Review of the 18th Istanbul Biennial

by Andrey Shental // Oct. 7, 2025

We live, as some theorists rush to declare, in a new dark age. Wars erupt, genocidal violence escalates. As Israel begins its official occupation of Gaza after striking neighboring states in the Middle East, the art world elite gathers to celebrate yet another biennial—this time in Istanbul. The Lebanese curator Christine Tohmé foregrounds the region and its diaspora, yet resists the pessimistic and essentialist narratives through which it is so often framed in Western media. Titled ‘The Three Legged Cat’—a concept without a fixed subject—it gestures toward vulnerability, hope and strategies of self-protection.

Selma Selman: ‘Motherboards,’ 2025, installation view at Zihni Han as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Mete Kaan Özdilek

During one of the opening days of the Biennial, an electricity blackout plunged several venues into darkness. Media works instantly collapsed into heaps of useless broken tools—against this backdrop, Selma Selman’s ‘Motherboards’ (2025), with its gutted computer cases piled in the corner, appeared almost prophetic. This intervention of the extra-aesthetic into the aesthetic realm served as an ominous reminder to the art world elite of the point at which art disintegrates. Cutting electricity—a military tactic deployed since at least WWII—weaponizes the common goods that civilians depend on for daily survival. Though classified as a war crime, it remains widely used in current conflicts. Haig Aivazian’s recent black-and-white eclectic cartoon ‘Children of Darkness’ (2025), which I only managed to see the following day, makes the genocidal power blockade its central subject. It depicts an unnamed occupied land, a pitch-dark world where artificial light becomes the ultimate resource extracted even from the white of the bones of the dead and the living.

Haig Aivazian: ‘Children of Darkness,’ 2025, installation view at Galleri 77 as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Sahir Ugur Eren

During the blackout, it was still possible to navigate with smartphone torches and glimpse more traditional—and therefore more resilient—mediums. The dim beam of my iPhone caught pencil-drawn faces, ruins and corpses, simply framed on the wall or collected in notebooks laid on a table. All were works by Sohail Salem, an artist currently based in Gaza who, despite chronic shortages, continues to find materials and create. He brought to my mind the almost-forgotten Soviet painter Mikhail Sokolov, who, incarcerated in the GULAG, drew with tooth powder and ground stylus on cigarette paper. Both cases, though vastly different in context, reveal the bare minimum of artistic necessity: when life is reduced to mere survival, art endures as a counterpoint to erasure.

Sohail Salem, installation view at Zihni Han as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Sahir Ugur Eren

Yet the Biennial’s overall atmosphere is far from grim: humor comes to the rescue even in the most desperate situations. Two examples are Mona Benyamin’s ‘Tomorrow, again’ and Ahmad Ghossein’s ‘So Your Heart Aches, Huh?’ or ‘The Pit’ (both 2023). Commenting on her native Palestine, Benyamin subverts three mainstream TV genres at once: the news program, the political debate and the weather forecast. Her presenters and experts—all played by relatives, as in her earlier films—refuse language altogether. Instead of speaking, they cry, howl, squeal or grin. When everyday reality is an endless nightmare, how can the media communicate it without either numbing audiences into indifference or victimizing those represented? For Benyamin, sinister laughter—indistinguishable from crying—becomes an alternative medium of reporting. Ghossein’s performance, staged inside a booth in Bahçe Galata theater, recounts attempts to overcome the trauma of the 2020 Beirut explosion and ongoing liquidity crisis. The character, played by Ghossein himself, recounts his passage through transcendental meditation, doctors, yoga and antidepressant therapy, always shifting focus to the people he encountered along the way. Contrary to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries, trauma is not private but collective—a shared condition.

Mona Benyamin: ‘Tomorrow, again,’ 2023, installation view at El Hamra Han as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Sahir Ugur Eren

Collectivity and community—whether homosocial or queer—is the Biennial’s central tactic of hope and healing. To mention just a few: Sara Sadik’s hookah lounge gamers, Karimah Ashadu’s motorcyclist taxists, Akram Zaatari’s wrestlers, Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ ravers, Elif Saydam’s minoritarian societies in Türkiye or Valentin Noujaïm’s diaspora clubbers. These works made me doubt whether the safe spaces are merely forms of escapism and hedonism—or are they inevitable means of protecting oneself for the future? And in what way, in the end, can we imagine the future when there is no guarantee it will arrive?

Elif Saydam: ‘Tomorrow, again,’ 2023, installation view at Zihni Han as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Sahir Ugur Eren

Nolan Oswald Dennis: ‘options,’ (2019–), installation view at Galata Greek School as part of 18th Istanbul Biennial // Photo by Sahir Ugur Eren

While walking through the streets of Istanbul, I listened to a podcast in which the white US-American speaker, full of optimism, claimed that history teaches us the Renaissance always comes after the Dark Ages. But does history follow an intelligible form—and is that form inevitably borrowed from Western schoolbooks? Nolan Oswald Dennis’s diagrammatic chalk piece ‘options’ (2019–) resists such predetermination, exposing its Western-centric bias. Unlike Marx’s famous dictum—“first as tragedy, then as farce”—Dennis offers a lexicon of alternatives left on the blackboard: catastrophe, disaster, misfortune, calamity, desolation, ruin, collapse, devastation, affliction, nemesis, fatality. ‘The Three Legged Cat’—stumbling yet persevering—seeks traces of futurity in the most hopeless conditions, teetering on the edge of falling. Yet, it reminds us to view the new dark age dialectically, like the clandestine fighters in Aivazian’s cartoon who leave us with a hopeful note: “darkness is the ink with which we write our stories on the radiance of our future pages.”