Curating on shifting ground

"Are we in Dubai or in Istanbul?" a collector friend asked as she stepped out of her black BMW into the Tersane district, after hours in traffic. She had flown in for two events: the Contemporary Istanbul art fair (25-29 September), and the 18th Istanbul Biennial, which opened on 20 September. "This doesn't feel like Istanbul at all," she remarked, crossing the polished former shipyard where the fair took place, next to warehouses that now house Alo Yoga and Gucci outlets. Nearby, kids tried to play basketball on a super-chic court, the Golden Horn glittering behind them. 

Her reaction captured the spirit that Ali Güreli, the fair's organiser and a former hotelier, sought for Contemporary Istanbul's 20th edition: a fair aimed at Gulf countries and aligned with their cultural strategies to attract tourism and investment. At the press conference, Güreli predicted "a movement towards the East," as Asia and the Middle East reshape a geography once dominated by Europe and America.

At the opening, Pierre Sigg of the Sigg Foundation, a partner of the fair, praised Istanbul's "heritage" as its unique strength. Yet the site of the fair felt sealed in a luxury bubble, geographically and socially detached from Istanbul's everyday life. Palaces and mosques shimmered in the distance, but reaching Tersane meant cutting through construction sites on foot or getting stuck in traffic. Boat transport, promised by the organisers, was nowhere to be found. 

It is almost as if the fair tried to shelter itself—and visitors—from the chaos that has recently engulfed Turkey's largest city. Perhaps this was a survival strategy. Political repression and censorship have long been part of cultural life in Turkey, but they have worsened in recent months. Concerts, film screenings and Pride marches are routinely banned under vaguely defined "public morality" rules, while artists and journalists face trials for "insulting religious values" or "defaming the state."

In March, the arrest of opposition leader and former mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, whose vocal support for the cultural sector had made him a key figure for Istanbul's creative community, sparked peaceful protests across the city, which were swiftly met with police violence. Inflation remains among the highest in the world, pushing artists and cultural workers to the brink. Many independent spaces struggle to survive without state funding or face sudden closures for alleged permit violations.

Contemporary Istanbul: art in an uncertain world

Against this backdrop, the fair strived to project an image of confidence and resilience. "We thought of Contemporary Istanbul as a platform to present the evolving art scene, convey a positive image of our country to the world, and introduce our strong contemporary artists to the global art world," said Güreli.

Robust incentives were offered to lure international collectors and galleries to the city, including covering customs fees for artworks, airport-to-airport transport via Turkish Airlines and sponsored hotels for collectors. "It's about better budgets for the galleries, but also symbolically positioning Istanbul as the host who spares no effort," explained Güreli. 

"Nobody is quite sure where the world is headed," said the fair's artistic director, Sarp Kerem Yavuz. Rather than avoid uncertainty, he asked artists to engage with it. A two-day programme, "Disrupted Coordinates: Istanbul and the Shifting Landscape of Art", brought together 25 speakers to discuss digital art, collecting ethics and art in crisis.  

Artworks exploring the international geopolitical situation abounded. But in addressing the repression that Istanbul has recently witnessed, galleries avoided direct criticism, opting instead for more oblique approaches. 

Anna Laudel showed Bilal Hakan Karakaya's battered suitcase filled with shards of stained glass from Sirkeci Station, departure point for Turkish "guest workers" leaving for Germany in the 1970s. Revolver Galeria presented José Carlos Martinat's graffiti extractions from South American walls. One slab showed a Cholita, symbol of Indigenous resistance in Bolivia. 

For Azra Tüzünoğlu, director of Pilot Gallery, Turkey risks losing international attention. "The international crowd is less interested in Turkey at the moment, and it’s a bit of a shame because I think we are losing that power," she said.  

Still, Tüzünoğlu insisted that the Istanbul art world still allows conversations silenced elsewhere, for example, overt support for Palestine. While certain subjects are becoming increasingly taboo, she said there is still room for artists who can be subtle and intelligent about the way they express their views: "Here, maybe you cannot say anything about religion, maybe you cannot show queer work, but we are still presenting lots of [queer] artists. Under pressure, you can always find other ways to express yourself."

The Istanbul Biennial: a triumphant and political return

If the fair demonstrated the resilience of Istanbul's art market against the odds, the biennial showed the capacity of institutions to rise from scandal. This 18th edition was delayed due to controversy surrounding the appointment of Iwona Blazwick as curator, despite her role on the selection committee. Accusations of nepotism and opaque governance followed; hundreds signed an open letter. Blazwick resigned in July 2023, the biennial was postponed to 2025, and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) faced a legitimacy crisis. 

To rebuild trust, İKSV appointed Lebanese curator Christine Tohmé, founder of the Beirut-based contemporary art institution Ashkal Alwan. She reframed the biennial as a three-year process (2025–2027), beginning with this September's exhibition. The opening drew large, young crowds to venues across Taksim, Pera and Galata Port. 

Tohmé asked how communities imagine survival when precarity defines daily life. The biennial answered with works both playful and grave. Like the fair, it focused more on international issues than domestic ones. There was a strong emphasis on Gaza and the genocide—recognised as such by leading genocide scholars and number of international organisations—with several powerful works. Among them, a piece by Palestinian artist Sohail Salem, who filled notebooks documenting Gaza's systematic erasure.

One of the most haunting pieces was Mona Benyamin's "Tomorrow, again" (2023). Styled as a news broadcast, it showed policemen trading empty lines—"He did it." "He didn't do it."—as a weatherman broke into sobs. The work explored how, in the media, Palestine is often reduced to rhetoric: genocide disguised as debate until language itself collapses. 

Social anxiety and isolation were tackled across multiple works and mediums. Valentin Noujaïm's cement slabs bore pulverised faces and voices recalling nights of loss in "Paris' La Défense", while Karima Achadou's "Machine Boy" followed the drifting lives of Lagos motorbike riders. The most striking piece in this vein was Selma Selman's stack of salvaged motherboards, amassed beside a golden spoon, an image of the 1% percent thriving on the waste of the 99%.

Other works folded critique into everyday symbols. Abdullah Al Saadi's flip-flops, carved from stone and plastic, resembled flimsy sandals but carried the heaviness of exile. Stéphanie Saadé's "Pyramid" series layered clothing from infant to adult sizes, reflecting on growth and discarded selves. 

The biennial succeeded in holding grief and play together, opening space for the unspeakable. Like the fair, it did not confront Turkey's authoritarian drift directly, but indirectly, by situating Istanbul within global precarity and capturing a strong willingness of artists to resist and express themselves, despite the tense conditions.

Leaving one of the biennial sites, I grabbed a kebab in an alley with my collector friend, and we descended toward Galata Port. She ate eagerly, hungry for more than the food itself—for the grit, the noise, the vitality of Istanbul. Before turning the corner, she looked up and saw a sentence engraved on Gallery 77 by artist Dilek Winchester, written in Latin letters interlaced with Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian and Greek. 

She couldn't read it in full at the time, but we later learned it said: "seeming-like-those-who-are-conceited-and-behave-as-if-nothing-has-ever-been-said-before-them". Was this about Istanbul, Turkey, the state of the world? The answer, perhaps, is nothing but ours.