⁰¹ Chto Delat [What is to be done?] (Tsaplay, Gluklya, Dmitry Vilensky, Nik Oleinikov), Perestroika Songspiel. Belgrade Story, 2009. Courtesy of the artists.
⁰² Danica Dakić, Isola Bella, 2007–08, HD video, 19’ 07’’. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰³ Hans Peter Feldmann, Bread Slice, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁴ Igor Grubić, East Side Story, 2006–08. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁵ Jinoos Taghizadeh, Good Night, 2009; Rock, Paper, Scissors, 2009, hologram collages. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁶ Rena Effendi, Pipedreams: A Chronicle of Lives along the Pipeline, 2002–07. Courtesy of the artist.
⁰⁷ Sanja Iveković, Turkish Report 09, 2009, red sheets of paper, installation view

‘Happy times do not come in the same way as a morning follows a night’s sleep.’
— Bertolt Brecht [i]

‘An author who teaches writers nothing teaches no one. What matters, therefore, is the exemplary character of production, which is able, first, to induce other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers — that is, readers or spectators into collaborators.’
— Walter Benjamin [ii]


The pun intended by the title of this review will be missed by those who did not visit the last Istanbul Biennial. It refers to two of the first works that the viewer encountered upon entering Antrepo No. 3, the main exhibition space among its three venues: a neon sign by Hϋseyin Bahri Alptekin featuring the phrase “Don’t Complain”, and a drawing near it depicting Alice before a frog, entitled Waiting for a Revolution (Alice), by Sanja Iveković. Although the works don’t summarise the conceptual framework of the Croatian curatorial collective What, How and For Whom (WHW) [iii], which was responsible for the 11th Istanbul biennial, the first does capture its agitational position: while the artist remarks that the imperative “don’t complain” is a form of complaining, the curators object that ‘the message … projects a desire for a more active stance towards social reality’, reinforcing their utilisation of art as a call to action for social change. [iv] Despite also their admission that there are no foreseeable utopian visions or revolutionary movements to raise humanity from the impasses to which neo-liberalism has doomed it, the drawing evokes, by means of children’s book imagery, the radical imagination needed for change, belying, as much as mocking, the curators’ lurking hope in the incubation of future revolutions. While both works’ messages, especially the imperative ‘don’t complain’, were addressed primarily to the wider art audience that the exhibition sought to mobilise, mine is addressed to the elitist ‘mob’ [v] of our kind: critics, curators and scholars whose complaints, though at times justifiable, hamper the impact of the exhibition, changing it from a provocative think tank of political art and ideas into an object of critique and antagonism between art experts — even those whose sights are focused on socially meaningful art.

The importance of this biennial lied in the fearless, polemical deliberateness of its curators’ ambitious political program, which was meant to fight the ‘culturalisation of politics’ with the ‘politicisation of culture’, and was quite transparently — even though debatably successfully — substantiated by the content of the works on display. Works that variously addressed politics, economics, and cultural and gender identity in late-postindustrial and, more often than not, post-communist and Middle Eastern societies. [vi] Acknowledging the constraints of the institution of the biennial as a forum for dissident art, the WHW conceived their exhibition as a ‘meta-device’: they strategically laid bare its apparatus through texts and elaborate statistic charts that visualised the constituents (such as the origins of the artists and the works) and the budget of the exhibition as well as the origins of the latter. In effect, these charts revealed their attention to equal inclusion of male and female artists, and justly represent a worldview that complicates the falsified divide of centre and peripheries (while only 28% of participating artists are of Western origin, 45% of the participants live and work in Western countries); charts also paradigmatically exposed the integration of art and capital in market-driven art events such as the biennial, as well as the inadequacy of their efforts to sabotage it (even if we take into consideration that the majority of the works in the biennial were owned by the artists).

A timely response indeed to the financial crisis, and an overdue questioning of the stagnating role of art in society, the last Istanbul biennial featured art from a vast, ethnically diverse pool of artists — giving primarily voice to artists from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, rather than Western Europe and North America — to unmask worldwide horrors and the fallacies that make possible, yet unsustainable, western democracy’s daydreams of normalcy and neoliberalism. The ultimate goal of the curators was to renew critical thinking, possibly motivating the audience to critique the ‘barbarism’ of current political models, if not plant the seeds of socialist reformation. [vii] Part and parcel with the agenda of the curatorial collective, whose first project was dedicated to the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, is a nostalgia for the currently undermined communist values and an anti-capitalist drive evoked by the exhibition’s title, What Keeps Mankind Alive? (The eponymous song derives from Bertolt Brecht’s radical critique of capitalism, The Threepenny Opera, and was written by Brecht in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill). Although the use of masks and other distanciating devices in several videos referred to Brechtian theater, only a few works in the exhibition directly engaged in dialogue with Brecht’s work or used his methods to stage the sociopolitical truths they reveal, the most explicit, perhaps, being the feminist wall drawing Pirate Jenny by Darinka Pop-Mitić, which illustrates another song from The Threepenny Opera.

