After a turbulent period of reorganisation, the 18th Istanbul Biennial favours futurity over futility – The Art Newspaper

Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s video installation, Resilience TiacuacheOpposum Resilience (2019), perfectly encapsulates the hopes of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, a space where “self-preservation and futurity are interdependent”, according to curator Christine Tohmé. Using survival-seeking opossums as a metaphor for mankind, this extremely funny and imaginative installation sees the creatures stand up to violent enemies that threaten their happiness and lives, bringing about a child-like joy in the viewer.

This edition of the biennial is titled The Three-Legged Cat because, for the first time since its founding in 1987, it will unfold over three rather than two years. This leg features 47 artists, including only six from Turkey, but many more from the Middle East.

The show would appear to be a bid for stability by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the private foundation that administers the biennial, following a rocky period of reorganisation. In February 2023, the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory board unanimously chose Defne Ayas, now the director of The Van Abbemuseum, to oversee the 18th edition. However, the IKSV rejected the board’s decision and instead appointed a member of the selection committee, Iwona Blazwick of the Whitechapel Gallery.

After an outcry in the arts community, Blazwick stepped down from the role and Tohmé, a much-admired curator based in Beirut, was finally selected. She proposed spreading events over three years and initiating an open call to encourage transparency. The biennial’s budget was raised from €2m to €6.5m to cover the extended programme, mostly paid for by Koç Holdings, the only Turkish company listed on the Fortune 500.

Cautious optimism

During an opening speech, Tohmé spoke bravely of how genocidal violence makes all attempts at a fulfilling life—including art—seem trivial. Though she did not specifically mention Gaza, where the United Nations commission recently found that Israel has committed genocide, the conflict there was the elephant in the room. Despite this, her biennial favours futurity over futility, leaving the door open for fantasy, playfulness and even a cautious optimism.

The exhibition is spread out between eight venues, all in close proximity to each other, and including a former cone factory, a deteriorating theatre building, a school-turned-museum and the shell of a French orphanage where Khalil Rabah’s Red Navigapparate, (2025) is installed. This site-specific intervention of shiny red oil barrels holding trees and saplings offers a regenerative practice, in response to the horrors faced by the Palestinian people.

As if in conversation with Rabah, Sohail Salem has created anxiety provoking drawings depicting his life-and-death struggle in Gaza, using ballpoint pens to scratch in the details. In comparison, the black humour of Tomorrow, again (2023) by Mona Benyamin proves cathartic. In this short video, clownish actors play Palestinian news announcers who laugh to the point of sobbing against a backdrop of perennial destruction.

This is a work that deserves to be shown widely, especially to audiences who remain divided on the term “genocide”. ​​Yet, as many museums in the west continue to consciously avoid such material, ignoring the wealth of art created in response to the horror at hand, it will probably not receive the attention it deserves.

Censorship and queer beauty

Meanwhile Akram Zaatari’s contributions, Olive Green (2020) and Crimson Red (2021), portray scenes of wrestlers, a sport practiced in Turkey since ancient times. The works are painted deftly with a modest touch, as if to ignore that their homo-eroticism could be labeled as resistance in a country where LGBTQ+ imagery is regularly censored, and considered counter to the image of family promoted by religion and the authorities.

Elif Saydam offers Hospitality (2024-2025), where layers of laminated sheets with images of flowers hang from the ceiling and seduce the viewer to enter a maze of queer beauty. Still more courageous is the curator’s choice to include a satirical look at homo-eroticism in Greek culture by artist duo VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), featured prominently in a street level window on a major thoroughfare.

The audience is led to the light at the end of the tunnel by Valentin Noujaïm’s brilliant film, Pacific Club (2023), in which a French-Algerian man relates the story of a nightclub, a refuge for immigrants during the 1980s. His tales of discrimination and community, of living through the AIDS crisis and the ravages of heroin addiction, seem to be of a previous time when death seemed imminent.

This testimony is filmed against contemporary footage of the same neighbourhood, where the past has now been erased by towering glass buildings and geometric plazas. The juxtaposition suggests that we cannot predict the future and that life can go on, even when the end seems near.

Despite extensive censorship in this increasingly authoritarian country—including the imprisonment of Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and cultural minister Mahir Polat earlier this year—there is no evidence that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan interfered directly with the organisation of the biennial, or the selection of art works. Perhaps artists and cultural workers organising shows in Turkey have learned to insinuate rather than to accuse, in order to avoid direct confrontations with the authorities.

Nonetheless, it is certainly a major challenge to create a biennial offering optimism under an oppressive regime. Even when the curator’s choices seem random and disconnected, as when VASKOS’s work shares a space with Pilar Quinteros’s more conceptual pile of sculptures, Working Class (2025), this exhibition provides a charming alternative to bleak biennales. In fact, this strategy can be a liberation, freeing viewers to form their own interpretations.

• 18th Istanbul Biennial, various locations, Istanbul, until 23 November