CULTURE: DESTABILISING THE GIVEN ORDER – Newspaper

The 2022 Istanbul Biennale which is coming to an finish as we speak, was a very long time within the making, having been delayed by the pandemic. That it was pulled off in any respect was a tribute to the organisers and the curators whose collective imaginative and prescient guided the occasion.

This imaginative and prescient, as one of many curators David Teh said on the press convention saying the biennale’s opening, was that of “an artwork world centered on ‘drawback fixing’”, the place many had been involved with, in his phrases, “the way in which we occupy the planet.”

The that means was intentionally broad. It was becoming that these remarks had been made in what was once a medicinal backyard. I used to be launched to this occasion by an outdated scholar and my cousin, Salima Hashmi, who collectively instigated my participation on the pre-biennale.

The curators’ sense of urgency and want to destabilise the given ‘order’ of issues was emphasised within the Poetry Channel occasion held on the Nostalji cafe in Istanbul, of which I used to be a component. The occasion introduced collectively poetry as a medium of resistance, and related the 2 nation’s arguably biggest poets — Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nazim Hikmet.

The 2022 Istanbul Biennale, which is concluding as we speak, featured a programme on the pre-eminent Pakistani and Turkish poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Nazim Hikmet. Shahnaz Rouse who participated within the session, writes about her impressions of the general occasion and what it was making an attempt to do…

Hashmi and Amar Kanwar launched Faiz to an viewers not beforehand aware of his work. In his opening remarks, Amar Kanwar, certainly one of curators on the biennale, sought to disrupt the notion of the ‘nice’ poet. He spoke about poetry as a journey, its that means by no means mounted however expansive and, like story-telling, interactive.

Hashmi, who adopted his remarks, learn two of Faiz’s letters from jail — one fittingly about day break, one other concerning the distinction between ache and unhappiness. She additionally learn the poems Zindan ke ek sham [A Prison Nightfall] and Lahoo ka suragh [In Search of Vanished Blood]. Learn in Urdu after which translation, they discovered a receptive viewers.

As a social scientist, I spoke concerning the similarities between Hikmet and Faiz’s life histories, and their dedication to a distinct imaginative and prescient of artwork, residence and internationalism. On this context, I emphasised their founding function within the Afro-Asian Writers’ Congress.

Whereas this studying and dialog was held in a restaurant saying the launch of the Poetry Channel, it concerned the interpretation and dissemination of Faiz’s poems in public locations, in addition to an on-going venture of writing of poetry as a type of public speech that disrupts current practices.

I learn this occasion as additionally a gap to a distinct type of dialogue between Turkiye and Pakistan, past bus strains and infrastructure, one which establishes people-to-people ties over the more moderen statist ones.

Whereas the biennale was expansive in its choices, except for the Poetry Channel venture, two others that left a long-lasting impression had been the Dumpling Put up and the Disobedience Archive.

The primary centered on meals as a collective endeavour, as a ruse to reinvigorate dissent and evade state repression. Just like the Poetry Channel venture, this too had a public face: the Hrant Dink Basis that underwrote this gathering, additionally launched a information journal, Manti Postasi (Dumpling Put up). Its very first article reminded readers of the persecution of the Hrant Dink Basis — the inspiration was arrange within the reminiscence of an assassinated Turkish-Armenian journalist and screens hate speech and promotes human rights in Turkiye — and the dedication to not solely preserve reminiscence alive, however to construct solidarity by way of a coming collectively round cooking and consuming.

Utilizing meals as a technique to evade authorities — in spite of everything, who can object to individuals consuming collectively — Kanwar, who had an lively hand on this venture said: “Anybody who turns into aware of the Dink Basis will quickly realise that they’re very resilient and might by no means be silenced. They may communicate in come what may, it doesn’t matter what. When you cease them in a method, they’ll discover one other… And carry on discovering newer and newer methods to assume, specific and talk.”

In different phrases, what the Dumpling Put up represents is reminiscence as a apply within the current. Within the newspaper concern of the Dumpling Put up, one of many writers remarked on the ever present character of dumplings — their promiscuous refusal to be confined and, within the phrases of 1 contributor to the paper, producing, “permeable borders, mutable meals.” Cultural alternate at its greatest.

The Disobedience Archive was one more collaborative venture. What struck me instantly was its venue: positioned in what was once a Greek college, now shuttered whereas the constructing’s destiny is being determined. It too was a reminder of a time when Greeks and Turks co-existed, not but divided till fashionable nation-states drew their bodily boundaries and identities.

The construction of the exhibit inside spoke to the “violence of modernity”, to make use of political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani’s phrase. A multiplicity of laptop screens — I didn’t depend what number of there have been — advised the tales of individuals’s struggles in Asia, Africa and the Americas and their repression by the hands of the state and likewise their fellow countryfolks.

The exhibit was brutal in its readability and pictorial depictions, forcing the viewer to confront the dimensions of struggling and its systematic nature. As an object lesson within the human capability for inflicting ache, in its very relentlessness, it additionally reminded us of human braveness and the need to proceed, in an identical vein however in a distinct register to the Dumpling Put up, or the letters Hashmi learn.

Overseeing this set of screens, on the partitions had been photos of Ataturk and different Turkish nationwide figures, a few of whom are admired for his or her secularism however who additionally initiated a militarism that has underwritten Turkish democracy since its infancy and which poets like Hikmet and the founders of the Hrant Dink Basis sought to re-channel and refine.

My focus right here has been on tasks that had been counter-hegemonic. The biennale as a complete was numerous and aided in attracting vacationers to the town, and little question served as an alibi for the present Turkish state’s claims of tolerance and openness to the world. This although the state’s monetary contribution to this occasion was sorely missing.

The restoration and opening of one of many iconic hammams [baths] in Istanbul and the artwork set up in one other, whereas stunningly lovely situations of early structure and utilising public area, concurrently performed into what some have known as “a vacationer gaze”, a re-Orientalising of area and place. Such Orientalising was much more evident on the very first programme after the press occasion that launched the biennale to the general public: this was a musical efficiency the place the performers wearing cliched ‘genuine’ costume.

My level is that biennales are, in some ways, the offspring of the ‘world festivals’ of the colonial period. They spring from the very forces that the curators of this most up-to-date Istanbul biennale sought to disrupt and destabilise.

In a world the place, more and more, artwork can change into a cliche and be domesticated, it’s the tasks I’ve described right here, the place the “composting” the curators wrote about of their imaginative and prescient assertion, had that means and disruptive potential. That there have been others I didn’t frequent is definitely believable however these stood out among the many ones I did go to due to their orientation previous the biennale itself, and their refusal of closure.

The author is Professor of Sociology at Sarah Lawrence School within the US. She has simply launched into a venture inspecting the histories and transnationalism of poets Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Nazim Hikmet and Pablo Neruda

Revealed in Daybreak, EOS, November twentieth, 2022