11th Istanbul Biennial

Last fall, What, How, and for Whom?, the Zagreb-based curatorial collective behind the 11th Istanbul Biennial, conducted a sort of séance, summoning up a historical ghost whom, it turns out, an exhibition of this size can only engage with in his vaguest form. The biennial was titled after a line in Bertolt Brecht's 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera (“What Keeps Mankind Alive?”). But Brecht's specific inquiry was less important to the exhibition than the broader principle evoked by the famous Marxist figure. As the curators asked, “Is it not possible to think of art the way Brecht understood theater – a mode of 'collective historical elucidation,' an apparatus for constructing truth rather than what amounts to a viewing feast for the bourgeoisie?”

Luckily WHW rooted this abstract inquiry in some solid typography and an unambiguous stance on the role of identity politics in international biennials. This year the Istanbul Biennial brand was all (communist) red and (anarchic) black, blocky lettering with Cyrillic leanings and the occasional star. The schema played on the curators' own regional affiliation (“just East of the West”) to emphasize the seemliness of their involvement in this equally “peripheral” endeavor. It's easy to knock this marketing device, but the simple question of regional affiliation is actually one of the primary ways WHW make good on their promise to “construct new truths.” (Image: VYACHESLEV AKHUNOV, FROM LENINiANA)

Even today, after the hybridity fest of the 1990s or more recent bombast about “globalization” (see: Hou Hanru's 2007 Istanbul Biennial), non-Western artists who trained outside the West, or who continue to live elsewhere, are rarely afforded the same status as (Euro-American) others at international biennials.1 “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” offers a compact statistical retort to these circumstances, reiterated in the exhibition guide, catalog, and a set of display panels: 11-IB artists by country of origin: From the West: 28%. From the “Rest”: 72%. 11-IB artists live and work: In the West: 45%. Elsewhere: 55%. These statistics are accompanied by an “upside-down” map where the former East becomes the West, now the starting point in a left-to-right reading of the world. (The map, too, is red-soaked to indicate biennial artists' origins). WHW are hardly suggesting that we hunt down a trove of undiscovered, non-Western artists as new fuel for the grandes expositions of the 21st century. The four-member, all-female collective – themselves a bit of a statistical anomaly – simply ask: What if someone actually did it, for once?

Hou Hanru's 2007 Istanbul Biennial, “Not Only Possible But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Time of Global War,” was both notoriously over-blown and under-whelming. WHW's Biennial is diametrically opposed: evidence that simple premises, realized well, can be revelatory. Artworks are shown in the massive waterfront customs depot Antrepo no. 3, a former tobacco warehouse in the historically European quarter of Galata, and an old Greek school which shut down in the 1980s for lack of students. A series of superlative “historical” works – spanning the late 60s through the early 80s – risk stealing the show. Made by artists like KP Brehmer, Cengiz Cekil, Nam June Paik, Michel Journiac, and Hans-Peter Feldmann, the older artworks, many on paper, are as concise, clear-eyed, and open to humor as the Biennial's proliferation of recent videos are lengthy and prone to taking themselves too seriously. But, by distributing multiple artworks by single artists across the exhibition sites, WHW avoid locking individual works into strict relational categories – “historical,” “contemporary,” or otherwise.

Five very short black and white films made by the Armenian artist Hamlet Hovsepian in the 1970s are spare, unexpectedly affective studies of quotidian gestures – yawning, scratching one's back, washing one's hair. Head (1975) frames the top of Hovsepian's head closely, anonymizing him as his hands work the lather around and around in a dark, viscerally evocative mass of hair. Close-up, body and action near abstraction: in its unceasing repetition, this quotidian act begins to feel decidedly bleak. Yawning (1975) is more lighthearted. Hovsepian – long-haired, in a suit cut for that era alone – sits in a chair facing the camera, docilely waiting for a yawn to come on. It does: contagion involves the viewer in the loop.

