Selma Gürbüz's work in the Mardin Biennial.

Photo : Photo Mehmet Çimen/Courtesy Mardin Biennial

In its fifth iteration, the Mardin Biennial continues to connect the high deserts of southeastern Anatolia to the international art world. The show brings to the fore environmental and sociopolitical issues that its local, largely Kurdish, Assyrian and Arabic populaces face when confronting globalization amid civil war, unprecedented migration, climate change, and the threat of extinction for some of their millennia-old languages.

This year, New Delhi–based curator Adwait Singh prepared a conceptual edition dense with ideas that features over 30 artists from 25 countries. Set in spaces done in the early medieval Artuqid architecture of its former Turkmen rulers, the fifth Mardin Biennial’s spotlight on artists from India places special emphasis on the greater geography of the city’s overland bridge to the Indus Valley.

“I am revising mainstream notions of dispossession, not only about the migrant crisis, but on the forced opening of economies, for example in India,” Singh told ARTnews. “The artists do not just speak to dispossession but offer alternative models, like anarcho-mysticism, hydrofeminism, deterritorialization.”