The 14th Istanbul Biennial the biennial will be a city-wide exhibition held in a variety of different venues. The press conference for the biennial held on Sept 2 at Istanbul’s Italian High School with the attendance of draft- person Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, İKSV Chairman Bülent Eczacıbaşı and Istanbul Biennial Director Bige Örer and also biennial sponsor Koç Holding Mustafa Koç
This year the 14th Istanbul Biennial, SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, which has drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev will open to the public from 5 September. The biennial has spread over 30 venues. The press conference was held at the Italian High School yesterday. İKSV Chairman Bülent Eczacıbaşı and Istanbul Biennial Director Bige Örer welcomed everyone. Bakargiev provided detailed information regarding the biennial. While creating the framework of biennial Bakargiev has focused on the thought and the concept of “saltwater”, “Bosphorus” and its currents going into opposite directions. Bakargiev also focuses on the history of Istanbul and Bosphorus and how the Bosphorus was made. It is know that the Black Sea was in ancient times a lake and the Bosphorus opened up about 2500 B.C. Bakargiev approach held Bosphorus as a passage as it means passage cow passage in Greek, as she said in an earlier interview with Irene Gludowacz in Parnass and CI Mag. She said, Bosphorus is a passage where things can crank, move or crack. In the same interview she said she wanted to refer to all these currents under the surface of modern Turkey. So that’s what she did in choosing the works and also selecting the venues. />
Adrian Villar Rojas, The Most Beautiful of all Mothers (2015)- Location: Büyükada
Bakargiev is very careful on choosing the words. She does not want people to call her as a curator but a draft person. That’s why during the press conference when someone has asked “how she selected the venues of the biennial,” Bakargiev said: “I have never used the word “select.” For her it is not politically correct to use the word select. Bakargiev also said the first venue she has decided to install a work is Trotsky’s house in Büyükada. “Orhan Pamuk told me that there is Trotsky’s house at Büyükada and I did not know,” she added. The same meticulous effort can be seen regarding the works of the biennial. The 30 venues are biennial are no coincidence. Each venue has been chosen attentively for the works that they are presented. The biennial will last until 1st November 2015 in over 30 venues on the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, from Beyoğlu to Büyükada, from Rumelifeneri to the old city and from Şişli to Kadıköy. Bakargiev also added, this is a citywide exhibition on the Bosphorus hovers around a material- saltwater- and the contrasting images of knots and wave.” According to Bakargiev, the exhibition looks where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon and to draw out. “It does so offshore, on the flat surfaces with our fingertips but also in the depths, underwater, before the enfolded encoding unfolds,” she said and added, this international exhibition of art will present new works by over fifty visual artists and other practitioners, including oceanographers and neuroscientists, in a city-wide project on the Bosphorus that considers different frequencies and patterns of waves, the currents and densities of water, both visible and invisible, that poetically and politically shape and transform the world. “With and through art, we mourn, commemorate, denounce, try to heal, and we commit ourselves to the possibility of joy and vitality, leaping from form to flourishing life,” she added.
Works at the biennial
The exhibition presents over 1,500 artworks, including commissions by artists as well as other materials from the history of oceanography, environmental studies, marine archaeology, Art Nouveau, neuroscience, physics, mathematics and theosophy, and some crystals that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev gathered with a friend at Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in early 2015. Works at the biennial range historically from an 1870 painting of waves by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who received a Nobel prize in 1906 for discovering the neuron, to the ground-breaking abstract Thought Forms of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater (1901-1905), a new work by Füsun Onur where a poem is heard on a moving boat, up to a cultural meeting point between Chicago and Istanbul by Theater Gates.
Exhibition venues for the biennial
Exhibition venues at the Galata-Tophane-Beyoğlu route are: SALT Galata, Vault Karaköy The House Hotel, Kasa Galeri, Galata Greek Primary School, Istanbul Modern, a floating boat on Bosphorus, DEPO, two garageson Boğazkesen Street and Çukurcuma Street and a store on Boğazkesen Street, the Museum of Innocence, the Italian High School, one of three fictional venues of the biennial French Orphanage, The House Hotel Galatasaray, a house on Bostanbaşı Street, Cezayir building, another fictional venue of the biennial Casa Garibaldi, ARTER, once the Anatolian Passage and now a shoe store FLO Building, Pera Museum, a room in the Adahan Hotel and the Adahan Cistern. Kabataş-Kadıköy-Büyükada route includes Tunca Subaşı & Çağrı Saray studio in Yeldeğirmeni, Kaptan Paşa Seabus, Büyükada Public Library, Splendid Palas, Rizzo Palace, Mizzi Mansion, Çankaya 57, and Trotsky House in Büyükada, and also Sivriada. The venues in Şişli-the Old City-the Northern Bosphorus route are: Hrant Dink Foundation and Agos as well as Hrant Dink Foundation and Agos – Centre for Parrhesia, Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam, Rumeli Feneri, and another fictional venue of the biennial Riva Beach.