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Monster Chetwynd’s playground in the shape of a giant gorgon’s head in Maçka Sanat park
Playfulness … Monster Chetwynd’s playground in the shape of a giant gorgon’s head in Maçka Sanat park. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Playfulness … Monster Chetwynd’s playground in the shape of a giant gorgon’s head in Maçka Sanat park. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

'It's hard not to panic' – Istanbul Biennial targets waste, greed, garbage and gorgons

This article is more than 4 years old

The art festival is spotlighting our tragic impact on the planet. Thank goodness for the lighter moments – such as James Baldwin walking, talking and smoking by the Bosphorus

Japanese arrowroot blankets the Alabama countryside, strangling the trees and fields. An endless tyre dump stretches to the horizon. Plastic waste accumulates in the oceans, forming a seventh continent. In fact, the agglomeration of plastic waste floating about in the Pacific is sometimes referred to as the Seventh Continent. An indictment of the way we live, the ever-growing garbage patch is testament to our wastefulness, heedlessness and greed. The Seventh Continent also provides the title for curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition for the 16th Istanbul Biennial. The biennial is itself another kind of accumulation, and one that is itself not without its own material and ecological cost, its own political ramifications.

There is too much going on in this uneven and at times impenetrable exhibition, in which what counts as waste and what is worth keeping, or looking at, is a constant question. It is always so, beyond that we live in a time of disaster. As it is, the biennial was almost sunk before it opened. Little more than a month ago, it was discovered that the primary venue – the Haliç shipyard, in the old imperial arsenal of the Ottoman empire in the Golden Horn harbour – could no longer be used. The site itself was polluted by asbestos. Biennials are not immune to the things they describe.

Monochrome, by Ozan Atalan. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The 16th-century shipyard would have been a spectacular venue, with the works installed in a labyrinthine display on a single floor. Now, Deniz Aktaş’s large-scale, panoramic ink drawings of tyre dumps have a room all their own in the exhibition, relocated in its entirety to four floors of a refurbished former warehouse due to reopen next year as the Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum. I like the simplicity of Aktaş’s drawings, the dutiful recording of these bleak and unremitting fields of tyres. Their title, The Ruins of Hope, recalls Caspar David Friedrich’s 1823 painting The Wreck of Hope. There isn’t much hope here, anywhere.

Water buffalo wallow in milky water in a film by Ozan Atalan. A spotlit, bleached white skeleton of another buffalo rests on a concrete slab in the middle of the room. The animals’ habitat has been lost in Istanbul’s current expansion, and the building of a gigantic new airport and attendant motorways. Istanbul teems and builds and buries the Bosphorus coast in concrete, towers and identikit housing developments spreading as far as the eye can see. Humans are an invasive species, too.

A show within a show, Feral Effects – by the Feral Atlas Collective, a group of over 100 scientists, artists and thinkers – shows us photographs of the smothered Alabama countryside, and describes, among much else, how offshore windfarms, oil platforms and concreted shorelines provide perfect conditions for jellyfish polyps to breed and over-multiply. On headphones, you can hear the deafening underwater cacophony of shipping, the aural world that fish and cetaceans now inhabit. The evidence accumulates, in videos and photographs, documents and watercolours. It is overwhelming. It is hard not to panic.

It’s a Small World, by Simon Fujiwara. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The biennial itself induces feelings of being engulfed. Here’s a prone body irradiated by painted lesions lain on a brick bier. Next an experiment in limbs and organs, glass and plastic, leather and metal. All artificial life is here. And now a riot of wallpaper, balloons and furry monstrosities. It goes on. Johannes Büttner’s inverted figures – cybermen sculpted from earth, clay, scrap metal, motors and dust – stand on their heads and judder in a room filled with doomy noise. An indoor field of watermelons provide a mute audience to a filmed shadow-puppet play, in Max Hooper Schneider’s installation. The melons, a wall text helpfully explains, are “incarnations of future neomorphic brain-bodies”. Well, I never.

Suddenly, one comes across something wonderful and moving, like Jonathas de Andrade’s O Peixe (The Fish). Shown in London earlier this year, the film shows Amazonian fishermen holding and caressing the large fish they subsist on, a tender embrace of hunter and hunted.

