review articl 110 artmargins 1:1 © 2012Kaelen Wilson-Goldie which warehouse, customs former door to another next Bosporus, the along edged twobuildings in venue floors or,a single rather, three concentrated in was biennial entire powderblue. The sparingly, and, were color-coded spaces that gray, white, of angular orderly an into grid works of the all slotted Associates), and Nishizawa and (Sejima SANAA firm of the Nishizawa Ryue by designed architecture, exhibition The themselves). or simply interviewed transcripts up dug archival curators the case which in died, had artist the (unless artists participating the with andinterviews sequence a essays of five quick with guidebook chunky produced asmall, Pedrosa and 2012), early Hoffmann until delayed was of which publication (the of acatalogue lieu In death. and violence show afireworks of in enough, suitably ended, and desire, and identity, memory, through proceeded abstraction, formalist with began which of sorts, anarrative was of work. There bodies singular and artists to individual devoted presentations of radial aseries arranged group shows, they thematic the apiece. Around artists dozen to two around a dozen of five exhibitions core show. organized of their They color the palette even and theme and structure, title, their determine and Gonzalez-Torres, effort late Felix their the to anchor artist, single work of the a used Pedrosa Adriano and Jens Hoffmann curators The on paper. plan exhibition an as it have looked perfect must Biennial, of the edition twelfth say about the oneWhatever might R evie of the 12th the w of I stan b ul Biennial ul Ka eln o Wils n- Go ldi

e Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf from Downloaded houses Istanbul Modern, a private museum. If viewers lost their way in the organized warren of rooms in Antrepo 3 or Antrepo 5, they could find it again in a neat maquette of the exhibition layout, on display in a dead space toward the back of the second building. In the months leading up to the biennial, the curators cut against convention by refusing to announce the list of participating artists until the opening day, arguing that to do so would have misled potential visitors and generated faulty preconceptions about the show. Pedrosa Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 stated in an interview, “We have an almost perverse habit of looking at lists. We look at a list and decide, based on that, whether or not to go. But a list always misrepresents a show. And we don’t think Istanbul needs that kind of marketing.”1 By keeping the list closed to public scrutiny, Hoffmann and Pedrosa argued, they also earned themselves more time to add and subtract from their formula and were able to keep their research fluid until the very end, without being locked into a fixed lineup. That said, their nondisclosure policy attracted enough attention, criticism, and antagonism—including an anonymous blog, http://untitledistanbul2011.blogspot.com, which appeared over the summer to piece the list together and make it public on a platform independent from the biennial’s organizational structure. This sug- gests that the curators’ policy was successful as a kind of low-key publicity stunt, which created anticipation and suspense in advance of a dramatic unveiling. Two months before the opening in September, however, Hoffmann and Pedrosa did announce the names of eight artists—all of them women—who would be given solo presentations in the biennial. Considering that the biennial was timed to coincide with the opening of a major new survey at Istanbul Modern, titled Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey, the announcement seemed to contradict the curators’ intentions by giving the impression, largely false, that the shows were complementary and anbul B iennial on some level equally concerned with femininity and gender, particu- t larly the gender imbalance of existing art histories. In fact, the twelfth Istanbul Biennial was more interested in masculinity and the lives of men, albeit with competing strands of brutality, delicacy, and desire. In retrospect, that last facet of the exhibition may have been the quietest and at the same time the most resonant echo sound-

1 Interview with Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, September

16, 2011. Wilson-Goldie | The 12 t h I s

111 112 artmargins 1:1 Photograph byMehmetCeylan. Antrepo 5,12thIstanbulBiennial.Courtesy IKSV. meaningful leakage, volatility, conviction, or risk. or conviction, volatility, leakage, meaningful to no room for little allowed curators the Istanbul, in that is format nial bien the of fortifying downside The of funding. mechanisms current and market the with relationship its at in ease fromspace, harm, safe art museum-like institutional, aregimented, in is Istanbul, in made decisions of curatorial range full from reasonably the one assume can frieze magazine eventfor of the the areview in noted astutely Smith Sarah-Neel where critic itback belongs,” the as art to “put that at was large, of biennials to debates purpose about the Man (1990) Soul to Empty Boy, Fragile Bad from Leonilson, of embroideries and paintings tender, absence; the evocative aten-year and after life one’s into back of alover tumbling vertigo emotional steep the ing convey video a (2010), Alright Be Will Everything Tomorrow Zaatari’s one; into Akram beds two process of turning the illustrating diagrams de Andrade’s1(2 1) 2em Jonathas in (2010), of photographs and aseries as works such in awhole, as evidenced as biennial the through ing (1991). But the overwhelming labor of the show, labor of the (1991). relevance its and overwhelming But the . And where it. And belongs,

