Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)

December 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Antrepo 3 & 5, Istanbul

17 September – 13 November

By Laura McLean-Ferris

Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, the 12th Istanbul Biennial appears to have been conceived on the basis of what not to do. Compact enough to see in a single day and featuring hardly any videos, it takes place in two adjacent warehouses rather than multiple venues – no performances, screenings or citywide interventions here. No claims, either, for site- specificity or an overview of art practice in Istanbul, nor any reference to the historic position of the city as an intersection between East and West. Instead, as the distinctive styling of the show’s title (Untitled, followed by a bracketed qualifier) suggests, the curators drew structural inspiration from the work of the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose practice is deployed as a contextual conceit with increasing frequency.

In Istanbul, the warehouses are divided into a series of interconnecting white cubes housing small solo installations. These, in turn, are clustered around five strongly focused thematic group shows, each Untitled, with the following qualifiers: (Abstraction), (Ross), (Death by Gun), (Passport) and (History). Each show takes an existing Gonzalez-Torres work – made present by a descriptive text alone – as its thematic anchor. The result of this stricture is that the exhibitions explore specific issues rather than the vague catchall thematics that have characterised international biennials of late.

One of the noticeable strengths of this exhibition is the inclusion of strong, persuasive work by female artists not yet granted a strong position in art history. In the (History) section the Italian photographer Tina Modotti, who moved to Mexico and became a key figure in the Mexican Revolution, captured several images of women and children while still managing to convey the upheaval at the time. Meanwhile, in (Death by Gun), another Italian, Letizia Battaglia, a divorced mother of three, created powerfully violent, angry documentary images of Mafia murders in Italy during the 1970s.

Given the direct nature of the works just mentioned, it might seem strange to suggest that the broad, open-ended conception of the curators’ idea of the ‘political’ was most apparent and pleasurable in  Abstraction), themed around Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Bloodwork – Steady Decline) (1994), a graph-paper grid featuring a thin, sloping red line to convey an HIV sufferer’s deteriorating immune system and thus the infection’s ruthless efficiency. There is an immediately apparent relationship between that work and, that of Nazgol Ansarinia, who has used the beautifully delicate decorative language of Iranian tablecloths as an abstract system through which to convey economic data relating to Iran. Similarly, in Dóra Maurer’s Study of Minimal Movements (1972), made during Hungary’s Communist dictatorship, photographic stills of people or plantlife in motion became nodes for delicate abstract drawings that trace those movements and their limits.

This, then, is an exhibition in which the context provided by the curators is utterly central, and yet their selection of artworks and historical markers has been carefully made, assuring that it’s the art that will be the most memorable feature of the biennial. The aestheticisation or abstraction of political issues is thorny and problematic, but this biennial made it seem as though the intersection between the diagrams of the beautiful and the (socially) significant might prove a middle ground worth discussing.