Istanbul Biennial 2019: The Seventh Continent Istanbul’s art scene is booming and it’s never been more evident than in this year’s 16th Biennial (14 September – 10 November). Running across three sites, and showcasing more than 220 artworks by 56 participating artists, it provides art lovers with a wealth of opportunities to fully immerse themselves in art. This year’s theme – The Seventh Continent The Seventh Continent refers to the mass of plastic waste floating in the Pacific, estimated to be five times the size of Turkey. Curator and art historian Nicolas Bourriaud uses this theme to explore the Anthropocene epoch; an era where human activity has been the dominant influence on climate change and the environment. While the biennial isn’t set on preaching an environmental message, it explores our current period in history and suggests a new ‘approach is needed to make sense of it. Bourriaud sees the 56 international participating artists as anthropologists of this ‘off-centred world’, a time where, the physical and symbolic limits that formerly separated human beings from their environments have collapsed. He suggests that,’ both anthropology and art are reflecting the erosion of the old mass systems – sociological, ethnical, sexual or political.’ The site locations Site 1 Located a stone’s throw from the beautiful Bosphorous and a 30-minute walk from Galata Bridge, the main venue (the new addition to the MSFAU Painting and Sculpture museum), plays host to more than half of the participating artists, so ensure you allow a day to take it all in. It’s also conveniently located for grabbing a coffee or a quick bite to eat, should you want some refreshments after an art-filled day. Site 2 The second host venue, the Pera Museum, is more centrally located near Taksim Square. Here, alongside the 14 Biennial artists, is the museum’s permanent collection, which is well worth viewing. Afterwards, head to Solera Winery, a fabulous little wine bar with a good selection of wines. Site 3 The third site, which is home to five art works, is located on Buyukada (the largest of the Princes Islands), situated a one-hour boat ride from the main port. All of the works are located within a short walk from the ferry drop-off for ease. To help inspire your visit to the Biennial, I’ve rounded up a few of my favourite installations / artists’ works. 1. Korakrit Arunanondchai – Thailand This video piece brings together two historical events – the rise of Donald Trump and the death of the King of Thailand woven together with the artist’s grandmother’s experience with dementia and a drone spirit called Chanti. Done through a collage of cleverly woven interviews, original footage, imagery and story-telling, there’s a real beauty to Arunanondchai’s work, which has an ethereal and spiritual quality. The content of the video is almost irrelevant; it’s the sum of the parts that makes it stand out. He punctuates the footage with poignant phrases, which encourage reflection such as: ‘how have the strokes of history painted your picture’, ‘for consciousness to exist beyond bodies’, ‘soil is the most valued species on the earth,’ etc. 2. Jonathas de Andrade – BrazilPeixe The Fish– video This powerful film shows a fisherman holding and stroking a fish with care and love while the fish slowly dies; a ritual performed by fishermen in the Northeast of Brazil. This demonstration of love while the fishermen knowingly kill the fish for food, throws up a complex set of emotions, making for compelling yet difficult viewing. Andrade uses this video to explore human’s relationship to the earth, that we are slowly killing yet depend on for our existence. 3. Hale Tenger – Turkey Appearance –Installation and audio - Buyukada This meditative piece is set in the gardens of Sophronius Palace, a now un-inhabited, dilapidated building on Buyukada Island. As you wander around the gardens you are drawn to the black obsidian mirrors that reflect the magic of this wild garden. You are forced to walk slowly in between the mirrors so you can hear the audio that forms part of this installation, a poem written by the artist – the voice of a fruit tree. The inspiration for this installation comes from a botanical technique girdling: the complete removal of a strip of bark which can kill trees or encourage enhanced growth of fruit. The artist asks ‘Can you be by not doing?’ and she creates a wonderful space to reflect on this and indeed how humans manipulate nature for their own gain. 4. Haegue Yang – South Korea ‘Incubation and Exhaustion’- sculpture, sound (Painting and Sculpture Museum) Yang presents an immersive sensorial environment with scents, sounds and textures. The room is saturated with biomorphic sculptures made up of motifs ranging from chillies and garlic to high-end surgical robots. These striking hyperreal images and sculptures are paired with an audio from a famous interview with Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, where native bird song and camera clicks was all that was recorded. Yang’s installation explores the breaking down of barriers between technology, politics, art and nature. Overall, the experience left me feeling reflective. Perhaps human beings are merely a dot on the landscape of the history of this great earth whose time is up. Motivated by human-centric concerns, the climate change debate, which has provoked so much discussion and anxiety, maybe suggests our focus should be on how to leave this earth gracefully.