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- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf from Downloaded In everything from the conception to the execution of the exhibi- tion, Hoffmann and Pedrosa showed a fierce commitment to redress- ing the excesses of the form—and toning down the ever-expanding, globally proliferating model of large-scale, perennial exhibitions track- ing international trends in contemporary art. Very few artists were commissioned to make new work, and many of the projects on display had been selected from recent exhibitions in the region, including Marwa Arsanios’s All About Acapulco (2010); Ala Younis’s Tin Soldiers Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 (2010–11); Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File (2010); and Taysir Batniji’s Watchtowers (2008) and Fathers (2006). Site specificity was virtually nonexistent. The curators established from the start that they had no interest in exploring Istanbul as a city, a set piece, or—as goes the standard cliché—a linchpin between East and West. Gone were the excursions of past editions to scour Istanbul’s urban environment for cisterns, bathhouses, billboard projects, open-air video screenings, a textile traders’ market, or an eerily abandoned school. With the possible exception of one work—Kutlug˘ Ataman’s jarse (2011), a copy of the artist’s medical record declaring him unfit for military service due to his interest in men—the exhibition barely touched on the dense, complicated, and deeply problematic matrix of politics and history in Turkey.2 In Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s show, examples of video art were sparse, scattered, and judiciously brief. Messy, sprawling, spectacle- driven installations were kept to a minimum. In place of polemics, the curators premised their exhibition quite precisely on a return to form. After a rash “of exceedingly political biennial exhibitions around the globe over the last two decades, in which aesthetic concerns have been given less consideration than the pressing political concerns of our time,” Hoffmann and Pedrosa, according to their catalogue text, tilted the balance back.3 Gone, too, was the tendency to give a bien- anbul B iennial nial exhibition a bombastic, catchall title. Drawing on the way Felix t

2 Anyone keen to explore those issues had an entire database of urban issues to contend with at Salt Beyog˘lu, which, over the course of the biennial’s two-month run, exhibited a bigger and better version of a long-term project initiated in 2008, titled Becoming Istanbul; where the Istanbul Biennial reaffirmed the fortitude, even the preciousness, of the art object, Becoming Istanbul moved beyond the edges of art proper to create a web of interdisciplin- ary, analytical research interests. 3 Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, “Introduction,” in The Companion to the 12th Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Arts and Culture and Yapi Kredi Publications,

2011), 23. Wilson-Goldie | The 12 t h I s

113 114 artmargins 1:1 León, Spain. the artistandGalerieSfeirSemler, Beirut,Lebanon.PhotographcourtesyofMUSAC, Akram Zaatari.Tomorrow Everything WillBeAlright,2010.Digitalvideo,12min.Courtesy and had become a city of import in terms of contemporary art. of contemporary terms in of import become acity had and map, on placed the been had arrived, had Istanbul that sion to announce occa an as biennial of the edition this used of reviews early A number refined. intellectually and sophisticated, tidy, politically smart, was time often messy, and incoherent, sprawling, anachronistic, this Istanbul Venice Where Venice the . so is exhibitions, enormous of all Economist Guardian The enough. concisely them described guidebook, accompanying the in essays brisk those like texts, wall minimalist but of afew the nial, bien the present in None Gonzalez-Torres by pieces of the actually was of Gonzalez-Torres. oeuvre the works in referenceapproximate to several work an or for aspecific named Gun)—each by (Death Untitled and (History), Untitled (Ross), (Passport), Untitled Untitled (Abstraction), group five shows—Untitled of the subtitles over the draped cop-out, of a something was 12), which Biennial (Istanbul Untitled exhibition their called Pedrosa and work, Hoffmann Gonzalez-Torres his titled As a strategy, this paid off. Soon after the exhibition opened, opened, exhibition the Soon after off. paid this astrategy, As compared it favorably Times mother to the Financial The and The The Both to date. Istanbul in biennial best it the called