Simon Fujiwara’s It’s a Small World uses the heads of Bart Simpson and Batman’s Joker, Disney characters and Iron Man as the basis for a series of architectural models – panoptic prisons and a hospital, a hall of cattle stalls and gym equipment, all populated by tiny lifelike figures. You could squint and peer for hours, losing yourself in this chilly – and chilling – world.

People watch Spaghetti Blockchain, 2019, by Mika Rottenberg. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Ylva Snöfrid is sitting on the floor painting a gigantic eye. She has been painting here all summer, surrounded by tables, chairs and any number of surfaces she has covered, mostly with her own image. She paints teen horror movie bloody mouths and severed torsos, masked self-portraits, grey and pink caves. This is the artist’s studio as goth bedroom. Her portrait decorates chair seats, and her body is painted on tabletops – the alarming implication being that you could sit on her face and eat off her body. It is all very arch and wan.

Give me instead Mika Rottenberg’s Spaghetti Blockchain, a madly entertaining and colourful film that somehow blends industrial potato harvesting, dyed and fried eggs, gelatinous, wobbly Swiss Rolls, hair care, a burning molecular model, Siberian throat-singers and the Cern complex. Rottenberg carries you along a magical, hypnotic and absurd journey in this visually and aurally arresting film; superbly choreographed and edited, it is one of the few genuine highlights of the biennial. I came out discombombulated.

More artists fill the top two floors of the Pera Museum. Charles Avery continues his exploration of an imaginary island, with a fish market containing trays and buckets of squirming handblown glass eels, weird cephalopods and fanciful molluscs lining the walls. Avery’s drawings are no match for the glass fruits de mer.

Like Avery, Norman Daly created an entire, imaginary culture, and fills a gallery with the supposed artefacts of Llhoros, along with erudite faux-academic explanations, labels and even music. That the objects themselves are derived from fork handles, lemon squeezers, polystyrene packaging and other commonplace objects adds to – rather than detracts from – his fiction. The influence of sculptor David Smith, Joan Miró, early Giacometti, as well as Assyrian and other ancient cultures is also apparent.

Elephant Mask, from Civilization of Llhuros, 1972, by Norman Daly. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

But this sort of over-annotated fantasy world doesn’t do much for me. I prefer the threat and balefulness of Melvin Moti’s film, inspired by Russian cosmism, an esoteric, early 20th-century train of thought that linked human events with sunspot activity and other, inexplicable cosmic influences. Often dark, the screen can burst into life, showing an old, black and white re-enactment of the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots. Archive footage from 9/11, menacing sound of shouts and fearful cries, a terrified man emerging from dust-filled gloom are interspersed with interstellar darkness, and Nasa footage of solar flares and the seething surface of the sun. I couldn’t wait to leave, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

In an Istanbul park filled with children and picnicking cats, Monster Chetwynd has installed a children’s slide in the form of a fantastical gorgon. Over on Büyükada, an island in the Marmara Sea, she has placed a number of large, fantastical creatures – a snake, crocodile, a spider and a bat (a recurring Chetwynd motif) – under the portico of a ruined mansion. We need her playfulness.

Several of Büyükada’s overgrown and abandoned summer residences provide venues for other artists. The best is a thoughtful installation of work by Glenn Ligon. In one room, he shows Istanbul-born film-maker Sedat Pakay’s 1970 documentary From Another Place.

The film follows James Baldwin wandering the streets of Istanbul, asking what it means to be a black American, a gay man, a writer stalled in Istanbul, where he lived, on and off, for about a decade from 1961. Baldwin gets out of bed, talks and smokes and walks. This intimate portrait is the truest and most memorable work in the biennial, brought here by Ligon, another African-American gay man, who has had Turkish subtitles added to Pakay’s film, and presents it along with his own neon and light works, as well as two further films shot by Ligon himself, casting himself adrift with a camera and following Baldwin’s footsteps around the city.

Ligon films everyday life, accompanied by a soundtrack by Don and Neneh Cherry, and by Turkish musicians. Past and present and voices collide. “I am a kind of witness, I suppose,” says Baldwin. At their best, that is what artists are, too, however fanciful their inventions sometimes are.

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