Power Ekroth

After internationally renowned figures like René Block and Rosa Martínez curated the biennial in the 1990s, and pioneers such as Beral Madra and Vasif Kortun laid a foundation for international exchange through institutions like Platform, Istanbul’s art scene emerged as a node in the global conversation. That banks and families served as patrons rather than the state granted these arrangements a fragile but essential freedom. The Istanbul Biennial is funded by the industrial Eczacıbaşı family and the entrepreneur Koç family. Both also run their own museums in starchitect steel and concrete temples: Istanbul Modern and Arter.

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With its 16 million inhabitants, Istanbul is the largest city in Europe. Though Ankara is the capital of Turkey, it is in Istanbul that the country’s most important cultural events take place. Istanbul is also the host of one of the world’s many biennials—but this one has earned a special reputation. Partly for the consistently high quality of art, and partly because it has long served as a place where art is permitted a certain degree of freedom.

This year’s biennial, however, has been marked by controversy. First, Defne Ayas was unanimously chosen by the board but was dismissed shortly thereafter. According to Art Newspaper, the decision stemmed from her work with Turkey’s pavilion in Venice in 2015, where the artist Sarkis and mention of the Armenian Genocide were included—a genocide the state still denies. When Iwona Blazwick, who herself sat on the selection committee, was appointed instead, the decision met with strong protests. The dual loyalty—both appointing and accepting the role—became too obvious. Blazwick withdrew.

**Christine Thomé at the press conference at the opening of the 18th Istanbul Biennial.**
**Photo: Muhena Kahveci**

Against that background, the appointment of Christine Thomé was a perfect match. Few are more dedicated than she is—a true curator of artists. Thomé’s background from Lebanon—a city marked by civil war, restricted democracy, and hardship, but also by a euphoric determination—seems tailor‑made for the Istanbul Biennial.

The title of her biennial, The Three-Legged Cat [reviewed by Sara Rossling here] can be read as a nod to former Uruguayan president Pepe Mujica’s three‑legged dog, but also reaches back to earlier editions (such as Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun’s biennial entitled İstanbul, 2005). As then, many artists were invited to work in the city for an extended period before the opening. The exhibitions were sited in existing buildings in Beyoğlu and Galata—neighborhoods with histories of migration, decadence, and gentrification—a walk that still carries traces of the “real” Istanbul.

This time the biennial also spans several years, through 2027, with the ambition of emphasizing process and collaboration rather than finished products. In terms of content, this edition more closely resembles WHW / What, How & for Whom’s What Keeps Mankind Alive? (2009)—WHW is also set to curate the next Skulpturprojekt Münster. But where WHW’s (leftist) political selection almost turned the curatorial team into the art world’s Michael Moore, Thomé avoids that trap. She alternates between works of explicit political content and works in which the political is more subtly embedded.

**Marwan Rechmaoui, *Chasing the Sun*, 2023-25.**
**Photo: Sahir Ugur Eren**

The work Chasing the Sun (2023–25) by Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui—also mentioned in Sara Rossling’s review—uses childhood games as a framework for investigating how societies are structured—and how hierarchies and violence are formed already in play. A large toy horse—a Trojan horse—forms the center of the work. It refers to “Grim Beeper,” a deadly Israeli operation in Beirut in 2024 when 1,500 pagers exploded simultaneously, killing 42 and injuring 4,000 indiscriminately. By linking the innocent façade of play to the logic of war, Rechmaoui creates a powerful political work, where seesaws, olive trees, and clouds serve as symbols of everyday violence and act as a lens to examine how societies form, and how social hierarchy and status are determined. Rechmaoui draws parallels between the structures of play and those of war, see the Studio Conversation with him here.

According to Thomé, the Istanbul Biennial is dedicated to all who have lost their lives in the conflicts and genocides that have shaped our contemporary world. Thematically it is therefore close to Hou Hanru’s title for his Istanbul Biennial in 2007: Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War. How can one continue to create—and live—in a time marked with suffering? In her opening speech Thomé reiterated that the audience should meet the works with joy and love. In contrast to Nicolas Bourriaud’s apocalyptic Istanbul Biennial The Seventh Continent (2019), she thus chooses not to get stuck in darkness. Her strategy is to offer a possible way forward, through solidarity and generosity—but also through the tactic of silence: where speech fails, one must be silent.

Documentation from Selma Selman’s performance Motherboards at the opening of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Modern. Camera: Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena

This tension, however, found a powerful crescendo in Selma Selman’s performance Motherboards during the opening days, where an anger encompassing the whole world was spat out, and an axe struck at civilization’s ultimate symbol: the motherboard of computers. See further filmed documentation also here.

Outside the Biennial’s Spaces

Outside the biennial’s realms one finds a very different rhythm: police and military mark their presence daily, with riot barriers along Istiklal—Beyoğlu’s main pedestrian street —and military planes rumbling over rooftops. They descend at low altitude, reminders that forces are always ready to intervene—against both internal and external threats. President Erdoğan’s brutal suppression of the opposition and rapidly rising inflation have created a pressure cooker.