The contemporary works coalesce – or, equally tellingly, dissolve – around recurring figures like German artist KP Brehmer (1938 – 1997), who appears in all three venues. You'd assume Brehmer's graph- and map-based illustrations on the movement of armed forces in the Vietnam war, the price of zinc and potatoes in Germany, or the year-long changes in the “soul and feelings of the worker,” would be flatly boring in the face of flashier contemporary offerings. But Brehmer's hand-drawn works, made between 1968 and 1980, act as a critical yardstick for later ones of a similar conceptual persuasion, but more contemporary style of execution. In three pieces from 2009, Marko Peljhan reconstructs armed forces' movements on the day of a Bosnian massacre (Territory 1995); the artist pair Bureau d'études provides a global overview of the Administration of Terror, where a web of arrows track international intelligence operations from the 1950s onwards; and the duo Société Réaliste creates an impenetrable alphabet of international borders turned into ideograms (Ministry of Architecture: Culture States). Like Brehmer, these contemporary artists aim to visually convey the trajectory of vast amounts of goods, money, people, and power. Yet the contemporary, computer-generated “mappings” lack the simple legibility of Brehmer's hand-drawn work. If this is because the internet era has provided us so many ways to “plug” concepts in to image-makers and data-crunchers, one can't help but mourn the thinking- and design-time abandoned in the process. [Image: KP BREHMER]


In a video-heavy Biennial program, stand-out works are often videos. At Antrepo, Rabih Mroué's I, the Undersigned takes on the genre of the public apology. On one screen, Mroué, stoically facing the camera, enumerates a long list of things for which he is sorry, while a second screen features his statements in scrolling text. Mroué's apologies are couched in a sort of legalese and addressed to those whom he may have harmed (knowingly or unknowingly, in circumstances of any sort). Beneath his remorse lie the implied confessions to deeds whose dimensions we can only imagine. The precision of Mroué's statements slowly dissolves, eventually collapsing into one ongoing sentence which rings with futility: “words, words, words, words, words...” At the tobacco warehouse site, the Russian collective Chto Delat? also look askance at the empty symbolism of political rhetoric in a short, satirical operetta titled Perestroika Songspiel – The Victory Over the Coup (2008). Scenes of typical citizens gearing up to change the world by protesting in the local square alternate with musical interludes featuring a six-person choir. The choir's ironic choruses are at odds with the music to which they are set: “Pinochet! Pinochet!” is sung as a blissful soprano, “Chechnya! Chechnya! Chechnya!” appears as a resounding finale, and “Hatred for authority, that's the ticket!” sets the driving rhythm of a militaristic tune. At the Greek school venue, Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir's Beyond Guilt #2 (2004) encapsulates a disturbing conflation of masculinity and militarism in a documentary filmed in a Tel Aviv hotel room. Having invited a series of young Israelis to the hotel through an online sex chatroom, the two women proceed to interview them about their obligatory military service. The male posturing, displays of “weaponry,” and tangled attitudes towards sex and violence which emerge simultaneously make for riveting and uneasy viewing.

What would happen, the 11th Istanbul Biennial curators have asked, if one were to draw upon an unprecedentedly non-Western demographic to produce one of today's major international biennials? Actually, nothing wildly different. Nothing happens that wouldn't also happen at a well-installed, discerningly selected and historically grounded exhibition of contemporary artists from anywhere else in the world. As historian Omnia El Shakry points out in her catalog essay, contemporary non-Western artists are almost always presented as “localized,” “particular,” or driven by region-based problems which are specifically “Uzbek,” “Lebanese,” “Russian,” or “Turkish.” By integrating a significant body of non-Western artists into the 11th Istanbul Biennial, curatorial team WHW have shaken this standard. Some might argue that this is just another example of a Western contemporary art world's relentless hunt for fresh fodder to satisfy its appetite for the new. For better of for worse, the new “truth” WHW have begun to construct is one where not just a select few, but non-Western artists in general are capable of executing today's biennial requirements with aplomb: to embody “universal” themes which are of interest to a global audience.

Originally appeared in Bidoun magazine, NOISE issue, #19.