By Nazlan Ertan
The word of the week is kedi, or cat, the agile, intuitive feline who is supposed to have nine lives. The Turkish word kedi ultimately goes back to Late Latin cattus (“cat”), with an intermediate form in Byzantine Greek gati (γ α τί, “kitten”) from which it passed into Ottoman Turkish as kedi.
So why is it the word of the week? Because of the Istanbul Biennial, the must-see flagship event of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) that continues until the end of November.
Admittedly, the 18th Istanbul Biennial, titled “The Three-Legged Cat,” ranks among the strongest in recent memory. It feels more grounded than “The Seventh Continent,” curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 2019, and definitely more understandable than the chaotic and intellectually constipated “Compost” by curators Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh in 2021. By contrast, “The Three-Legged Cat”, under the direction of Christine Tohmé, lands solidly on its feet. A bit like the tradition of “A Good Neighbour,” curated by Elmgreen & Dragset for the 15th Biennial in 2017, it is politically clear, down-to-earth and unafraid of saying out loud what many others skirt around. This is largely thanks to its outspoken curator, who spoke plainly about how, as she prepared for the biennial, her mother’s farm in southern Lebanon had been bombarded.
DARE I SAY IT?
That clarity was on display at the press conference, when Tohmé’s reference to “genocide in Gaza” and her direct claim that “things cannot go on as they are” earned the only genuine burst of applause after the polite, lacklustre speeches of Bülent Eczacıbaşı, chair of İKSV, and Ömer Koç, chair of the Board of Trustees and the main sponsor of the show. Koç, to his credit, corrected the imbalance later that evening with a far stronger speech that boldly attacked those who ignored, or, worse, defended the genocide in Gaza.
Yet for all the talk of change, a strange silence pervaded the kick-off press conference. None of the journalists asked Tohmé, or anyone else on the stage, what it means to hold a biennial in a city whose elected mayor has been imprisoned for six months.
Ekrem İmamoğlu, likely voted for by many of the people filling the press conference at the French Orphanage, remains behind bars; a quarter of the city’s district mayors have been removed from office. No one asked whether this erosion of local democracy had left its mark on the exhibition, or whether the artists felt its chilling effect. Was it auto-censorship, or simply a sense of futility, that kept the questions unasked? Or the knowledge that you’d get a stock answer: “Art does not speak the same language as politics.”
The works themselves, by Turkish artists, suggest an answer. İpek Duben’s eerie “Children of Paradise” speaks of consumerism; Dilek Winchester’s “410 Letters” mourns alphabets and the fragments of memory they carry. These are finely made, even searing works, but they gesture sideways, toward critique at the safe margins. By contrast, Nolan Oswald Dennis, the Johannesburg-based artist, confronted apartheid directly with a blackboard full of euphemisms mocking “historical interpretations.” Iraqi artist Ali Eyal grappled with the American invasion of his country with brutal lucidity. Lebanese artist Seta Manoukian painted her way through the scars of the civil war. Turkey’s own present imperfect (the failed coup of 2016, arrests, censorship, the democratic unraveling of the past decade) remains largely absent.
…OR REMAIN SILENT?
The irony is thick: while Istanbul markets itself as a cultural hub, its artists work on ever-shrinking ground, the judiciary’s sword hanging over their heads. The most striking recent example is Manifest, the six-member girl band that drew 12,000 fans to their first over-18 concert in Istanbul earlier this month. Their success was met not with celebration but with a prosecutor’s probe into “obscenity” and “public indecency,” judicial controls that placed them under a travel ban, and the cancellation of their subsequent concerts across the country.
This week, pop star Mabel Matiz stood trial over his song “Perperişan,” accused of “obscenity” (yes, again) and of threatening public morals. The Ministry of Interior filed a criminal complaint, the song was blocked online, and Matiz was hauled in to testify under police escort. He rejected the charges, insisting his lyrics drew on metaphor and folk tradition.
The clampdown has not spared actors either. Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu, one of Turkey’s most acclaimed young performers, was detained in April for the crime of urging a consumer boycott on social media after Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest. Though released, he was placed under judicial control and given a travel ban, a punishment that forced him to withdraw from a theater production in Athens.
Perhaps most chilling is not the prosecutions but the silence that greets them. In a painfully honest interview with Cansu Çamlıbel at T24, Ayşe Barım, a prominent manager and owner of ID İletişim, one of Turkey’s major talent agencies, said she had been “left alone” when she was arrested in January under charges linking her to the 2013 Gezi Park protests. “The sector did not stand by me,” she confessed, “and here I am mourning that silence too.” Reflecting on her months in detention, she added, “Perhaps this silence created the space for my victimisation.”
Back to the Biennial. Yes, it is bold enough to speak about Gaza. But about Istanbul, about Turkey itself? If art is meant to confront power, then this Biennial has one leg planted in Gaza and the Middle East, one in global problems from eco-angst to apartheid to neoliberalism, and the third shakily on the floor of Istanbul, the crossroad of cultures. But the missing fourth leg, the one that would dare to turn the lights on the prisons, the bans, the prosecutions at home, is nowhere to be seen.
