15th Istanbul Biennial: “a good neighbour” (Part 2)

Fourteen months ago, in the days immediately following the failed military coup d’état in Turkey, and just two and a half weeks after a terrorist attack by ISIS members on Istanbul’s main international airport on June 28, the 15th Istanbul Biennial, scheduled for September 2017, might have seemed like an unlikely possibility to many in the international art world. Yet I never had any doubts. In response to skeptical inquiries, I would always relay a variation of what the Biennial’s director Bige Örer had conveyed before: the Biennial would happen, no matter what. To their credit, in August 2016, curators Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset were in Istanbul, proceeding with their research with the team at the Istanbul Biennial’s parent organization İKSV (the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts), even as the country was still recovering from the shocks of the preceding months.

• Turkey