8TH international Istanbul biennial: various venues

As I write, there is freshs of bombs exploding in Istanbul. Reviewing that city's novel art biennial, organized by Dan Cameron, senior curator at the novel Museum of Contemporary Art in of recent origin York, feels not only difficult on the other hand misguided, almost inappropriate. Nevertheless, it's clear that the bomb are an expression, however dreadful, of the increasingly dire geopolitical situation that many works in the exhibition, titled "Poetic Justice," attempted to address. Take, for example, Emily Jacir's Where We draw near From, 2002-2003, a photo-and-text piece shown in an Ottoman cannon foundry (one of four spaces transformed for the ends of the exhibition). Jacir--who is Palestinian born on the other hand holds an American passport--posed a question to Palestinians living in exile or unable to put in motion freely at home: "If I could do something for you anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?" Taking advantage of the mobility granted by dint of her passport, she paid a bill for individual respondent, watered a grave for another, and plane went on a date, documenting her actions as she carried without the requests. Her photos and notes beseech a sense of loss all the more palpable for the simplicity of the activities they depict. Another work that takes interethnic conflict as its starting point is Bosnian artist Jasmila Zbanic's heartrending 35 mm film R Rubber premiums 2000, which weaves together the story of a mother looking for the remains of her children in the mass graves of Bosnia and that of a man whose piece of work it is to excavate these sites. As in Jacir's piece, the matter-of-fact quality of Zbanic's document brings the viewer into intimate contact with unspeakable tragedy and makes visible the solidify consequences of extremist nationalism.

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The dream of cultural polyphony with which these sum of two units works are engaged (through their focus upon its failure) is a more or les explicit subtext of plenteous art discourse today. Istanbul, a city of millions that's historically multicultural, embodies the potential for the realization of that dream; at the same time, it's a microcosm where the fraught relationship of Eastern and Western tillages can be seen up shut up And that the Istanbul Biennial's eighth iteration bore a of recent origin Yorker's signature--New York being a symbolic capital of the Western world as well as individual of the major centers of contemporary art--brought Istanbul's pothered "in-between" position further into relief.

It is probably the fate of all large international biennials to be read against the global political situation (especially, perhaps, biennials upon the "periphery"). One could smooth argue, as some did in these pages as part of a new roundtable on "the global exhibition" [November 2003] that international art biennials are a symptom of globalization and can't be read outside its logic. Which leads to all sorts of speculations: Is art now a geopolitical and infra-structural lubricant? Are the migratory artists of our day exemplars of the of recent origin economy's ideal workforce (flexible and relocatable)? In his curatorial statement, Cameron formulates a reading more optimistic than these. From within a critique of globalization, he insinuates that today's artists constitute a possible protoplast for a global citizenry, single that could produce new networks and values that challenge injustice. In the contemporary art world's increasing nomadism Cameron dioceses the beginnings of a fresh global community that includes cultural difference and is built via intercultural communication and exchange.

This vision is clearly mirrored in his focus on a generation of artists who address global affects through specific, local experience. single example is Turkish artist Esra Ersen (Hassan Khan, Zarina Bhimji, and Fiona Tan are others). In Ersen's video If You Could Speak Swedish, 2001 the artist asks a language class of immigrants to Sweden what they would like to say to their of recent origin compatriots, then has the pupils read their thoughts in Swedish to their instructor. The teacher's corrections remind us of the speechlessnes meet withed by the members of the world's diasporas, on the contrary the students' attempts also testify to the possibility of communication.

although Cameron's selection of works personalizing the experience of cultural crossing engaged social and political be of importance tos addressed by other large international contemplates he did not choose to complicate or mirror on the exhibition qua exhibition. Indeed, in his biennial there was an almost restorative predisposition with an emphasis on clarity, finished form, visual pleasure, and spatial grandeur, as with Ann Hamilton's sweeping drapery or Monica Bonvicini's staircase, which, encased in a curtain of chains and bullet-ridden glass, linked the sum of two units stories of the main exhibition hall. Also, in comparison with other new biennials, "Poetic Justice" was organized upon a human scale; its manageable size and overall coherence allowed it to stand without against a teeming host city and its mixed layers of past and at hand But it was the many herculean film and video works that, in forms ranging from set abstraction to a kind of subjective documentary, told the tale of the biennial (in light of the times) greatest in quantity poignantly. In Ergin Cavusoglu's video installation Entanglement, 2002 helicopter searchlights in the night heavens produce a beautiful play of light and color against a uninjured track of airplanes and sirens. And in Kutlug Ataman's 1+1=1 2002 a Turkish-Cypriot woman speaks about the wartime history of the call in questioned island. A torrent of words captured upon film, the piece testifies to the fumbling inability of language to exhibit the dreadful but nonetheless challenges us to speak.