Elinor Seath
0 Comments
Sound sculptures, a thought provoking if somewhat macabre photographic exhibition of unclaimed corpses dressed in high fashion, cutting-edge video installations set up in dilapidated warehouses, the sadness of a water journey for a Syrian refugee’s family brought to life in the ‘Sea of Pain’, a water installation, and a dark labyrinth that echoes the voices of exiled poets inside a 40-foot pyramid constructed of cow dung. These are some of the memorable encounters I experienced at the 3rd annual Kochi Biennale held in the coastal state of Kerala in India. Spanning 12 venues and with 97 participating artists from 35 countries, Kochi comes alive with art, performance, talks and workshops. Its spectacular setting in Fort Kochi, a water-bound extension of the mainland, lends the Biennale its unique atmosphere. The Kerala region has been a trading centre and a melting pot for centuries, with seafarers from Arabia, China and Europe seeking the spices that Kerala was famed for. Fort Kochi’s amalgam of old churches from the Dutch and Portugese period, synagogues, forts, trading warehouses, old homes and palaces have been creatively utilized by the organisers to create a special ambience for artists to show their work. The whole aesthetic experience is cleverly tied together with an 88-chapter text of ‘Baroni,’ a novel by Argentinian writer Sergio Chejfec stenciled across the city walls. Since the start of the three-month event in December 2016, there have been 800,000 visitors to the Biennale, according to the organisers. I visited in mid-March in sweltering heat, just as the build up to the final ceremony was starting. As an artist myself, I came away with my conviction strengthened --- art is an essential medium to discover, challenge, and turn on its heads our pre-conceived notions of the world. The theme of the Biennale ‘Forming in the pupil of an Eye’ came to Sadarshan Shetty as the curation process developed. He had initial conversations with Raul Zurita, the Mexican artist, and things organically grew from there. This was Shetty’s first curating experience and he wanted to create a ‘space’ where the artist/curator relationship was symbiotic, “I was merely the facilitator of a shared space,” he told me over lunch at Solar, a café frequented by the Biennale crowd. I asked him how artists were responding to the space, meaning of course the physical space of the Biennale’s setting. “What do you mean by space? Your perception and mine are very different,” Shetty said. Our Biennale guide, Anjali, a student of English from Hyderabad University, emphasised the “interactive” nature of the exhibits and encouraged us to make our own interpretations of the artwork. For me, the potency of the ‘Sea of Pain’ was a fantastic example of this. The viewer is made to wade through an expanse of water, which connects you to the fate of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year old Turkish boy whose body was washed ashore on a sandy beach in Greece after the boat he and his family travelled in capsized. The image of his crumpled and lifeless body washed up on shore shocked the world and humanized the refugee crisis. The dark maze of the Pyramid of the Exiled Poets, by Aleś Śteger, where the whispers of dead and exiled poets is the only sound you hear as you walk single file, claustrophobic and scared in the dark, recreates in you the fear and repression experienced by poets persecuted for speaking their truth. I cannot but mention the incredible 38-minute video installation Inverso Mundus by the Russian artists AES+F shown on a 15 metre screen. A surreal slow-motion film that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy in a topsy-turvy post-industrial world, Inverso Mundus also questions the power dynamics of today’s world, between the sexes, class, generations and even the animal-human relationship. Yet another interactive piece was Turkish artist Ahmet Ogut's "Workers leaving the factory - Version 2.” Two simple Merritt sewing machine on which a television screen replaces the operative part of the sewing machine stands in an open room overlooking the sea. As you pedal the machine, a grainy video of workers walking out in protest from a factory site plays out on the screen. The viewer, in other words, has to labour in order to view a labour force, in this case, in protest. Indian artists have also been featured heavily. P.K. Sadanandan, a mural artist from Kerala, started on a mural in the traditional Kerala style at the opening of the show and completed the 10-metre mural by the closing week. It depicts the pernicious institution of caste, which is still very prevalent in India. I spoke to him when he was on his final strokes, and hoarse from talking to visitors over the last three months. Running alongside the main Biennale are 20 Collateral events, where more international and Indian artists are given the opportunity to show their work. I visited an exhibition by the recently discovered artist Brij Mohan Anand, who came of age in pre-Independent India and was involved with the nationalist and Communist movement. His energetic black and white etchings on subjects such as the futility of war, social oppression, serve to shock the viewer, but are aesthetic in their own right. Roots/Routes, a collaboration of four Pune-based artists portray the individual artist’s journey in mediums as varied as ceramic, video, sculpture and painting.
