8th International Istanbul Biennial
The title character in Umberto Eco’s recent and rapturous epic, ‘Baudolino’, is at once soldier, poet, lover and fabricator of truths. In the opening pages, amidst the onslaught of the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Baudolino rescues Niketas, a Byzantine historian and court official. Eco writes
Finally they were at the foot of the steps. Niketas found the torches, and the two men, holding them high above their heads, proceeded down a long passage, until Baudolino saw the very belly of Constantinople, where, almost directly beneath the greatest church in the world, another basilica extended, unseen, a forest of columns stretching infinitely into the darkness like so many trees of a lacustrine wood, rising from the waters.
‘The city is pierced by cisterns’, Niketas said. ‘The gardens of Constantinople are not a gift of nature but an effect of art. You see?’1
Eight centuries after the Crusades, Istanbul suffered another onslaught with a series of bombs in the city’s heart that snatched sixty-two lives. These attacks occurred in late November during the closing days of the Biennial. Initiated in 1989, the Biennial is one arm of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts—an independent cluster of cultural festivals of film, theatre, music, jazz and visual art. This Biennial was entitled ‘Poetic Justice’. Yet, rather than exemplifying a moralising tone on the idea of virtue triumphing over vice, much of the art rested with the idea of a contemporary poetics pressing alongside a pursuit of justice and dignity, often in the face of immense turmoil. If art and life are as inseparable as we believe they are, where is the place of art in... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline