The 18th Istanbul Biennial has opened under unprecedented political pressure, with artists and cultural figures walking a careful tightrope in Turkey's increasingly repressive environment. The exhibition, titled "The Three-Legged Cat," runs through November 23 in what has become the most subdued and clandestine version of the internationally renowned art event.
Two outstretched plaster hands wrapped in golden barbed wire serve as a powerful metaphor for the current state of the arts in Turkey. The sculpture "Selfmade" by artist Mariana Vassileva, displayed at Istanbul's Arter art museum, dates back to 2011 but could hardly be more symbolic of today's artistic climate. The piece is part of a smaller exhibition titled "Under Pressure Above Water," featuring just 33 works by 15 artists, curated by Istanbul-based Nilüfer Şaşmazer.
The wrapped hands symbolize both the restricted reach of existence and the danger of getting hurt, while simultaneously representing the ability to skillfully navigate dangerous circumstances. Istanbul has become one of the most dramatic examples of this artistic balancing act, with barely a day passing without arbitrary arrests or artists being charged by prosecutors. Despite this climate of fear, daily life continues with exhibitions and festivals opening and the city's rooftop terraces remaining crowded.
The crackdown on artistic expression has intensified dramatically in recent months. In early September, pop singer Mabel Matiz was charged with obscenity for describing a love story between two men in his song "Perperişan" (Exhausted). Ayşe Barim, owner of a PR and artist agency, was suddenly labeled as an accomplice in the 2013 Gezi protests. The girl band Manifest faced charges of indecent and unchaste acts as well as exhibitionism after a concert in Küçükçiftlik Park. Screenwriter Merve Göktem was accused of supporting prostitution and inciting crimes over an interview about her series "Naked."
Given this hostile environment, it borders on miraculous that the 18th Istanbul Biennial could open at all and continues to run. While the art event, founded in 1987, is a private initiative financed by the Istanbul Foundation for Arts and Culture (IKSV) of the Eczacıbaşı industrial family, which also owns the Istanbul Modern museum at the upscale Galataport Mall, it cannot operate entirely without state cooperation.
The systematic targeting of opposition figures has severely impacted the biennial's operations. Last year, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu from the opposition CHP party was arrested along with half the city administration under the pretext of corruption, leaving the biennial without many municipal contacts. This August, İnan Güney, the district chief of Beyoğlu where the biennial takes place, was detained. Two days before the opening, Hasan Mutlu, the district mayor of Bayrampaşa, was also imprisoned – marking him as the 17th district mayor of the metropolis to be jailed, all from the CHP.
This massive depletion of the opposition environment may explain why this biennial became the most inconspicuous and restrained edition of an event known for its political stance, experimental spirit, and spectacular settings. Gone are the days when Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in 2015 had sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas install a surreal bestiary of fiberglass sculptures on the beach in front of the villa on Büyükada island where Leon Trotsky once spent his time in exile. Or when the Croatian curatorial collective WHW transformed the 2009 biennial into an agitprop happening.
The city barely advertised the event with posters. Visitors had to search extensively to find the eight venues, such as Zihni Han, an old shipping office at the harbor, or Külah Fabrikası, an old ice cream cone factory hidden behind a smeared iron door among the sea of tourist establishments in the gentrified harbor district of Karaköy. The unspoken directive of the biennial organizers seemed to be: don't stand out or provocatively challenge the status quo.
However, this restraint doesn't mean the biennial has become tame. Curator Christine Thomé's choice of the cat – Istanbul residents' favorite animal – as the motto for the 18th edition wasn't a retreat into coziness, but rather symbolized the mixture of playfulness and resistance. When the curator, born in Beirut in 1964 and shaped by Lebanon's experiences of violence, emotionally dedicated the show at its opening to all victims of war and tyranny, it was clear she also meant the country where she was currently working.
Thomé's naming of the biennial "Three-Legged Cat" referenced not only the three phases of the biennial, which for the first time extends until 2027, but also served as a hidden image of an art scene with a handicap. Despite strong words at the opening, the political elements in Thomé's exhibition often come indirectly, hidden in stories, unlike the more direct approach seen in the Arter museum exhibition where Alicja Kwade presents an extremely bent wooden palette as an abstract symbol of tense existence under political pressure.
The indirect approach is evident in seemingly idyllic embroideries by Jagdeep Raina that address the fatal consequences of agricultural industrialization in Pakistan, or in Pilar Quinteros's work processing ideas of resistance, renewal, and the loss of collective memory through a sculpture that tells the story of the vandalization of Muzaffer Ertoran's 1973 "Worker" statue in Istanbul's Tophane Park.
The ability of this clandestine spirit of aesthetic resistance, which Thomé stages as inconspicuously as possible, to inspire or change conditions seems more difficult than ever. The window of opportunity for critical art in Turkey to subvert national iconography and promote democratic and multicultural change closed definitively with the suppression of the Gezi protests in 2013.
Today, critical art is tolerated as a niche existence, even though more museums and art spaces than ever exist along the Bosphorus. With nearly 500,000 visitors per edition in a 16-million metropolis and a society that consumes TV series like Turkish delights, art remains further from mass impact than ever. The ongoing brain drain of aesthetic intelligence and flight to the West reinforces this loss of artistic influence.
Despite these challenges, Thomé continues to take risks. She boldly presented Elif Saydam's plastic strips printed with colorful ornaments that symbolize the alternating inclusion and exclusion that sexual deviance faces in Turkey. The response came promptly: just days ago, President Erdoğan, who has taken a hard anti-LGBTI stance, proposed legislation threatening transgender people and same-sex couples with imprisonment.
Thomé's biennial is not apolitical, but in most of the works she displays, the defensive and veiled approach dominates. This is evident even in her placement of Simone Fattal's sculpture pair "Warriors" in the old Greek elementary school in Karaköy, which opened in 1888 and was converted into an exhibition hall in 2015. The two archaic clay figures by the Lebanese sculptor express experiences of resistance and resilience from the civil war years of 1975 to 1990.
Those seeking a more powerful image of escape from highly compressed conditions of oppression might find it more readily in the Arter exhibition, which captures Thomé's motto of "self-preservation and futurity" more strikingly than the biennial itself. In his photographic work "Diamonds," artist Nasan Tur has managed to shatter a material that ranks among the hardest in the world. In the print, a diamond bursts like a supernova into thousands of splinters, transforming the symbol of power, wealth, and exploitation into a universe of beauty at the moment of its destruction.
