‘Refugees Welcome’ located outside Tate Modern. Photo: Marcia Chandra. All rights reserved."What can be expected of…[art] in politically fraught times?" asks reviewer Hili Perlson, commenting on the recently launched Istanbul Biennale (running from 15 September to 12 November 2017). With its open-ended yet pointed theme, ‘A Good Neighbour’, the Biennale invited artists and audiences to reflect on the tenuous concept of ‘co-existence’ together with questions of otherness, identity and belonging. Predictably this Biennale received much commentary given the backdrop of current human rights violations in Turkey plus ongoing media censorship. The notion of what is ‘politically fraught’ has taken on disturbingly local dimensions across the exhibition space that is Istanbul.
Biennales and art fairs seldom remain unscathed. Their warp and weft are dependent on the hospitality and political fabric of the host city and its diverse inhabitants. Yanis Varoufakis’s fierce critique of documenta 14 illustrates this curatorial challenge in his adamant refusal to separate grand themes – no matter how progressive-sounding - from the everyday, harsh realities of local economies: "documenta took a great deal more from Athens", says Varoufakis, "from both its private and public sector – than it gave. Adding the veneer of a left-wing narrative against neoliberalism to a purely extractive neocolonial project that’s framed as a gift to Greece is adding insult to injury". For Varoufakis, the space between artist and audience at documenta 14 was overshadowed by a complex set of colonial and neocolonial tradeoffs, and, in this case, ‘art’ and the geo-political apparatus driving it, was hardly a benevolent mediator.
"documenta took a great deal more from Athens, from both its private and public sector, than it gave." – Yanis Varoufakis