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- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf from Downloaded As a set of tactics, however, few of the curatorial decisions were as novel, inventive, or unprecedented as they were made out to be.4 The third edition of the biennial, curated by Vasif Kortun in 1992, was similarly sited in a single venue. The sixth edition, curated by Paolo Colombo in 1999, hinged on a muse—the popular singer Dalgas, whose name roughly translates as “passion” in Greek and “wave” in Turkish—in much the same manner as the twelfth edition used Gonzalez-Torres for curatorial armature. As for striking a balance Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 between art and politics, the poetic and the political, none of this was particularly unique. It was problematic, however, in that it set out from the position that art and politics are realms that are separate and dis- tinct, not one and the same and all mixed up together. The exhibition effectively reduced the political contents, contexts, and conditions of production of contemporary art to variations on a style, and the biennial format to a series of popular typologies— among them modernist grids, historical passports, embellished books, redacted documents, and editioned posters. It ignored completely the political climate and the culture wars that informed Gonzalez-Torres’s practice and determined the elements of his (at the time necessarily coded) visual language. Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s exhibition concerned itself with the happenstance beauty of art that emerged from conflict, but it showed far less interest in the factors that ushered formal lan- guages into being—the totality of the Arab Spring, for example, was contained in a suite of rather traditional, mock historical paintings. For a show that was so confident in its embodiment of elegance and refine- ment, the biennial was also, paradoxically, something of a populist exercise and an inside job, a crowd-pleaser that could have little mean- ing to anyone without deep background knowledge of the participating artists or a willingness to leave the show and pursue his or her research elsewhere. Who loved it? Collectors, gallery staff from directors on anbul B iennial down, and critics in the mainstream press. Who loathed it? Other cura- t tors and specialist critics. Who remained deeply divided, even after the

4 The first “pre-event” of the biennial was the Remembering Istanbul conference, organized by Hoffmann and Pedrosa at Istanbul Bilg˘i University in November 2010. The curators of past biennials were asked to present their editions, for the purpose of historicizing the event. Their lectures are collected in the book Remembering Istanbul (Istanbul: Istanbul Foundation for Arts and Culture and Yapi Kredi Publications, 2011) and narrate a history of the biennial similar to the book Time Present Time Past (Istanbul: Istanbul Modern, 2007), which was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name that was organized to

coincide with the biennial’s twentieth anniversary. Wilson-Goldie | The 12 t h I s

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116 artmargins 1:1 artist. PhotographbyNathalieBarki,courtesyIKSV. Courtesy theartistandGallerySfeirSemler, Beirut,Lebanon.Photograph courtesythe Wael Shawky. Cabaret Crusades: TheHorrorShowFile,2010.Video,31min.49sec. Courtesy theartist.PhotographbyMehmet Celya, courtesyIKSV. Ala Younis. TinSoldiers,2010–11.Paintedmetal,12,500-soldier(figure)installation. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf from Downloaded biennial ended? Artists, primarily, whether they were in the exhibition or not. Is it possible to have a disappointing biennial full of promising art? Yes, when the curatorial conceit weighs too heavily on the works on view: when group shows merely hammer home the fact that a particular element is present in all of the works, or when solo shows are completely stripped of any information to anchor works in a place, time, oeuvre, or legacy. The twelfth Istanbul Biennial may have been Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 an exemplary exercise in exhibition making, but by addressing the excesses of the format so forcefully, and by offering up such a con- servative corrective, it raised the very real possibility that biennials in general have outlived their usefulness. With a different parenthetical, Untitled (Istanbul Biennial 12) could have been anywhere. Strip away the crisp architecture of concerns attributed to Gonzalez-Torres and you would be left with a boilerplate mix of familiar themes: history, memory, trauma, identity, and desire. Shuffle any number of artists, alive or dead, known or unknown, in and out of the show and you would effectively have the same show. There was nothing specific to root Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s exhibition in Istanbul. It could have been anywhere. Beyond its size, there was nothing to justify its existence as a biennial, as opposed to any other kind of institutional exhibition. Istanbul’s biennial was established in 1987, and over the past twenty years it has become one of the strongest among the art world’s so-called peripheral international events. It has also proven to be a critical laboratory for curatorial experimentation, particularly in 2005, when Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche chose the city itself as their theme and challenged the increasingly bland, homogenized nature of the biennial format by insisting on site specificity and rooting the event in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Galata and Beyog˘lu. Through that edition, and again in 2009 under the curatorial anbul B iennial direction of WHW, the Istanbul Biennial has also become an intriguing t platform of contemporary art practices in the Middle East. The event has always included a substantial number of Turkish artists, but it has put them more and more in dialogue with their peers from the Arab world, exploring the historical ties, artistic affinities, and geographical proximi- ties between them (Hou Hanru’s biennial in 2007 was an exception—of the ninety-six artists and collectives he selected, only three were born in the Arab world, and just one was still living there). Wilson-Goldie | The 12 t h I s

