The public programme events of the 13th Istanbul Biennial begin with "Making The City Public" to be held between February 8 and 10.
The public programme events aim to examine the ways in which publicness can be reclaimed as an artistic and political tool in the context of global financial imperialism and local social fracture. The public programme, "Public Alchemy", will be organised under the co-curatorship of Fulya Erdemci and Dr. Andrea Phillips. The events will include lectures, workshops, seminars, performances and poetry readings and each cluster of events will focus on one aspect of the current urban transformations.
"Making the City Public"
The first event of the public programme, "Making the City Public", will focus on current urban transformations in Istanbul while taking the accessibility of civic space and debate over rights to the city as the starting point for the discussion of publicness.
Urban transformation can be understood as a political mechanism the role of which is not only to produce the way in which a city is designed aesthetically and technically but also the way in which its citizens are produced as actors. Current urban transformations in Istanbul, in which historically and culturally diverse neighborhoods are being destroyed to make way for newly privatized housing, in which shopping malls are replacing local markets, and in which central areas of social gathering are being relocated to the perimeters of the city, form part of a state-scale rebranding mechanism intended to attract global investment. Such changes intervene in an already complex landscape, wherein layers of competing political and cultural history reveal traces of multifaceted concepts of public space, from the Imperial to the Republican, from the informal to the formal. But what is the future of the city for its subjects ? those included and excluded by new architectural legislation, those allowed to stay, and those made, once again, barbarian? In these series of events we'll seek to question the modus operandi of this transformation and the role of the cultural industries within it.
"Making The City Public" will begin on Friday, February 8 at Istanbul Technical University, Maçka Campus C101 Conference Hall, continue on Saturday, February 9
at Salon İKSV, and it will end on Sunday, February 10 with a tour to northwest Istanbul urban transformations.
at Salon İKSV, and it will end on Sunday, February 10 with a tour to northwest Istanbul urban transformations.
Please click here for programme details.
