İnci Eviner To Represent Turkey At 58th Venice Biennale
By HG Masters
The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) announced on March 22 that a new installation by İnci Eviner will be featured in the Turkey Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. An influential professor and artist in Istanbul, Eviner is known for her drawings and paintings in ink and acrylic that depict fantastical human-animal creatures, and for her multimedia videos and installations that feature performers engaged in absurd gestures and ritualistic actions. Her works address subject formation, gender and sexuality, and many of her works can also be read as analyses of the current political climate in Turkey.
Eviner was the subject of a major solo retrospective at Istanbul Modern in 2016, “Who's Inside You?” curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu, and created new installations for Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), Aichi Triennial 3 (2016), Istanbul Biennial in 2013 and 2005, as well as the 1997 Venice Biennale. Eviner won one of the Sharjah Biennial Prizes in 2017 for her animated video tableau Beuys Underground (2017). Her works have been exhibited at museums including the Drawing Center in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Madrid and Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille.
The pavilion will be curated by Zeynep Öz, who co-founded the art education nonprofit Spot, and curated three editions of the “Produce” exhibition series, which commissioned many new projects by younger artists. Öz was a co-curator of the third Aichi Triennale in 2016, and organized the Istanbul off-site exhibition and performance program for Sharjah Biennial 13 in 2017, which similarly featured many newly commissioned works and projects.
The 58th Venice Biennale runs from May 11 through November 24, 2019, and will be curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery.
HG Masters is editor-at-large forArtAsiaPacific.
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