117 118 artmargins 1:1 exhibition was its attention to the labor of art—for those who make it and it and who make those labor of art—for to the attention its was exhibition of the facets enduring most of One the turns. nimble and took delicate but it also of propaganda, stuff the around It crashed complicated beast. a was biennial but WHW’s didactic, work overwhelmingly was the world. of Much the change could they thought curators the if as was It heavy-handed. and stubborn, loud, It brash, was program. political Opera Threepenny The Brecht’s musical from Bertolt alyric after Alive? Mankind What Keeps named exhibition, WHW’s life. twenty-first-century in fulfillment tive collec and personal of measure some find and occupation, resist tion, exploita expose of promises communism, lost the retrieve capitalism, of late inequities gross the redress could art prove—that pose—and to pro occasion an as biennial the used WHW collective Croatian the time, At that one, 2009. or memorable in last the as powerful as exhibition an off pulling time to have ahard job guaranteed was the took Whoever achallenge. themselves set Pedrosa and Hoffmann art. museum-quality good, generating politics of dire examples are disturbances such show,revolutions and other and the wars that through uncomfortably rumbles which thesis, the supporting than other conflict, the on position no took Lebanon—but south in resistance the involvedin from fighters photographs of letters Zaatari’s Akram checkpoints, and photographs of landscapes Halawani’sstark Rula homes, from demolished of Abu-Eiseh’s objects Bisan collection ports, father’s of pass his presentation Boukhari’s works on Palestine—Baha of number high astrikingly featured exhibition the For example, style. reduced to of place, place, any were again politics But the backstories. necessary) and relevant highly (often their in or couched contextualized Acapulco About Arsanios’s All in briefly, were regions raised, two the between historically have existed that migration) (via possible links The tastes. and interests curators’ the following intuition, and grace relative with axis East American–Middle aLatin explored Biennial Istanbul twelfth the Africa, North with dialogue” “in project conceived aEuropean as and Cartagena and Murcia held in was which of , edition last the After spread. geographical the or issue straining for the not forcing credit deserve Pedrosa and work. Hoffmann their region in the in life moreover, of and, everyday facets East addressed Middle from the came It is worth noting that in taking on the Istanbul Biennial in 2011, in Biennial Istanbul on the taking in that noting It worth is collectives and artists 40 nearly percent of the biennial, WHW’s In , but left unexplored, as none of the works on view were amply none as works on view of the unexplored, , but left , was conceived as a full-fledged, left-leaning left-leaning conceived, was afull-fledged, as -

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- - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 September 24 on guest by http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf from Downloaded engage it—as both a solitary struggle and a potentially regenerative act. WHW’s biennial also exposed a crucial contradiction, via the corporate sponsorship of the biennial, which provoked protests during the opening and instigated a great deal of soul-searching, among artists and curators past and present, about their complicity in the art world’s reliance on private funding that is never entirely innocent. Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s biennial smoothed over the rift. During a symposium about biennials as agents of social change, which was organized dur- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/artm/article-pdf/1/1/110/720084/artm_r_00006.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 ing the 2011 biennial but notably staged outside of it, the artist Nazim Hikmet Richard Dikbas¸ explained that in a city with only lackluster art schools, the Istanbul Biennial had provided an unparalleled alterna- tive education for generations of students. After the second research congress organized for the long-term project Former West took place in Istanbul last fall, the curator Övül Durmus¸og˘lu argued that what- ever the faults of such gatherings, carving out time and space for the development of discourse was critical in an art scene that otherwise did so only from biennial to biennial. If anything, Hoffmann and Pedrosa’s biennial made it clear that the discourse would be, could be, and perhaps should be elsewhere, in the infrastructure for debate and exchange that has grown up around and between the biennials over the past twenty-four years. The models for sustaining that discourse now are increasingly detaching themselves from biennials, their prolifera- tion, and their branding potential for cities and economic development schemes. They are finding more meaningful expression in other initia- tives such as research centers, project spaces, performance programs, and schools. There, the art need not remain where it belongs. anbul B iennial t Wilson-Goldie | The 12 t h I s

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