The ABC (Art by Children) programme engages 5000 children from across 100 schools in Kerala. It provides a platform for children to engage in high quality visual and performance art and will surely ensure that the rich legacy of the Biennale is kept alive and developed through generations to come. The selection process for the curator of the 2018 edition of the Kochi Biennale is already underway. There is talk of a women being chosen but no one knows as yet. What is certain, if Biennale 2016 is a benchmark, is that it is sure to be another exciting and event of global art standards, where boundaries are pushed and fresh perspectives created.
Outside of the formal Biennale experience, or indeed as a ‘collateral’ experience, there is a plethora of things to do and see, and fantastic places to eat and stay. It is easily accessed from the international airport at Kochi, and getting around by taxi or autorickshaw is easy for first-timers. An overnight houseboat trip on the beautiful Kerala backwaters is highly recommended and can be combined with your visit to the Biennale. To fully immerse yourself in Biennale, allow yourself a week to visit. To avoid disappointment, book early and stay at Secret Garden, a fantastic, reasonably priced boutique hotel. It’s also worth enjoying a houseboat experience with Bay Pride Tours. I hope that this provides you with a taste of the joys that attending an international biennale can bring and that it whets your appetite for the Kerala Biannale in 2018. Elinor Seath In a quest to bring two of my burning passions (travel and art) together, I jumped on a plane bound for Marrakech to experience my first Biennale. I had a window of two days to enjoy the festival, and having experienced the madness that is Marrakech last year, I was keen to do some pre-trip homework to ensure I had a plan to enjoy the festival to its fullest. After talking with my friends and colleagues about my mini adventure, I was surprised to learn how few people knew what a Biennale was. So, if your one of those people here’s a little background... Biennales - A global celebration of art Biennales are international art festivals hosted by large cities across the world, and are typically held every two years. Currently, there are 46 countries that stage Biennales. Typically lasting over 12 weeks, they provide a platform to showcase international artists, attracting thousands of visitor, which provides a great boost to a city's tourism. While it's good to have a plan, my pre-trip planning and what actually happened in Marrakech were two very different things! When I had initially conducted my research, the website for the Marrakech Biennale wasn’t that easy to navigate and sadly, I didn't fare much better navigating my way around Marrakesh, so what I saw happened quite by chance, which added to the drama. I am pleased to say the website is now much more coherent. The Biennale can be felt throughout the city with museums, hotels and galleries hosting exhibitions and workshops under its working title NOT NEW NOW. Despite reading the explanation for this a number of times, the meaning still eludes me, so you I’ll leave you to work that one out for yourself! There are three main exhibition sites and I was lucky enough to stumble upon Palais El Badi, a vast ruined palace. Here 22 international artists were invited to create a site-specific piece responding to the history of the palace and the ruins that are now left.
As I stepped back out onto the streets of Marrakech, senses heightened, I became more aware of the art around me - even the local plumber promoting his services seemed like art to me and reminded me of a piece I’d seen in the Palais El Bahia. Over the course of 24 hrs, I had seen a mind-boggling variety of art from incredible photos of Jamaa El Fna, the main square in the medina, to a 'pimped out' photo booth where you were invited to share your stories, it all intermingled to create a fascinating experience.
Bringing together art and travel, a Biennale is a fantastic way to learn about a new city and enhance the visitor's experience. I love that art is a safe space to explore some really challenging issues we face in the modern world, allowing others to open up debate in a unique way. I think I have found my calling - Biennales here we come! So, if you're looking for a weekend in a fascinating city and you want to see some art – get yourself to Marrakech before the first week in May – you won’t regret it. |
Arts, Culture & Entertainment
All
Archives
July 2020
|