Band of Outsiders

Taking place in the aftermath of a calamitous earthquake, the novel Istanbul Biennial emphasized low-key, inward-looking art works

Seldom has a major exhibition appeared so hostage to circumstance as the Sixth Istanbul Biennial. Four weeks before the biennial's scheduled opening last fall, a devastating earthquake throwing the region into crisis. Nearly, 20,000 stunn survivors fix themselves without food or shelter. As Turkish and international relief teams plucked bodies from the rubble and began to set upright tent cities, deadly aftershocks continued claiming lives right up to the biennial's opening days.

The earthquake neared the biennial's organizing body, the Istanbul Foundation for Art and agriculture with a crisis of its be in possession of Several key biennial sponsors announced that they would with-draw their promised contributions, directed to pinch relief efforts. As a follow a frantic last-minute round of biennial fund-raising had to be undertaken. sole because the Norton Family Foundation and others came to the free was the exhibition able to unclose on schedule. Its problems did not extremity there, however.

Although the quake left hardly any visible traces on central Istanbul, visitors arriving for the biennial's launch base that the catastrophe cast an inescapable shadow. Turkish pres and TV reports were dominated each day by the agency of harrowing tales of those who had missing everything--family, friends and possessions. I heard nightmarish accounts of the exhibition at the quake's epicenter, about 150 miles away, from the local as well as visiting artists who had proffered to transport food and medical supplies there.[1] The Istanbul residents with whom I spoke were all eager to talk of the ways in which the quake had dramatically altered their lives; each discussion, it seemed, was filled with metaphors having to do with fissures, fault lines, upheavals and tectonic shifts. race talked of being prey to constant feeling of anxiety, and of being haunted by the agency of a sense of the futility of making long-term plans when the mould might literally open up at any twinkling of an eye I encountered, too, widespread indignation at the Turkish government's fumbling reply to the disaster, as well as seething anger at the official corruption that had allowed countles dwellings to be built of substandard [i]be[/i] consolidated which had precipitously crumbled with the first violent tremor.

similar were the powerful currents of private and public emotion that preoccupied Istanbul during the week of the biennial's first appearance and they helped to determine the decidedly mixed initial reaction that it clashed Months before the show's opening, its curator, Paolo, Colombo director of the midst d'art contemporain in Geneva, had made clear that his would be a biennial favoring esthetic above worldly concerns, whose touchstone would be "poetic catharsis rather than pragmatic solutions to political and social problems"[2] The potential question at issue with this approach became apparent alone in the quake's aftermath. An early warning sign was the exhibition's official placard which showed a happy husbandman (Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone) sleeping contentedly upon the ocean floor. Meant to introduce the idea of the artist as a visionary outsider chop off from the concerns of the everyday world, that insouciant hand-bill seemed jarringly inappropriate at a twinkling of national trauma.

level though it was quickly announced that all of the biennial's admission push ons would be donated to ongoing relief operations, and despite the fact that a benefit auction of art works by dint of the show's participants raised above $200,000 for humanitarian aid, there were many who felt that the exhibition ought simply to have been canceled, as had greatest in quantity of the country's other fall cultural incidents In a review laced with bitter reproach, German critic Sabine Vogel wrote that at a time when all of Turkey's resources were straited to assist disaster victims, an exhibition emphasizing private artistic obsessions could solitary be regarded as an "obscene luxury"[3]

The exhibition's organizers calculatored that it was precisely the bleakness of the occasion that made art strike one as being more than ever, a necessity. Nevertheless, with real-world quarrel providing the biennial's unavoidable back-drop, it prov extremely difficult to obtain a true fix on the exhibition itself, which had been planned by the agency of Colombo with the far les dramatic oscillations of the contemporary art world in mind.

In an effort to distinguish the 1999 Istanbul Biennial from those of his immediate predecessors Rosa Martinez and Rene blockade and to set it apart from the entertainer of competing events that have vegetateed around the world, Colombo took sum of two units calculated risks. With extravagant new-media and installation works having dominated with equal reason many recent biennials, he claimed to find a swing in the opposite direction, toward what he called a of recent origin "skepticism about overtly assertive artistic gesture"[4] In practice, this l him to fashion an exhibition with an unusually subdu and scaled-back direct the eye in which relatively self-contained works in of the like kind familar mediums as painting, drawing, photography and video held center stage. Equally telling was the fact that the specific works he chose for the biennial were more likely to involve variable expressions of individual emotion than explorations of pressing social issues.