Bosphorus Strait
View of Istanbul and the Istanbul Modern from the Bosphorus Canal. The intervention by English artist Liam Gillick, engraved on the exterior of the museum, "Hydrodynamica Applied" (2015), is Bernoulli's equation, which formulates the conservation of energy and pressure/Photo: Patricia Rousseaux

“My mother was an archaeologist. And she had a very special way of arranging one thing next to another, or installing them or organizing them, decorating the house with objects she had found. When I was a child, during the Vietnam War, she received numerous visitors in Washington, and when I woke up in the morning, I never knew exactly who had slept at home. I think that dOCUMENTA (13) and other exhibitions I have done tend to recreate that atmosphere. On the one hand, the vitality of different people in the house, and, on the other, the presence of the objects she had collected, some precious and others found in the street. The importance of the relationship between cultural material, the history of the past and the politics of the present.”

At the Istanbul Modern, which opened in 2004, 55 artists were specially invited. Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles presented the oil on canvas “Project for a Hole to Throw Dishonest Politicians In”, 2011 (see issue 31 of...). ARTE!BrasileirosPhoto: Patricia Rousseaux

In this paragraph from the interview with CI MAGIn September of this year, the Turkish publication, edited in Istanbul, featured artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakarguiev, who has just been named one of the top 10 most influential people in the art world by the renowned English publication. ART ReviewThis poetically summarizes why the Istanbul Biennial may have made a significant contribution to validating the theory of complex thought in contemporary times, and how contemporary art is a pivot, a trigger for reflecting on the individual, history, politics, science, and literature.

Edgard Morin, a sociologist and philosopher, pioneered the idea of ​​what came to be known as "complex thought" in the 1970s.

“If we try to consider the fact that we are simultaneously physical, biological, social, cultural, psychic, and spiritual beings, it becomes clear that complexity is what attempts to conceive the articulation, identity, and difference of all these aspects, while simplistic thinking separates these different aspects or unifies them through a mutilating reduction.”

A critique of the scientific paradigm of modernity, a challenge and a motivation to think about ourselves and our surroundings differently from how we were led and educated to think in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when we were expected to study and understand phenomena in watertight, isolated disciplines, and believe in them as long as they could be measured within scientific and mechanistic determinism.

Since 1970, the concepts of "interdisciplinarity" and "transdisciplinarity," followed by the Swiss biologist and psychopedagogue Jean Piaget and the Franco-Romanian physicist and philosopher Basarab Nicolescu, respectively, have brought the possibility of admitting the existence of a new type of approach to knowledge, one that synthesizes the juxtaposition of various areas of knowledge, crossing epistemological boundaries of each science and allowing an experience of different levels of reality: reflective, sensory, and experimental.

With the title SALTWATER: Theory of Thought Forms (Saltwater: A Theory of Thinking Forms), the Istanbul Biennial served as a setting to develop this idea and provoke all possible "displacements," of space and thought.

On foot, by boat, by car or "tranvai" (a type of tram), visitors from Turkey and around the world explored installations, specific sites and works that addressed different layers of history, geography and the use of technologies.
In Carolyne's words, "there are currents of people, of ideas, of wars, of weapons, of love – of everything, but it's not always visible."

The oceanic movements that wash the coast of Turkey, with currents that cross the Bosphorus channel, from the Mediterranean to the Sea of ​​Marmara and the Black Sea, produce subterranean movements that carry debris from various continents and harbor countless stories of power from our civilization.

The city of Constantinople – today Istanbul – is located between the main trade routes linking Asia to Europe, and was the seat of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, as well as later the Ottoman Empire, which originated in the 11th century when nomadic Turkish tribes settled in Anatolia, a region that is now part of Turkey. The Ottoman Empire was one of the strongest during the 15th and 16th centuries, encompassing much of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and North Africa. It lost supremacy throughout history. The Turks fought in the First World War (1914-1918) alongside Germany. The defeat in the conflict further disrupted the already fractured empire, which was eventually abolished shortly afterwards, in 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed.

One of the social traumas that the Biennial brings to light, from different perspectives, is the genocide, in 1915, of thousands of Armenians suspected of “nationalist sentiments” hostile to the central government. On May 26, 1915, a special law authorized the deportation of Armenians for reasons of internal security, followed, on September 13, by a law ordering the confiscation of their property. The Armenian population of Anatolia and Cilicia was condemned to exile in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Many Armenians died en route or in concentration camps. One hundred years later, the Turkish republican government finds itself once again involved in conflicts with neighboring countries, in this case with Syria.

Art translates human suffering. And in each era, this suffering incorporates and develops different symptoms.

The contemporary artist investigates pain, geography, biology, and the past. They update images of memory and transform them into the present. They investigate and construct archives. Forms of expression that organize knowledge from different perspectives and revisit memory are here to stay.

Beauty hasn't been the same for a long time now.


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