4th Istanbul Design Biennial

Pera Museum hosted the 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial, organized by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV). For the 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) and sponsored by VitrA, curator Jan Boelen teamed up with Vera Sacchetti as Associate Curator and Nadine Botha as Assistant Curator.

As a space for critical reflection on design established in a historically rich context, the Istanbul Design Biennial offered the opportunity to question the very production and replication of design and its education. In 2018, the 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial built on the legacy of previous editions, in order to reinvent itself and become a productive process-orientated platform for education and design to research, experiment and learn in and from the city and beyond.

Titled A School of Schools, the 4^th Istanbul Design Biennial stretched both the space and time of the traditional design event, manifesting as a flexible year-long program within which to respond to global acceleration, generating alternative methodologies, outputs and forms of design and education. A School of Schools manifested as a set of dynamic learning formats encouraging creative production, sustainable collaboration, and social connection. Exploring six themes, the learning environment was a context of empowerment, reflection, sharing and engagement, providing reflexive responses to specific situations.

At Pera Museum, the Scales School investigated the fluidity of taxonomies, quantifications, and institutionalized norms, standards and values to highlight biases and assumptions in our social, economic and intellectual agreements.