Neither Here Nor There! – A Performance by Nejbir Erkol (Mardin)
Duration: 45 minutes
21.05.2022 | 11:00 | Design Foundation Gallery
Erkol’s performance investigates the possibilities of how precarity emerges, based on the memory of an incident in 2019 when a mortar shell fired from across the border landed 97 steps from his home in Nusaybin. Because of the rain that had fallen the day before, the ground was wet, preventing the mortar shell’s casing from exploding. Using the metaphor of the wild canary grass (Phalaris) collected from the crater left behind, the performance takes on the form of an imaginative storytelling. It explores the notions of safe space, natural resilience, and fragility. The performance will be accompanied by sketches of grass.
My Guiding Wavelength: Borderline and Methodical Erosions with the Cry of Despair – A Performance by Bint Mbareh (Palestine / United Kingdom)
Duration: 45 minutes
21.05.2022 | 15:00 | Develi Inn
Bint Mbareh’s performance in Mardin takes the pain and sorrow created by dispossession as its starting point. These moments are tied to a deep-rooted tradition in which exclamations are essential channels for expressing suffering, as common among prophets and saints. In this context, the artist investigates how sonic exclamations—traveling from one body to another through the very material that forms the voice—break through borders without regard for the dictates or violence that an artificial or imaginary boundary seeks to impose. The artist’s wider research focuses on temple mythology in Palestine, the role of the temple as a neighbor, and how communities expelled from Palestine maintain connections with their saints and prophets through voices that seamlessly transcend time and space.
Shared Notes – A Musical Collaboration by Kathyayani Dash (India), Petra Nachtmanova (Vienna), Erkan Çanakçı (Istanbul) and Çağrı Koç (Mardin)
Supported by the Tarabya Cultural Academy
21 May 2022 | 16:00 | Develi Inn
This performance brings together poets from the Anatolian poetic tradition and poets from the Indian Bhakti repertoire of Kabir Saheb. Using the Turkish mystic Yunus Emre and the Indian poet-saint Kabir Saheb as its starting points, this musical exploration highlights not only the synchronicities between the two but also their omnipresent spiritual resonance. Their shared poetic vocabulary and musical worlds reflect a familiar longing, desire, and a unique emotional tone that exists between laughter and tears—an introspective pull uniting people in ways only the heart can understand. Like the Sufi and Bhakti movements roaming dynamically across the Eurasian plains, the performance rings a bell that symbolizes a bridge between two vessels traveling through time.
Days of Eating – A Food-Based Engagement by Bhagwati Prasad (India)
20–25 May 2022 | Various times | Develi Inn
In this food-based activation of his project Begumpura – A Place Without Sorrow, the artist invites the public to gather around a socio-ecology shaped by language. The residents of this nomadic utopia unite through the belief that everything can exist within and pass through one another. A makeshift shelter constructed in Old Mardin becomes a site for imagining intimacy formed through shared experiences of language and food. Bon appétit!
Reading Room by border_less Collective
20 May – 20 June 2022 | 12:00 – 18:00 | Kebikeç Sahaf Café
The Reading Room, assembled by the independent archiving and publishing platform border_less, provides an opportunity to delve deeper into the concepts explored in the 5th Mardin Biennial. Throughout the biennial, this intimate library-café will host parallel events coordinated by artist Baver Doğanay. The bibliography was compiled by Karan Shrestha, Ritu and Tenzing, Abdessamad El Montassir, Merve Ünsal, Lara Ögel, Gülşah Mursaloğlu, Merve Akar Akgün, Ilgın Seymen, Fisun Yalçınkaya, Baver Doğanay, Adwait Singh and border_less.
Democratize Knowledge Economies: A Self-Governed Discussion on Alternative Publishing in Art, Copyright Permissions, Patent Resistance, and the Future of the Internet
21 May 2022 | 12:00 | Kebikeç Sahaf Café
Participants: border_less Collective (Istanbul), İpek Hamzaoğlu (Vienna), Lara Ögel (Istanbul), Merve Ünsal (Istanbul), Sibel Horada (Istanbul), Thukral and Tagra (New Delhi)
Mystic Cosmopolitics and Intransigent Sonics: An Exchange Between Dina Amro (Palestine/UK), Zahra Malkani (Pakistan), and Kathyayani Dash (India/South Africa)
22 May 2022 | 12:00 | German Headquarters
Talk by Eray Çaylı and Erkan Özgen
24 May 2022 | 18:00 | 13 Square Meters
28 MAY 2022, SATURDAY
14:00 | Talk by Adwait Singh – Loading / Diyarbakır
1 JUNE 2022, WEDNESDAY
14:00 | Event Hosted by Zahit Mungan – Zahit Mungan Studio
10 JUNE 2022, FRIDAY
13:00 | Talk by Yuvam Dünya Association – Design Foundation Meydan Gallery
“Let’s Change Ourselves, Not the Climate! / #OneDayIsToday”
Speakers: Kıvılcım Pınar Kocabıyık, Kübra Güler Dağtekin, Berivan Aslan Sungur, Özgül Öztürk
17 JUNE 2022, SATURDAY
19:30 | Screening of the Documentary “Clouds” – Marangozlar Coffeehouse
Director: Osman Nuri İyem
“Clouds” tells the tragicomic story of the Bulut family living in a small Aegean village.