A Brief Note on the 18th Istanbul Biennial: “What the Mine Gives, the Mine Takes,” and More

On Saturday, the weather is shifting from warm to cold, with occasional showers adding a chill to the air. Saturday is the day to put your usual leisurely walks on hold. It’s time to use Istanbul’s beautiful infrastructure solely for pragmatic reasons. City lines, coastal walks, rail systems, window shopping on narrow streets, and dining establishments become merely instruments of pure necessity on weekends. Unless you subscribe to Futurism, delighting in crowds, chaos, speed, and cacophony. But for the author of this text, they are merely the necessary tools of necessity. This is probably also the case for the majority whose weekdays are ruled by work.

I recently dedicated a Saturday to one leg of the 18th Istanbul Biennial. After a cacophonous ferry ride, I disembarked at the Karaköy pier. My plan was to visit all the exhibition spaces along Kemankeş Street from start to finish, and then save time for the Beyoğlu and Meclis-i Mebusan legs later. That was my only plan.

Of course, there are other plans one could make before visiting an exhibition:

• Studying artist biographies,
• Reading texts about the works,
• Reading comments about the exhibitions on various platforms, etc.

However, when making these plans, you will weave a symbolic web of words, images, and gossip, clouding your judgment before even visiting the exhibition, and you will diminish the pleasure of the novelty that you can gain through visual contact in the space. The exhibition will merely become a proof of what you have read after having a similar experience to the critics.

One of the preparations that must be made before visiting the exhibition is mental preparation. In organizations such as biennials, although different “materials,” “shapes,” “meanings,” and “techniques” impose a sense of unity by connecting with the space and a set of theoretical texts, each work is actually independent, and each work has a high probability of forming the basis for a different story with you. Within this story, it is not only the work itself that matters, but also the space in which it is created and your experiences within that space.

In recent years, the decision-makers of the Istanbul Biennial have been aware of this. They are keen to exploit the concept of ‘space’ alongside the exhibits, ensuring they capitalize on the potential for dialogue between the audience, the city, society, heritage, and the artwork. They highlight the relationships between spaces and the city, their historical processes, and their heritage characteristics, with the aim of finding their counterparts in contemporary society. Consequently, the claim of the exhibited work is shared with different phenomena, increasing the bridges between the audience and the cultural organization. Istanbul’s historical and contemporary cosmopolitan structure has always been a useful foundation for this kind of construction, of course. However, the stories of the venues used are only revealed in the Biennial catalog. I did not encounter any work that engaged with the venue's heritage, image, or history. This situation has led to gaps between the historical and the contemporary. The impressions that can be drawn from this contrast are left entirely to the viewer’s experience.

Muradiye Han | Photo: Oğuz Alp Dedeoğlu

After this critical break, if I were to continue my random exhibition diary, I could start with Karaköy Square.

The Peninsula Hotel’s massing, cutting the shoreline like a transept in a claim of sacred ground, forced me to pass through the endless parking lot construction and the hotel’s dark green corporate-colored “Peninsula Edition” vehicles. While vehicles on the single-lane road and pedestrians squeezed onto the sidewalk continue to struggle, pedestrians wanting to change sidewalks are likely to feel anxious even on this narrow road. Because when crossing, a car can subtly nudge the pedestrian, subtly mobilizing the power dynamic between the pedestrian and the vehicle.

After crossing the sidewalk and walking ten meters, the first street opens up to two venues of the Biennial: Gallery 77 and Muradiye Han. Between these two facing venues, people sheltering from the rain, homeless people refreshing themselves with beer under the awning, tourists laughing in the Irish Pub, and fish sandwich vendors trying to attract customers have made the street quite lively.

I ran to Muradiye Han to escape the rain. It was smaller than I had expected. This small space consisted of **Anna Alenso’s sculptural machine**, video, and sound installations. The main installation of the exhibition, which focused on the realities of gold mining in Venezuela, was designed as a sculpture converted from machines used in gold mining. The gold washing process was depicted by dirty water flowing on a noisy, sloping conveyor belt. A bulldozer cabin placed next to it seemed to make this space, which was small enough for two people to stand in, even more cramped.

