![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/16-shooting-2_634521639022321330_main.jpg\" "\\"16-shooting-2_634521639022321330_main\\"")
<\/p>\nBy Kaelen Wilson-Goldie<\/p>\n
The Daily Star<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
ISTANBUL: Whoever took the job of curating the 12th Istanbul Biennial was guaranteed to have a hard time pulling off an exhibition as powerful or memorable as the 11th.<\/p>\n
Two years ago, the Croatian collective WHW used the biennial as an occasion to propose \u2013 and then try to prove \u2013 that art could redress the gross inequities of late capitalism, retrieve the lost promises of communism, expose exploitation, resist occupation and find some measure of personal and collective fulfillment in 21st-century life.<\/p>\n
WHW\u2019s exhibition, named \u201cWhat Keeps Mankind Alive?\u201d after a lyric from Bertolt Brecht\u2019s \u201cThe Threepenny Opera,\u201d was conceived as a full-fledged, left-leaning political program. It was brash, stubborn and heavy-handed. It was as if the curators thought they could change the world.<\/p>\n
Much of the work was didactic, but WHW\u2019s biennial was a complicated beast. It crashed around the stuff of propaganda, but it also took delicate and nimble turns. One of the most enduring facets of the exhibition was its attention to the labor of art \u2013 for those who make it and those who engage it \u2013 as both a solitary struggle and a potentially regenerative act.<\/p>\n
Now the curators Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann have stepped into WHW\u2019s formidable shoes. Their exhibition, titled \u201cUntitled (12th Istanbul Biennial),\u201d opened to the public Saturday as a literal and willful return to form.<\/p>\n
\u201cIstanbul has become important as a critical, experimental, research-based biennial,\u201d says Pedrosa, an independent curator based in Sao Paulo. \u201cFrom looking at the last few editions, there seemed to be an emphasis on art and politics, but there also seemed to be a certain disregard for aesthetic form,\u201d not only in Istanbul, he explained, but in a rash of other politically minded exhibitions taking place over the last twenty years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe way curatorial practice has developed, curators are bringing in other things to look at political issues through art,\u201d says Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. While others have turned to literature, philosophy, critical theory or an activist agenda, Pedrosa and Hoffmann have hinged their biennial on the sensibility of a single artist.<\/p>\n
Felix Gonzales-Torres, who died in1996, was known (and almost unconditionally adored) for his eloquent and ephemeral gestures. He made piles of candy and stacks of paper for people to take and keep. He put a photograph of an empty, unmade bed on a public billboard, strung up light bulbs, hung diaphanous curtains and placed two synchronized clocks side by side.<\/p>\n
Gonzalez-Torres left almost all of his works untitled, followed by parenthetical words or phrases that conveyed undercurrents of violence and sorrow. Some of the pieces were inconsolable, dealing with the illness, death and absence of his lover. Others pointedly critiqued guns in America, the Reagan Administration\u2019s criminal neglect of the AIDS crisis and the ravaging physical effects of the disease.<\/p>\n
None of Gonzalez-Torres\u2019 works are in the biennial itself \u2013 Pedrosa and Hoffmann argue that he constitutes \u201ca disembodied presence\u201d \u2013 but the show is named for him and structured around five actual or approximate examples of his work: \u201cUntitled (Abstraction),\u201d \u201cUntitled (Ross),\u201d \u201cUntitled (Passport),\u201d \u201cUntitled (History)\u201d and \u201cUntitled (Death by Gun).\u201d He has become, here, something of a fixed curatorial framework.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis works have a certain sensibility and elegance,\u201d says Hoffmann. \u201cThey don\u2019t punch you in the face and they aren\u2019t spoon-feeding you messages.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Istanbul Biennial has long been the most serious and professional event of its kind in the region. With the Sharjah Biennial looking a little unsteady, the Marrakech Biennale still untested and the Cairo and Alexandria Biennials in terminal decline (with or without a revolution), Istanbul may soon become the only one that counts.<\/p>\n
Fitfully, since 2005, it has also become a solid platform for artists from the Middle East. For this edition, the Ford Foundation gave the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, which organizes the biennial, a grant of $50,000 to support the participation of Arab artists \u2013 the argument being that no one else will.<\/p>\n
The greatest strength of \u201cUntitled\u201d is that it does not corral the usual suspects, and that applies equally to artists from the region. Mona Hatoum, Akram Zaatari, Wael Shawky, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are there, but so too are Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Marwa Arsanios, Ala Younis, Charbel-Joseph H. Boutros, George Awde, Rula Halawani and Shuruq Harb.<\/p>\n
Palestine is as ubiquitous a disembodied presence as Gonzalez-Torres.<\/p>\n
With five group shows and more than fifty solo presentations spread across three floors in two old customs warehouses, the biennial is remarkably self-contained. It feels institutional, refined, museum-like and controlled.<\/p>\n
Each of the solo artists is installed in his or her own room. Jonathas de Andrade\u2019s \u201cTropical Hangover,\u201d 101 photographs of Recife in Brazil coupled with 140 pages from a manic found diary that swings from sexual adventure to God and despair, fills a long and spacious hallway, giving the works room to breathe. Thirteen gorgeous photographs by Tina Modotti are pulled together in an intimate chamber. But overall, the layout feels uniform and systematic.<\/p>\n
The group shows are also incredibly literal with their themes. Walk into \u201cUntitled (History)\u201d and you find books and timelines and documents redacted to a decorative extreme. Walk into \u201cUntitled (Passport)\u201d and you find luggage, maps, visa application forms and, of course, passports.<\/p>\n
\u201cUntitled (Abstraction)\u201d is lined with modernist grids, whether made out of Mona Hatoum\u2019s hair or cut up stills from the film \u201cLasting Images\u201d by Hadjithomas and Joreige. The latter is problematic in that \u201cLasting Images,\u201d as a film, is haunting and visceral. \u201c180 Seconds from Lasting Images\u201d reworks the piece into wall d\u00e9cor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not every selection in the exhibition feels equally astute.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Pedrosa and Hoffmann\u2019s structure is certainly crisp and clever but it does not necessarily justify its own existence. It may be a beautifully made exhibition, but does it need to be a biennial? You could move it anywhere in the world, tour it like an enormous museum show, or break it down into a year\u2019s worth of programming.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
WHW may have been strident, but they took risks and staked out positions and courted the dangers of being na\u00efve, hopeful, furious, of claiming an urgency for art and failing to meet its challenges, of reviving a tired ideology instead of coming up with something new or unknown.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cUntitled\u201d is, by contrast, smooth, steady and heavily scripted. The show ends with bang in \u201cUntitled (Death by Gun),\u201d but it feels like a one liner.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You\u2019re in a room with Mathew Brady\u2019s photographs of dead bodies in the American Civil War, Weegee\u2019s photographs of dead bodies in New York, Eddie Adams\u2019 sequence of a street assassination in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are guns and bullets everywhere, along with Mat Collishaw\u2019s knife-wound as vagina-like bullet hole.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Goya\u2019s \u201cThe Third of May\u201d is replicated in clay figurines on the floor, a chalked-in toy train track looping figure eights around them.<\/p>\n
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On a screen in the corner, a little girl walks down a wooded path, playing hide and seek with two little twerps. One of them shoots her in the shoulder and she slumps to the ground. The video loops and you hear the shot over and over. Maybe the first time you wince. After that, nothing. It\u2019s just a cheeky, anodyne detail.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cUntitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)\u201d runs through November 13. For more information, please see www.iksv.org<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on September 21, 2011, on page 16.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Read more: <\/p>\n
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http:\/\/www.dailystar.com.lb)<\/p>\n
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