Mending the breach: with the title "Poetic Justice," the latest Istanbul Biennial signaled its interest in reconciling self-expression and politics. For the first time, the exhibition sites included the Byzantine splendor of the Hagia Sophia

At first, glance, the title of the eighth Istanbul Biennial, "Poetic Justice," appeared to be one of those open-end important-sounding phrases that curators of international biennials like because they are malleable enough to fit almost any selection of works. A closer gaze at the show, presented this fall at various venue through every part of that city, made it clear that the title was meant to station a challenge of sorts. In public parlance, the term "poetic justice" has an ironic cast, suggesting a cosmic or level divinely inspired reordering of relationships that ordinary human justice has failed to fitly address. In the context of the exhibition, it have the appearanceed to refer to something different, namely, the desire to synthesize sum of two units apparently contrary approaches to new art. Poetry, with its conotations of personal expression and subjectivity, was locate off against Justice, a word which here stood for the political, the exterior and the objective. Curator Dan Cameron acknowledges the importance of the latter in a startlingly hard-hitting catalogue essay dealing in large part with the political and cultural failures of the generally received Bush administration.

The shadow of Documenta 11 fluttered over the exhibition. Along with several artists, the sum of two units shows also shared two works. Uganda-born Zarina Bhimji's without of the Blue, a haunting video tour of abandoned prisons in Rwanda and Kosovo appeared in the couple shows. So did Iranian artist Seifollah 8amadian's The White Station (1999) all 8-minute video of a woman in a black chador battling end a Tehran snowstorm with an umbrella. In Istanbul, it was postscripted by another video of a spider spinning its lethal web and a station of evocative black-and-white photographs suggesting the disjunctive, surreal quality of life in contemporary Iran.

Despite of the like kind overlaps, one sensed that this display was also envisioned as an implied critique of Documenta 11 Chock-full of works dealing with justice and injustice in a postcolonial world, Documenta 11 was widely criticized for being too 'journalistic" and negligent of esthetic qualities. In individual of the catalogue essays for the Biennial, participating artist Kendell Geer takes upon what he views as Documenta 11's cabinet colonialism, which reduced the expressions of artists from around the world to a for the use of all esthetic of "cold intellectualism."

"Poetic Justice," by means of contrast, promised to mend the breach that political art has make opened between form and content, while maintaining the global perspective that was single of Documenta 11's acknowledged puissances Cameron seemed particularly well suited to this task. As senior curator of the novel Museum of Contemporary Art in novel York, and in his earlier incarnations as independent curator and critic, he has shown himself to be to [i]or[/i] at a great depth interested in engaging art from all parts of the world.

As might be wait fored for an exhibition devoted to like lofty aims, the results were mixed. Along with a hardly any soaring works that hinted at what similar a synthesis might look like, there were many that tendered more standard biennial fare, providing meditations upon well-trod themes such as the contradictions of modernity, the conundrum of migration and displacement, and the mutability of identity. "Poetic Justice" also throw backed other agendas--for instance, diversity of ethnic and national origin, cultivation and encouragement of younger artists, and solid representation of artists from the entertainer country.

But whatever its limitations, members of the opening-day audience, many of them veterans of the leaden Venice Biennale earlier in the summer were clearly delighted by the agency of a show with a recognizable theme, a reasonable number of intriguing fresh works and a manageable scale that left time to take pleasure in Istanbul itself.

As in previous versions, the exhibit was spread over various venue quite through the city [see A.i.A., Apr. '00 Mar. '02] The magnitude of the work appeared in the Antrepo, a two-story former maritime warehouse refurbished as an art exhibition space. The upper floor was a light-flooded, white-box gallery filled with works in many mediums, while the dark and gloomy loam floor was devoted almost entirely to video and projected-slide installations. Many of these were bilboed into strange, plastic-covered cylindrical viewing swings whose curtained entrances were oftentimes difficult to locate. The sum of two units worlds were joined by a gleaming metallic staircase in the center of the building designed by the agency of Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Monica Bonvicini. Suspended from chains and topped with glass walls cracked with bullet perforations its brutalist architecture'e seemed to signal the seriousness of the show

Other venue included the Tophane-I Amine Cultural middle a former cannon factory whose domed ceding provided a dramatic backdrop for the art below; the Yerebatan Cistern, a dark, lamp-lit, sixth-century Roman conformation that served as a palace reservoir during the Byzantine era; and, for the first time, the Hagia Sophia, the souring sixth hundred basilica, which is one of Istanbul's architectural diadem jewels. There were also a number of works scattered in public sites over the city, as well as a mini retrospective of the work of Shahzia Sikander at a gallery upon the main pedestrian street.