Last summer, four cartoonists from the satirical magazine LeMan were imprisoned for the “horrible provocation” of publishing an image that appears to depict the prophets Muhammad and Moses. Erdoğan’s party called the cartoon an “Islamophobic hate crime,” even though the magazine apologized. Meanwhile, arrests of opposition politicians have become routine: days before the biennial opened, CHP mayor Hasan Mutlu of Bayrampaşa was arrested, shortly after his colleagues in Beyoğlu and Istanbul were taken away or put on trial. And in March 2025 the Swedish journalist Joakim Medin was imprisoned. He was given a suspended sentence for insulting the president and is also charged with terrorism—charges based on his journalistic work. He was released in May, but still awaits trial. What Swedish concessions allowed the release—or Turkey’s acceptance of Sweden’s NATO membership—remain unknown. The undertones of necropolitics, however, are hard to miss.

But despite the crisis, art in Istanbul is far from silenced. What the gallerist Levent Özmen recently called a permanent state of exception: “There are no normal times; we are always surrounded by crisis.” Rather than paralyze the scene, it has created a kind of hardened resilience.

Yüksel Arslan, Arture 167, Kapital XVI, 1972. Full drawing in the middle, details on the side. Currently on display at Istanbul Modern.

How can art continue to operate in a space where freedom of expression is not self‑evident and where authoritarian forces have taken hold? When the principle of arm’s‑length distance has been abolished and state art museums have played out their role, a vacuum arises in which art must find new forms. In this landscape many Turkish curators and artists over the past twenty years have chosen to leave the country—a quiet but unmistakable sign of how narrow the space has become.

Others, of course, have stayed. They have actively worked to create alternative spaces for artistic practice and conversation, often in indirect conflict with the logic of power—or in the rooms opened by private patrons.

So, the question becomes not only what forms resistance may take, but where it may emerge. Is it in the small, temporary contexts where art can still breathe—in studios, independent initiatives, on the street, or in the digital space? Or in the in‑between spaces between temples of capital and state surveillance?

In recent years old buildings like Union Française or Casa Botter have been transformed into cultural hubs, often run by the municipality but threatened by the same political uncertainty as everything else. The burgeoning scene therefore moves constantly—from the gentrified quarters of Beyoğlu to industrial zones in Maslak, studios in Sultanbeyli, or projects like PASAJ.

Istanbul in Extension

The same evening as Selman’s performance that somehow gave the pressure cooker a collective release, several civilians were killed in Gaza. The next day, the so‑called Gaza Biennial opened at Depo—an initiative curated by Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh, in premises associated with the imprisoned patron Osman Kavala. The parallel presence of a strong support for Palestine and a quiet repression of the Kurdish population reveals a complex double standard in the Turkish context—a tension which also affects artistic expression and interpretation.

Mike Bode in the exhibition *Dark World*, with the only remaining film poster with the original name of the film *Dark World.*

At Salt Galata, Mike Bode and Caner Yalçın present Dark World, a work they have collaborated on for many years, concerning film material shot during Turkey’s cinematic heyday in the 1950s. They explore the story behind Metin Erksan’s film of the same name from 1950s Turkey, originally intended as a social‑realist portrait of the folk poet Âşık Veysel. The film was shot in the spirit of social realism but underwent major alterations. Due to censorship decisions by the Central Film Control Commission and commercial/ideological interests from the producer, parts of the film were reworked to conform to the politics of rural modernization of the time. By focusing on the film’s fragmentary state and archival material, the exhibition highlights the logic of censorship, the conditions of production, and the ideological forces that shaped the film’s dissemination and character in mid‑twentieth‑century Turkey. See filmed conversation with Mike Bode here.

**Cevdet Erek in his exhibition *Us and Them*, Galleri Nev.**

Cevdet Erek, who for many years has worked with space, sound, measurability, time, and rhythm aesthetics as metaphors for society, shows a compressed and condensed exhibition at the private gallery Nev. The sculptural and sound‑based installation with the charged title Us and Them is built on the rhythms of the football stadium. Sounds from the “home stand” and the “away stand” collide in brief outbursts, symbolic collisions between identities. By placing the visitor outside the center of the installation, Erek points to how power forms boundaries—and how belonging is constructed both in the world of sport and more broadly in society. See conversation with Cevdet Erek here.

**Installation with a giant pompom in making as a means to discuss difficult things, part of the exhibition *We’ve Been* at the Tapestry Studio sinxe the 90s, Salt Beyoğlu**

At Salt Beyoğlu, sister institution to Salt Galata, the exhibition We’ve Been at the Tapestry Studio Since the 90s portrays the Tapestry (textile) Studio’s singular role at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. Founded in the 1970s and developed by Gülçin Aksoy from the 1990s onward, the studio grew from a little‑known room to a workshop where textile tradition met performance, feminist practice, and everyday life. Here, academic hierarchies were blurred, the doors opened toward the city. Yarn and weave became both materials and forms of thought, metaphors for exchange and collaboration. From this grew art collectives, fanzines, and street actions.

The exhibition at Salt Beyoğlu is both an archive and a reminder of how open pedagogy can become a space for resistance, community, and creative breathing room. What at first might seem like dry institutional historiography reveals itself to be potential dynamite. Perhaps here lies the answer: in the small and secret fissures, in the collective spaces where art can still breathe. In the textile practices at Tapestry Studio, in the residencies at Barın Han, in the independent spaces that refuse to give up despite inflation and repression.

It is in these spaces that the loving and generous strategy of art, as Thomé speaks of, becomes a living reality. These local and critical scenes constitute the real counterforce to the political pressure cooker. They may not need the biennial itself, but they use it as a friction surface to reach a wider audience and thereby create an expanded breathing space. Istanbul shows that art cannot be isolated from politics, but neither can it be reduced to it. It is both resistance and refuge, both everyday life and utopia, and an ongoing struggle to continue to exist.