Tenger’s (b. 1960, Izmir, Turkey) mixed media and sound installation Appearance, also commissioned by this year’s Biennial, provides a space for introspection and regeneration, located at Taş Mektep (Sophronius Palace) on Büyükada Island. Built in 1870s as the summer house of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Sofronios, the building was used as Büyükada Primary School between 1922-1967. For this work, the artist draws inspiration from the locality and from the botanical technique known as girdling, which is used both to enhance growth of fruits in trees or in forestry to kill trees. The sound element in Turkish and English is a poem by Tenger about agency, power, self-knowledge and greed. Dotting around the garden, lattened obsidian stones used as mirrors point upwards, reflecting the environment.

There is a great variety of artists at this year’s Biennial, representing the diversity of “The Seventh Continent”. Bourriaud concludes in his statement:

… what is most important is that all these artists are creating new thoughts, new fields of research, and new objects to be researched. They are aliens bringing messages. And I would say that the message of the whole Biennial is that now, in this new world, we are all aliens – aliens from each other – and we had better get used to it, and make from it something vital and viable.

C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia

“The Seventh Continent”, the 16th Istanbul Biennial, is on view from 24 September to 10 November 2019 at various venues around Istanbul.