Pera Museum

By 15th Istanbul Biennial

Pera Museum was originally built by architect Achille Manoussos as Hotel Bristol in 1893. Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation founded the Pera Museum after the Neoclassical building’s renovation in 2005. Located just off İstiklal Caddesi, this private foundation museum has three large collections: Orientalist Paintings, Anatolian Weights and Measures, and Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics.

15th Istanbul Biennial: a good neighbour (2017) by Curators: Elmgreen & Dragset15th Istanbul Biennial

The 15th Istanbul Biennial, entitled a good neighbour and curated by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset.

The biennial located in the heart of Istanbul, and has been visited free of charge at six nearby venues within walking distance.

Bringing together a variety of artworks dealing with different notions of home and neighbourhood, the 15th Istanbul Biennial exhibitions took place at Istanbul Modern, Galata Greek Primary School, Ark Kültür, Pera Museum, an artist collective’s studio, and Küçük Mustafa Paşa Hammam.

Pera Museum15th Istanbul Biennial

Pera Museum

The 15th Istanbul Biennial presents work by sixteen artists on the top three floors of the museum, with two additional works displayed within the museum’s Orientalist Painting collection.

Installation shots from Horror Vacui series Installation Shot from Horror Vacui Serie15th Istanbul Biennial

Alejandro Almanza Pereda*
Horror Vacui series

Pereda’s Horror Vacui (2010–2017) series appropriates existing Romantic-style landscape and genre paintings sourced by the artist from within Istanbul.

*b. 1977, Mexico City, Mexico
lives in Guadalajara, Mexico

The work is an allegory of the entropic forces that can ruin even as they build.

The series’ title, ‘horror vacui’ – ‘fear or dislike of empty spaces’ – refers to a traditional visual technique of filling a pictorial plane’s negative space with detail.

Installation shots from Horror Vacui series Installation Shot from Horror Vacui Serie15th Istanbul Biennial

The installation sets an idyllic view of nature against the corrosive and relentless process of humans shaping geography to their will. It also points to the covering up of history, the translation of values across time.

Museum of Shedding Museum of Shedding15th Istanbul Biennial

Dayanita Singh*
Museum of Shedding

The word curate comes from the Latin word to care for (cura), a fact that points to a link between artistic custodianship and notions of care, attention and stewardship.

*b. 1961, New Delhi, India
lives in New Delhi, India

Her museums– capturing homes, or images of her friends and neighbourhood – are portable structures; subjectively captured, they can be subjectively reconfigured too. For her Museum of Shedding (2016), Singh presents an architectural space for an imagined curator of a museum...

...the image of someone who seems to work and live together with art.

The Museum of Shedding represents a notion of the museum stripped down to its essence: basic objects and furniture.

Museum of Shedding Museum of Shedding15th Istanbul Biennial

Singh's act of sequencing images for display, communicated through the gridded structure of a viewing cabinet, conjures the processes of reshuffling enacted when we choose to curate, to care for, or to document. The work serves more generally as a metaphor for the processes of artistic custodianship, and the linking of space and memory.
In presenting this museum, Singh is interested in archives as sites where space and time are joined, as well as the acts of memory that are invoked when we select and recombine from the past.

Installation shot from Inverted Home series (2017) by Gozde Ilkin15th Istanbul Biennial

Gözde Ilkin*
Inverted Home

Working with found garments and domestic fabrics, Gözde Ilkin is interested in objects that embody cultural codes and collective memory. She uses these clothes and textiles as intimate materials that carry the traces of history.

b. 1981, Kütahya, Turkey
lives in Istanbul, Turkey

For Ilkin, patterns in fabrics are structures that bridge memory and the present, the imagined and the real.

For the Istanbul Biennial, Ilkin presents a number of works constructed from domestic fabrics that come from her family.

The effect, as well as the multiplicity of styles and reference points, is to counteract and render unstable the normativity of family life – making it ‘disjunctive’, to borrow a word used in one of the works in her series Inverted Home.

Boys Eat Turkish Delight (2008) by Gözde İlkin15th Istanbul Biennial

Boys Eat Turkish Delight presents a domestic scene in which three men are seen playfully feeding each other at a table.

