Polytropy

This is about a weekend in the islands, and contemporary art.

The Fourteenth Istanbul Biennial (September 5 to November 1, 2015) had exhibits or installations all over Istanbul, and several of these were on Büyükada, the Big Island, which is Πρίγκηπος in Greek. The Big Island is the last of the four islands visited by the ferry from the mainland. For easier access, Ayşe and I stayed on the second island, Burgazada, the night of Friday, October 23, 2015. We caught the ferry from there to Büyükada on Saturday morning. We visited all of the venues of the Biennial on the island. Illustrating this article are photographs from some of these venues.

I supply some information about the artworks from the Biennal guidebook (which can be downloaded as a pdf file). This was the information that we had at the time of visiting. It turns out that there is more information on the web, sometimes a lot more. Some of the works, at least, do not stand very well on their own. One needs to be told what one is looking at. Without this, one may still look and figure that what one is seeing is meaningful to the artist; but that may be all. In this, the works in the Biennial differ from the photographs and paintings of Emine Ceylan (born 1955), which last month (February, 2016) were on display at my university’s Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center. I give one example, from an album of my photos from the exhibit:

This seems not to be the kind of thing that the big names in art today are interested in doing.

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