The 18th Istanbul Biennial Finds Its Step

The 18th Istanbul Biennial opened with all the clarity and melodic precision of a well-tuned instrument. Yet, its run up was an opaque morass of internal politicking, protests and a yearlong delay before finally settling on Christine Tohmé as curator. Staged under the theme ‘The Three-Legged Cat’, the event is set to unfold over three years, encompassing exhibitions, live performances and screenings, workshops and the creation of an academy. Following an open call – the first in over a decade – a blessedly concise 47 artists were selected for the initial salvo, which spans eight sites in a relatively small, walkable radius. 

The biennial’s solidaristic anti-genocide position was made clear in both Tohmé’s and Chairperson of Istanbul Biennial Sponsor Koç Holding Ömer M. Koçh’s impassioned speeches at the press conference and opening ceremony. But the initial exhibition itself was presented very much matter-of-factly – without any affective orchestral swells – and was all the better for it. This is a biennial that understands that we are all tired and a little numb; that perhaps it is time to let the works speak for themselves.

And speak they do, with the stated theme of resilience being recast here as a kind of quiet, dogged perseverance exemplified by Abdullah Al Saadi’s Sisyphean Stone Slippers (2023), which marries rubber flip-flop thongs with stone soles, and Chen Ching-Yuan’s arresting series ‘The Brick and Timber’ (2020–21), featuring workerist oil paintings of loggers, gamboling canines and stacked bricks. Meanwhile, Sevil Tunaboylu’s Remainder (2024) combines sculptures of lizards with severed tails with autobiographical paintings and a cast of construction props straight out of an ACME catalogue; together they bespeak the crafting of a familial legacy.

The best nods to the other theme, futurity, are similarly a little kooky. Sara Sadik’s Xenon Palace Championship (2023) transforms an interactive platform game – part shisha showdown, part masculine fever dream – into a refuge from racialized everyday indignities. Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Opossum Resilience (2019) brings together Oaxacan anti-mining land defense with a multi-breasted agave, a mythical Mixtec character, a shaggy hill and a very fabulous opossum. In Riar Rizaldi’s Becquerel (2021), a speculative Indonesia is powered by thorium mining and a nuclear sun that radically alters circadian rhythms; rest is verboten.

Across the show, the predation of extractivism emerges as a major theme. Ian Davis’s stylized paintings of service workers at sites of extraction, poised on the precipice of disaster – including Copper Mine (2025) and Auditors (2023) – are remarkable amidst a preponderance of flat painting. Mostly, works in this vein emphasize the messy viscerality of the business. Especially compelling is Ana Alenso’s What the Mine Gives, the Mine Takes (2020), an immersive video installation featuring a bootleg contraption circulating alluvial liquids evoking the improvisatory machinery of the Venezuela gold-mining industry. Elsewhere, Ola Hassanain’s lovely water feature A Whispering Dam (2025), modeled after Sudan’s Sennar Dam, suggests that resistance and knowledge transmission may not be a dramatic groundswell so much as a steady seepage. 

In a city as palimpsestic as Istanbul, the biennial sites often do a lot of heavy lifting. Not so here, with some spaces renovated to the point of feeling emotionally inert. But this affective lack is compensated with an especially strong run of video works, which evoke the quiet politics of presence and pleasure. Chief among them is Valentin Noujaïm’s Pacific Club (2023), a stunning paean to the 1980s boîte and Arab refuge once located in the Parisian La Défense district. Other highlights include Rafik Greiss’s achingly beautiful film The Longest Sleep (2024) about mawlid rituals (celebrations for local Sufi saints), which posits embodied devotion as a path to liberation, and Haig Aivazian’s noirish trilogy You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light (2022–25), which meditates on the fugitive potential of darkness. The softest paw can be a claw.

18th Istanbul Biennial ‘The Three-Legged Cat’ is on view across various locations in Istanbul until 14 November 2027 (the first leg runs until 23 November 2025)

_{Main image: Rafik Greiss, The Longest Sleep, 2024, 3-channel video. Courtesy: artist and Galerie Balice Hertling; photograph: Sahir Ugǔr Eren}