We
are grateful for the possibility of collaborating with the Istanbul Film
Festival, to introduce on screen the central concerns of the 17th Istanbul
Biennial. Developed in the midst of a spiralling global health crisis that is
still far from resolved, this slow-cooked, postponed edition of the biennial
has presented us with a rare opportunity. With the frenetic global exhibition
circuit largely suspended, we have tried to rethink the very purposes of
contemporary art in today's increasingly brittle and polarised societies. What
should a biennial do, in such febrile times?
Cinema
is arguably due for the same kind of reckoning. In the midst of environmental
and humanitarian crises, of social and economic dysfunction, it must surely do
more than entertain. What role can it play in nourishing and fertilizing our
public spheres? With an accelerated, algorithmic news cycle, the breakdown of
independent media and of balanced, fact-based reportage, perhaps we need a
more editorial kind of cinema – moving images that keep us
informed, that challenge popular wisdom, that educate us. Can movies still
engender rational debate, where political institutions and the media sector
have abandoned that aim? How can cinema help an audience desensitized by
torrents of information, numbed by streams of violence and scandal, to see and
hear again, to feel and think and speak in new ways?
These
questions seem to us to resound worldwide, and we are posing them across all
the channels at our disposal: in the exhibition that will activate a wide range
of venues across the city this September, in an ongoing collaboration with
independent broadcaster Açık Radyo, and in a host of special biennial
publications in print and online.
Our
contribution to the Istanbul Film Festival consists of two features and one
thematic programme of shorter works that will be pivotal to the biennial's
public programme. Pere Portabella's 1971 experimental landmark Cuadecuc-Vampir is
a testament to the power of reflexive art in times of social cleavage and
hardening repression. Shot opportunistically on the set of Jesús Franco's Count
Dracula, this parasite film shows us what images are doing to us, and how
much we can do with them, given the ample ingredients of a well-known cinematic
typology.
By
turns gritty and lyrical, Payal Kapadiya's A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021)
is
The
multi-authored programme 'Elemental Frequencies', meanwhile, reflects an urgent
refrain of contemporary culture: How to safeguard the basic ingredients of
healthy life on a finite planet? Current calamities are revealing the limits of
a globalisation based on unfettered extraction. Artists are as preoccupied as
anyone with the nature that sustains us, and our alienation from it; this will inevitably
be a keynote of the coming biennial. But our concern as curators is to query
what else might be considered 'primary' resources – not just the geophysical
and the biological, but an un-reified intelligence embedded in language,
culture and collective memory. 'Elemental' justice will not come from any woke
materialism or cross-legged communion with the forest. It will require social
and historical sensitivity. This means listening to the world better, tuning in
to forgotten wavelengths (Riar Rizaldi), to the fading sounds of an oral
tradition (Nguyen Trinh Thi), to the half-buried traumas of colonized islands
(Chikako Yamashiro).
The
Istanbul Biennial film programme taps into a dawning awareness that today's
mounting crises will not be solved without insights, ancient and modern, that
are endangered by the prevailing technological and ecological nihilism.
We
look forward to continuing this conversation when the Biennial finally opens in
the fall – please join us!
