Curator: Rosa Martínez.
October 5 to November 9. 1997. Istanbul. Turkey.

Venues

The 5th International Istanbul Biennial was staged at one main centre and a number of satellite venues. Located inside the Topkapi Palace gardens, the Imperial Mint -which perfectly embodied the idea of a city within a city- was the main venue. Other spaces, such as the Yerebatan Cistern, the Hagia Eirene Church or the Women´s Library also hosted art projects. Together with exceptional venues like the Maidens´ Tower or the Pera Palas Hotel, they catalyzed the artistic proposals and, by using the city’s main gates -the International Ataturk Airport, the Sirckeci and Haydarpasa train Stations, the 5th Biennial became both an exhibition and a walk.

Selected Artists: Ahtila. Eija-Liisa. Alaez, Ana Laura. Almeida, Helena. Altindere, Halil. Antoni, Janine. Ataman, Kutlug. Avsar, Vahap. Aziz, Sükran. Berksoy, Semiha. Berlin, Meta Isaeus. Bodnar, Eva Eszter. Bony, Oscar. Bourgeois, Louise. Bournigault, Rebecca. Buetti, Daniel. Caeckenbergh, Patrick van. Cattelan, Maurizio. Creten, Johan. Cross, Dorothy. Davis, Yael. Diller & Scofidio. Durham, Jimmie. Eliasson, Olafur. Emin, Tracey. Erdem, Türkan. Feyzdjou, Chohreh. François, Michel. Gill, Symrin. Golec, Leszek and Tatiana Czekalska. González Torres, Félix. Grigely, Joseph. Gutiérrez, Yolanda. Guzmán, Federico. Hauswolff, Michel von. Hemmo, Irit. Herrán, Juan Fernando. Hoeck, Richard. Höller, Carsten. IRWIN. Ibrahim, Bedi. Janssens, Ann Veronica. Kim, Soo-Ja. Kosmaoglou, Sofia. Kulik, Oleg. KÜLTÜR. Lakner, Antal. Langa, Moshekwa. Leonilson. Lindal, Anna. Lislegaard, Ann. Maestro, Lani. Massumi, Elahe. Mateus, Cristina. McCaslin, Matthew. Mendieta, Ana. Miralda, Antoni. Moral, Sükran. Mori, Mariko. Navridis, Nikos. Neshat, Shirin. Neuenschwander, Rivane. Obregón, Roberto. Orlan. Özseçen, Ebru. Pérez Bravo, Marta María. Piña, Manuel. May Post, Liza. Qiang, Cai Guo. Rakauskaite, Egle. Ribeiro, Flávia. Rist, Pipilotti. Romanos, Chryssa. Rosenfeld, Lotty. Semmes, Beverly. Sense:less. Sterbak, Jana. Sussman, Eve. Sangar, Bülent. Taylor-Wood, Sam. Tian-Miao, Lin. Valldosera, Eulàlia. Vickerson, Laura. Wallinger, Mark. Weber, Martin. Wirkkala, Maaria.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
‘On Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties’

Under the title “On Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties” the 5th Istanbul Biennial synthetizes the desire to approach and explore some important points of discussion in contemporary esthetic thought and creation: the borderlines that separate art and life; the search for new meanings of beauty, and the awareness that we need languages to communicate even if translations produce displacements of meaning.

Besides its appearance as a totally autonomous entity, and the awareness that, as with any other language, it has its own laws, art also acts as a medium to relate human beings to different areas of reality, and may be considered as a translation, a vehicle for reinterpreting and creating new ways of perceiving and transforming the world. The pleasure of beauty, the strength and the intensity of an aesthetic experience in which emotions function as a form of knowledge is needed in those processes of comunication in which the ‘other’, as Duchamp said, is required to complete the meaning of the artwork.

