Perhaps she shouldn’t have worn silver platforms. They weren’t matched for the winding descent down the seaside property once home to Leon Trotsky. As she tripped, the art patron raised her arms — clad in manacle-like bracelets — and released an expletive.Along with the rest of the “friends and patrons,” the intrepid visitor was on Büyükada Island, where Trotsky lived from 1929 to 1933 after being ejected from the Soviet Union by Stalin. Today, it is one of the more than 30 uncompromising — and, yes, for the heavily pampered, curse-inducing — venues of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Istanbul Biennial, called “Saltwater: A Theory of Thought Forms.” Shambolic, sprawling, difficult to navigate: the citywide biennial stands accused of being antagonistic to viewers, and maybe that is the point. Humans are not — and least most, beleaguered members of the art world — at the center of the show’s vision.Take the artwork at the end of the pathway leading through Trotsky’s ruins. A fleet of life-sized white fiberglass animals emerge from the Sea of Marmara, forming a kind of unpardoned, unpaired Noah’s Ark. Argentine artist Adrián Villar-Rojas has rafted together this glistening kingdom of kitsch (an elephant, giraffes, elk, and gorilla better suited to a Disney theme park), each statue weighted with another collapsed animal made of scraps of burlap fabric and pottery. However naïve, this strange menagerie has some merit: The animals hold, as far as I know, absolutely no reference to the ideas of the revolutionary thinker whose house they stare at woodenly. Likewise, nearby at the Splendid Hotel, Trotsky makes an appearance in a film installation by William Kentridge, only to be submerged in a rising tide. The object-oriented ideas laid out by Christov-Bakargiev in dOCUMENTA(13), while its light curatorial touch is here lost, make a comeback. (More than 20 of the artists, including Kentridge and Villar-Rojas, participated in that show in 2012, making up about 20 percent of the roster at Istanbul.) And despite the hand-waving explanations — about the show’s theme of salt and waves and knots — Christov-Bakargiev successfully lodges a critique of the humanist and digital trends in art today.The Bark Petition of Australia’s Yolngu Aboriginal people crystalizes these ideas. In 1963, the clan leaders filed a petition to the Parliament House in Canberra to protect their land, surrounding a piece of paper typed in English with bark paintings of fish, turtles, boats. These artistic works, as well as others used as evidence in trials in the 2000s, had direct political effect on the laws in Australia, gaining the clan land and sea rights. It might sound weird and mystical to say, but the artworks were recognized by authorities — and here by the curator — as possessing an agency, perhaps even more agency than the indigenous people who crafted them.In a similar, though fictionalized, vein, Francis Alÿs’s gorgeous black-and-white film “The Silence of Ani,” 2015, follows dozens of children playing birdcall whistles across the ruins of a medieval city between eastern Turkey and Armenia, a place long ravaged by war. The film imagines that the sound of their calling holds the talismanic power to bring back the birds to the land, and by extension, an era of peace.Often, however, the art objects disregard human affairs entirely. Back on Büyükada Island, Susan Philipsz sounds the echo of water dripping and underwater beacons across the 19th-century Mizzi Mansion, known as the Red Palace — all jewel-like broken windows, peeling wallpaper and pink paint, and bare concrete. With large black-and-white photographs of rusted ship hulls and knurled nautical parts leaning against the walls, the entire Red Palace feels like it has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, something like a window into a world without humans and our technological excess. Off the island of Sivrida, Pierre Huyghe has built an actual underwater stage on the floor of the Marmara Sea for jellyfish, sea urchin, starfish, and other sea life. No visitor can see this underwater theater (“Abyssal Plain,” 2015–,). But in the context of the show, that doesn’t particularly matter.Elsewhere artworks possess the power to flee the scene entirely. Walid Raad’s “Another Letter to the Reader,” 2015, recalls an episode in 1914, when Young Turk Minister of War Enver Pasha ordered the motifs of Iznik to be hidden away for protection against wartime damage. “Few realized that the motifs had actually left their containers looking for the blue, green, and red colors that had long abandoned them,” Raad writes. In a vault in the former Bank of Athens, the traces of the organic Iznik patterns are but empty cutouts.In total, this biennial takes at least three days to see, and its ideas are not easily consumed. It proposes a philosophy opposite that of the glib politics-and-art, community-building exercises typical of the Creative-Time ethos today. It equally rejects the pace of digital art championed by the likes of the New Museum Triennial, where artistic vision is eclipsed by technological frippery, the sound-byte compression of thought mistaken for meaningful discourse. Christov-Bakargiev instead finds a third way: correctly placing the art object — not the social networks, not the viewer — back at the center.A version of this article will appear in the November 2015 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
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