Overthrown Alcove from Inverted Home series (2017) by Gözde İlkin15th Istanbul Biennial

Toddler Promession® Toddler Promession®15th Istanbul Biennial

Aude Pariset*
Toddler Promession®

Humans have spent millennia on earth, yet it is only during the past 150 years that we have made an indelible, irreversible imprint on our planet.

*b. 1983, Versailles, France, lives in Berlin, Germany

Toddler Promession® Toddler Promession® (2016) by Aude Pariset15th Istanbul Biennial

Plastics, for instance, cannot be broken down by natural processes, and will remain on the earth for many centuries.

Toddler Promession® Toddler Promession®15th Istanbul Biennial

For the Istanbul Biennial, Aude Pariset is showing a piece that reflects on human interaction with natural ecology, as well as their entanglement with notions of domestic space and child-rearing.
In Toddler Promession® (2016), a mattress made from Styrofoam, a notoriously non-biodegradable material, has been placed in an Ikea infant’s cot and filled with molitor worms.

The term stems from the Italian word for ‘promise’, suggesting in the context of this work a sense of hope for the future. But while ‘toddler’ may refer either to the absent inhabitant of the cot or to the larval worms, it might also evoke an image of destructive humans who, like toddlers, are wreaking havoc on the earth.

Untitled. Liliana Maresca at Marconetti Building (1983/2016) by Liliana Maresca15th Istanbul Biennial

Liliana Maresca*
Untitled. Liliana Maresca at Marconetti Building

The sculptures and actions of Liliana Maresca, who died in 1994 of AIDS, were done in the wake of the Argentinian dictatorship and ensuing state violence, which ended in 1983: a period of state terrorism, bloody strife and numerous unresolved disappearances.

*b. 1951, Buenos Aires, Argentina
d. 1994, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Maresca’s untitled series of photographs from 1984 comprise a laconic photo performance, documented by Marcos Lopez. The abandoned Marconetti building, near Buenos Aires’ Parque Lezama, in whose empty interior the performance took place against a background of peeling wallpaper, was being occupied at the time by artists such as Maresca’s collaborator Daniel Riga.
In one photograph, a hand reaches into the frame holding a small egg, the white light reflecting on the outstretched palm as well as the open door behind it. In another, we see a number of open doors in a room. Representing a transition between exterior and interior, this image has political valence: a political way forward by means of personal actions.

Recolecta Recolecta15th Istanbul Biennial

Recolecta

For the installation Recolecta (1990), Maresca exhibited a real cart rented from a ‘cartonero’ (or cart-pusher), a second, similar cart painted white with a spraygun, and two small carts made of brass and silver mounted on pedestals.

For Maresca, the triad of carts can be thought of as three stages: the real; formal representation (the white cart); and as an ironic national symbol during a neoliberal age. The objects’ transmutation into metal recalls alchemy and transformation (interests of Maresca’s after her HIV diagnosis).

Grounded in, but transcending, immediate politics and personal crisis, Maresca’s work speaks quietly and authoritatively of loss, care, transition, and the fragility of livelihoods.

Recolecta Recolecta15th Istanbul Biennial

The figure of the cartonero was prevalent in the early 1990s in Argentina and during the major economic crisis of 2001. After the neoliberal policies of the new government plunged many into poverty, wheelbarrows became a common sight, used by individuals to collect paper garbage in exchange for a small refund.

Spreken (1999) by Berlinde De Bruyckere15th Istanbul Biennial

Berlinde De Bruyckere*
Spreken

One could say that clothing was the first architecture used by humans. Before building houses, early nomadic humans wrapped pelts or furs around themselves to warm and protect them.

*b. 1964, Ghent, Belgium
lives in Ghent, Belgium

Artist has long incorporated blankets into her sculptures. While used primarily for warmth, blankets are also tools for disguise and hiding. De Bruyckere’s work Spreken extends this link, becoming a fraught and intenseallegory for human communication, stealth and union, intimacy and speech.

With its ambiguity as to whether these figures are successfully communicating, the work seems to ask: can two humans ever speak to one another in any meaningful sense? Is mutual understanding possible? Who can speak for and to whom?

Or have the figures created a kind of furtive ‘home’ for themselves in order to speak freely?

Perhaps the ultimate question asked by the work is whether intimacy can emerge between people despite the inevitability of human miscommunication and misunderstanding.