Life:
An artwork may be seen as a terminal, a point of arrival and departure
between life and language, a space where one can play with signs generated by other fields of knowledge and experience (science, technology, mass media, politics, physicality, sexual identity…), a place where it is possible to value and to transform relations with the ‘others’ by articulating, to different degrees of intensity, the understanding of nature and the multiplicity of cultural differences, so we can move from the ‘pasive aesthetics of mirrors’ to a changing, multi-faceted and active ‘aesthetics of prisms’, where the gaze is multidirectional and inclusive.

Beauty:
Without neglecting the need for content, ideology or pathos, art is
striving to recover the vertigo and intensity associated with the idea of beauty. Beauty is not timeless and universal, beauty is a subjective experience linked to the rhetoric of appearance, to the linguistic qualities of the signifier and the pleasure that they produce in the beholder. Aesthetic values depend on historical and cultural variations of taste and today, from a holistic perspective, we can move from beauty to content and integrate mind and body, thought and emotion, rhetoric and philosophy, pleasure and knowledge to achieve a new conception of life.

Translation:
Translation is implied in any form of creation. Creation is a displacement, a movement from one field (life, culture, experience) to another (visual or poetic languages…). Art today embodies a nomadic experience; it is becoming a form of energy related to displacement.
The desire to explore the differential spaces, the places of the ‘others’ and the fluidity and difficulties of translation between different contexts are being reviewed as a means of reinterpreting our position in the contemporary world.

Difficulties:
To travel between those different spheres (cultural, sexual, linguistic…) is a journey of adventure with various risks and difficulties. The process of exploring and overcoming these difficulties is intrinsic in issues related to translation, life and beauty.

La entrada 5th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey, 1997 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Cutaror: Rosa Martínez

Venice June 15 – November 2 , 2003

Santiago Sierra’s work belongs to a set of critical operations which call into question the belief that art is an autonomous, sublime and unselfish activity. Reviewing his works over the last twelve years, what stands out is the persistence of certain subjects – recurring lines of action which end up pointing to a basic obsession: that of deconstructing minimalism as the hegemonic language, associating it with the dictatorship of production and profit.
In his actions, people become ‘performative ready-mades’ that shape ‘situated stories’, extending the classical idea of site specificity. Connecting the semantic charges personified by his actors to socio-economic and geopolitical conditions is an effective way of linking the personal to the political, the local to the global. Some fundamental lines of his poetics converge in his projects at the Spanish Pavilion in Venice – obstruction, linguistic provocation and the reflection on work as punishment.

Wall enclosing a space points to the technologies of mediation and restricted access posed by borders and by limits, whether visible or invisible, which place people in different geographical, social or ideological territories. The wall polarises the Biennial spectators on either side of a hypothetical stage and formalises physical and political tensions evocative of that strange territory of sealed cities and countries defined by contemporary exclusions. Unlike Beckett’s absurd existentialist ‘wall of nothing’, Sierra builds walls that show how frontiers have not been abolished but reinforced. Inside the Pavilion, by staging the remains of construction work on the wall, disorder and abandonment, he proposes an exercise in denuding reality and refers to other remains and other twilight zones.

Covered word is a simple sculpture made of poor materials. Here, Sierra acts by omission. By covering the word ‘España’, he momentarily truncates its multiple historical and symbolic connotations, thus prefiguring a controversial emergence of sentimental reactions, ideological interpretations and aesthetic assessments.

The action, Hooded woman seated facing the wall took place in the physical location of the Spanish Pavilion interior, with no audience, on 1 May 2003. For an hour, a woman wearing a black hood remained seated, still and in silence. This work, which the artist documented in photographs and on video, dwelt on the idea of labour as a technology of domination and punishment, bearing witness to the violence of disciplinary processes and the objectualising power of money. The iconographic connections with Goya’s works, and with torture by the Inquisition, link up with many other contemporary iconological references.

Rosa Martínez Curator of The Spanish Pavilion / Venice Biennale 2003

Excerpts from the essay Merchandise and Death, in Santiago Sierra catalogue. Spanish Pavilion, Venice Biennial 2003. Publishers: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores. Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales y Científicas / Turner. 2003.

La entrada 50th Venice Biennial – Spanish Pavillion – Italy, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.