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15th Istanbul Biennial, 2017

Marco Marcon
Eyeline 88
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I suspect that by the time this article appears in print, many art reviewers will have publicly bemoaned the ‘self-censorship’ affecting this Istanbul Biennial, A Good Neighbour. While the issue is a real one—Turkey is going through a very troubling political phase, the ramifications of which are felt across all sectors of civil society—Western preoccupation with artistic freedom in non-Western countries may be somewhat misplaced. Censorship is an extremely serious problem for the media, academia and political debate, but how much does it damage art? All great masterpieces of European art created before the 19th century have been produced in societies in which it would have been dangerous to publicly express heretical political or religious opinions.

It is true that dictatorships of the paranoid kind, such as regimes in which dabbling in abstract painting is enough to get you into trouble, drive genuine art underground. But the success of this small biennial demonstrates that in countries ruled by ‘merely’ authoritarian governments it is still possible to produce important art and beautiful exhibitions. If anything, A Good Neighbour shows that although commitment to making explicit ideological statements is understandable, even admirable, it is not always conducive to the creation of artworks that transcend the immediate urgency of local political situations.

 

As former participants in many large international exhibitions, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the Danish artist duo who curated this exhibition, have experienced firsthand the distortions created by over-ideological curatorial plans. Like other artists-turned-curators, they do not suffer from the kind of creativity envy that often drives professional curators to contrive pseudo ‘artistic’ exhibition rationales. On the contrary, they have created an exhibition that respects the individuality of the artworks... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Adel Abdessemed, Cri, 2013.

Adel Abdessemed, Cri, 2013. Ivory, 138 x 111 x 60cm. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe. Photograph Sahir Uğur Eren.

Erkan Özgen, Wonderland, 2016.

Erkan Özgen, Wonderland, 2016. Still, single-channel HD video, 03:54min. Courtesy of the artist. Presented with the support of SAHA – Supporting Contemporary Art from Turkey. Photograph Sahir Uğur Eren.