Anna Alenso, What the Mine Gives, the Mine Takes, 18th Istanbul Biennial, 2025 | Photo: Oğuz Alp Dedeoğlu

Alenso’s machine works, made from recycled metals, can be seen as a continuation of machine art that ironically addresses mechanization. Jean Tinguely’s musical machines made from scrap metal and his kinetic sculptures that build and destroy themselves, Rowland Emett’s sculptures based on his unusual satirical machine drawings, Panamarenko’s massive sculpture machines that straddle reality and the extraordinary, and Arthur Ganson’s fictions created with kinetic machines form part of the machine art canon. Although the intellectual origins of the theme of ecology in art date back to the 19th century, directly political and critical ecological art production began to emerge after World War II. Developments in the chemical industry, oil production, nuclear energy, atomic bomb testing, air pollution, and the automotive sector's mobility have created ideal opportunities for improving the quality of life in modern cities, making life easier and alleviating security concerns for people. On the other hand, the asymmetrical developments that occurred disrupted this smooth beauty. The deadly London fog, the pollution of rivers, the destruction of habitats from atomic bomb tests, mass killings, oil wars, and unregulated logging. Nature, humanity’s friend since the cave era, had now become the primary target of humanity’s systematic, tyrannical behavior. In fact, “man’s attempt to subjugate nature” and “disrupting the balance of nature” are terms used by those who do not know the true story. As James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, proposed in the 1970s, claims, nature is a living organism that reacts to renew itself. Alenso’s work also shows that, as we approach the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, nothing has actually changed.

So, what can we glean from Alenso’s work when viewed from a Turkish perspective? A scientific article published in 2000 argued that for nature to be restored, social acceptance and support are essential for such an initiative.

Turning to the biennial, Ali Akay mentioned in his series of articles on T24 that the biennial’s socially critical approach to current events prevails:

As curator Christine Thomé suggested at her first meeting, this biennial is a biennial focused on “the region.” As I wrote in my previous article, a regional geography is being highlighted. History is in the background, and rather than addressing the region’s history, the focus is on the present. It highlights the traumas of the people of the Middle East region today, outside of art history. Individual and collective traumas are the focus within the region.

If we focus on Alenso’s work, it is not far removed from the historical context. However, when evaluated in terms of location, it finds its place among the social reactions that have emerged from mining issues in Turkey. The negative tensions surrounding mining: lives lost in cave-ins, uprooted olive trees, polluted and depleted water sources, brown gashes on green hills, show the other side of this same geography. The sound produced by the constantly rotating belt breaks the silence of disasters and massacres, while the mud flowing over it shows that environmental transformations carried out with “good intentions” are nothing more than the filth that fills the “Gaia hypothesis.” This machine, which stands far ahead of its aesthetic and historical context, shows that the continuity of nature comes at a price. In fact, it is not ironic that this automatic machine is in a tiny gallery space. In the current state of affairs, it is impossible to know when and where nature will reveal itself. Exhibiting the installation in such a small space heightens the sense of danger posed by disproportionate power.

Speaking of the venue, I must say that I did not like the exhibition areas on the Kemankeş line among all the venues. Exhibitions are mostly open on weekends, and consequently, there is a crowd at the exhibition areas on these days. The narrow staircases that people struggle to navigate, along with the limited space allocated for staff at the entrance, are both challenging for employees and hinder visitors from entering and exiting the building. In this regard, Gallery 77 and Zihni Han, in my opinion, have failed. They should not be chosen again. If spacious indoor venues cannot be found, I believe squares, streets, and street staircases could be used. For example, in the US, trucks were placed along a closed street. The backs of these uniform trucks were converted into exhibition spaces. There are many solutions, but if “narrow” spaces were deliberately chosen, I would expect clarification on this matter. It’s quite easy to say these things without being involved in the organization, but it’s not difficult to imagine the difficulties that Istanbul’s crowds could cause. Otherwise, the repeated warning announcements to prevent damage to the artworks will have to be considered part of the exhibition.

In conclusion, I experienced the 18th Istanbul Biennial as a collection of works that were angry, aggressive, painful, and realistic. The video work depicting the gradual disappearance of the worker statue in Tophane can also be seen as a piece that reveals the concerns of this biennial. It was perhaps the only work connected to the surrounding space of the biennial venues, which were concentrated along the Karaköy-Fındıklı line.