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17th Istanbul Biennial

September 17 - November 20, 2022

Pera Museum hosts the Istanbul Biennial organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) since 1987, with its 17th edition, curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh.

The 17th Istanbul Biennial brings together people and processes, a gathering of more than 50 projects, each the fruit of long-term research and collaboration, each offering resources that the biennial aims to share, amplify and disperse. Prepared over three years of uncertainty and unprecedented isolation, it is above all an invitation to spend time together, thinking, talking, reading, viewing and listening in public, an invitation to ask and questions, and question answers.

Can a biennial be a newspaper? Can it be an archive, reimagined? Could it be fluid like water, a sea of sensations that flow through everyone? Could it be an afternoon of shared learning, of insights gained from old songs, from the birds, the grass, the fish, the buffaloes, or from the living soil? Could it be a season spent sealed in a bottle, fermenting? Or a concert, a series of podcasts or street parades or protests? Could we touch the earth and think together?

The 17th Istanbul Biennial spans 12 exhibition venues in the Beyoğlu, Kadıköy, Fatih and Zeytinburnu districts, as well as over 50 bookstores, second-hand booksellers, hospitals, nursing homes, cafes, metro stops and a radio station.

Over 500 artists, thinkers, writers, poets, researchers, architects, radio hosts, fishermen, activists, stand-up comedians, conductors, ethnomusicologists, ornithologists and many others contribute to the biennial individually or through collective work with local communities.

Image Credits 

Nepal Picture Library, Mass protest, Nepal, 1981
Nepal Picture Library archive
Photography: Hisila Yami

Gülsün Karamustafa, Insecure, 2022
Video still

Sim Chi Yin, One Day We'll Understand, 2018
Detail

Yehwan Song
, cascadingspiral.com, 2022
Screenshot

17th Istanbul Biennial

Pera Film is hosting the film program of the 17th Istanbul Biennial. Curated by Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh, the program includes 22 films.


Pera Learning

Colors of the Earth
17th Istanbul Biennial Learning Programs

Pera Museum Learning Programs organizes Colors of the Earth in parallel to the 17th Istanbul Biennial and inspired by the projects of the artists exhibited at the museum for different age groups, to be made available online and face to face.

Mid-term Workshops

Pera Museum Learning Programs organizes Mid-term Workshops on 15-20 November, inspired by the projects of the artists of 17th Istanbul Biennial exhibited at the museum.

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974)

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 to a Jewish family in Pärnu, Russia (today Estonia), far from Philadelphia where he spent his whole life, worked, fell in love, and breathed his last. Kahn family emigrated to America when he was five years old. 

Modernity Building the Modern / Reshaping the Modern

Modernity Building the Modern / Reshaping the Modern

A firm believer in the idea that a collection needs to be upheld at least by four generations and comparing this continuity to a relay race, Nahit Kabakcı began creating the Huma Kabakcı Collection from the 1980s onwards. Today, the collection can be considered one of the most important and outstanding examples among the rare, consciously created, and long-lasting ones of its kind in Turkey.

The Golden Horn

The Golden Horn

When regarding the paintings of Istanbul by western painters, Golden Horn has a distinctive place and value. This body of water that separates the Topkapı Palace and the Historical Peninsula, in which monumental edifices are located, from Galata, where westerners and foreign embassies dwell, is as though an interpenetrating boundary.