The 6th edition of the Mardin Biennial, organized by the Mardin Cinema Association and directed by Döne Otyam and Hakan Irmak, will take place between May 10 and June 10, 2024. Curated by Ali Akay, the biennial, titled “Further Afield,” asks questions about how we can move beyond all the artistic, political, and sociological problems we are experiencing today.
Director Döne Otyam points out that the biennial has an innovative structure inspired by Mardin. She says, “The biennial, which will again spread across different venues in the city, will bring new approaches and interpretations to the pressing questions and problems of today's world through the language of contemporary art.”
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CONCEPT
Further Afield...
(Katastema)
Where can we turn our gaze to find possibilities of escaping the structure of intensifications that constrain our freedoms and to look at the globalized past of societies?
We are going through a period of renewed identity within open cages that we thought we had overcome, but which have caught us unawares. How can we transform the struggle against racism in a post-colonial and feminist, intersectional, decolonial deconstruction context into a state of “coexistence” with nature, culture (anthropocene and capitalocene), plants, animals, other humans, ethnicities, nations, classes, and regions?
How can we overcome these problems without denying any of them and by continuously fighting them, without getting tired and without giving up the struggle, and how can we foresee imagining “further horizons”?
How can we organize the changes and transformations in family relationships (single-parent families, multiple marriages and the resulting large families, the increase in non-blood-related family relationships) and technology (artificial intelligence, globalism, robotization, and informatization) in today's societies?
How can we, in particular, emerge from the current global situation and establish a “negotiating democracy” among living beings (in the idea of a “Parliament of Things” that is as human as it is other living beings)?
The 6th Mardin Biennial will focus on these issues as a proposal for artistic observation, reflection, and creation. How can we think about overcoming these issues and transcending the period we are living in, aiming for more distant horizons as we walk step by step on the ground?
*Katastema is defined by Epicurus as the moment when pain ceases and thus the body and soul attain tranquility.
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CURATOR
Ali Akay
Born in Istanbul in 1957, Ali Akay completed his bachelor's degree in sociology at Paris VIII University in 1979, his master's degree in 1980, and defended his doctoral thesis in 1986. During the same period, he also completed bachelor's and master's degrees in political science and philosophy. He has been teaching in the Sociology Department at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University since 1990 and in the Painting Department since 1992.
He has published numerous articles and catalog essays in Turkey, France, Germany, Austria, England, Kazakhstan, Israel, Slovenia, and America in the interdisciplinary fields of sociology, sociology of art, philosophy, and art history. He has published more than 20 books with publishers such as Bağlam, Ayrıntı, Minör, Belge, Yapı Kredi, Dedalus, Doğu Batı, Boğaziçi, and Kime. His writings appeared in the journals he founded, Toplumbilim from 1991 to 2012 and Teorik Bakış from 2012 to the present.
He has curated numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. He worked as an independent curator and consultant at the Istanbul Modern Museum (2004-2007) and the Akbank Cultural Arts Center (2003-2012), as well as at Şekerbank Açıkekran (2011-2022). His recent exhibitions include: “Seven Questions About Asia” (6th Kuandu Biennial, Taipei, 2018), ‘Whisper’ (City Art Gallery, Ljubljana, 2018), and “Cold Air from the Balkans” (Pera Museum, Istanbul, 2016).