The crucial evocation of Brecht’s ideas as a viewing ‘prism’, and a criterion for the selection of the displayed artworks that distinguished the exhibition lied in the exhibits’ programmatic framing by Brecht’s belief in the political engagement of art, and in the alignment of the curators’ understanding of art’s role with Brecht’s perception of theater as a mode of ‘collective elucidation’ — a means of ‘political education’ and of ‘deframing the apparently self-evident’. [viii] The WHW’s ultimate goal to restore the art viewer’s agency — to transform her/him from passive consumer of the spectacle into active producer of meaning — is further informed by Brecht’s entrusting of ‘Mankind’ with the potential for change and by his view of art as a ‘collaborative research and exposure of truth’, rather than a sublime meditation between experts and charismatic people, that is not isolated from an innately bad reality but informed by the dialectics of life. [ix]

The curators and co-authors of the catalogue indeed critically revealed in their writing the ideological premises of the separation of art and life — that is, the forged dichotomy of artistic autonomy and political commitment that, since the beginning of the Cold War, has cast suspicion upon the intersection of ‘high’ art and political engagement in light of modernist principles, dismissing political exhibitions as narrow, if not dangerous, propagandistic events. After all, it is the servitude of seemingly ‘autonomous’ art to neoliberal politics — which they sampled through their inclusion of a Museum of American Art project that revealed the by-now well-known role of the Museum of Modern Art in the triumph of abstract expressionism as part of American Cold War politics and, in effect, the inevitable inextricability of art and politics — that they aspired to counteract with the works they chose for the 11th International Istanbul Biennial as an exemplary advocation of a redirection of art to the service of other, socialist, politics. Although they included a few abstract works, the foremost being the pseudo-minimalist sculpture The President’s Platform, 2007, by Marina Naprushkina (a red copy of the pedestal used for the speeches of the leader of Belarus, which ironises its use as an instrument of propaganda through its evocation of the platform as a basis for democratic dialogue and freedom of speech), the curators’ intermeshing of nonetheless autonomously produced works from the ’60s through today belied a predilection for modernism’s ‘outlaw’ — Realism — whose multifarious eruption (from the existentialist neo-figurative painted portraits of Marwan to the documentary video art of a series of younger artists) offers ‘concrete’ dialogues with specific recent or current sociohistorical realities, regrettably perhaps reinforcing, through its privileging of content over form, the dichotomies that the curators aspired to defy with their reconciliation of autonomous and political art. [x]

Despite such prevalence of content, the curators did not impose any strict thematic categorisation of the works on view, or fix certain narrative itineraries among them, allowing instead their political ‘prism’ to open up the unraveling of ‘truths’ that the artworks ‘constructed” for each viewer. The topics that the works deal with, however, reinforced by the catalogue texts, let us follow threads that circumscribe their concerns.

The critique of capitalism underlies the disillusioned vision of market-driven and media-centered old and new democracies in a great number of the works. Some explore the global impact of capitalism on everyday life with stark illustrations of the often-devastating effects of international capitalism in both the West and the East — in Eastern Europe in particular — as in the documentation of the effects of the oil industry on people’s lives in Rena Effendi’s photographic series Pipedreams: A Chronicle of Lives Along the Pipeline, 2002–07. Another example is María Ruido’s documentary video Amphibious Fictions, 2005, which traces the effects of capital optimisation of transnational capital — a cause of poorer working conditions within the European Union and beyond — in light of the new working practices imposed on the traditional textile sector around Barcelona that have resulted in the deunionisation and literal domestication of the workers. The plight of laborers — including artists — in diverse geocultural contexts, is variously brought into focus, while KP Brehmer’s abstract deciphering of a worker’s state of mind during the production process in Soul and Feelings of a Worker, 1978-1980, constitutes the ultimate dignification of the laboring ‘Mankind’ in What Keeps Mankind Alive?”. Conversely, the bourgeoisie has been variously incriminated almost à la Brecht. In Pop-Mitić’s Landscapes, 2004–05, a middle-class living-room-like installation is filled with framed paintings of landscapes that also represent locations of mass graves from the war in former Yugoslavia, mocking the embourgeoisement of art and the war crimes and injustices masked by its tasteful neutrality, in effect unmasking the ‘aesthetics of blindness’ [xi] that the whole exhibition castigates as characteristic of contemporary art and life. While several works delineate consumerism as capitalism’s problematic promise in several post-communist regimes, ‘Chair’ from the ‘objects of desire” of Errorist Kabaret, by the radical Argentinian group Etcétera, proposes — with the absurdity of the errorist movement’s protests — the strike of objects against consumerism, after the ’Bottle of Wine’ admits that ’we [the objects] are there for all their social needs, for their consumerism. We are more important for them [people], more than they are for themselves.’ [xii] The collapse of values under capitalist self-interest is further highlighted by the equation of business with criminality in the publication Postgraduate Education, 2009, by Siniša Labrović, which illustrates a guide to successful criminal behavior, in the style of classic ‘how to’ self-help books, mocking the centrality of graduate education as key to success in the established system and proving its prerequisites for commercial and social success as truly criminalising. While the underbelly of capitalist euphoria is counteracted by the reality of poverty documented in a number of works, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Bread, 2008 — a slice of bread with its middle eaten — raises to an indeed-moving monumentality a universal symbol of life and labor, survival and oppression, while bringing the centrality of food in today’s times of crises to the foreground, and echoes Brecht’s dictum that ‘food is the first thing, morals follow on.’

Capitalism, also, is explicitly thematised by a few artists. Yüksel Arslan’s painting Capital, 1971, illustrates the last chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital through the quasi-surrealistic depiction of a huge hand threatening a town. In Treat (or Trick), 2008, an installation combining drawings and animation, Zanny Begg uses a Halloween custom to unmask the illusions of free market self-regulation and finds in trouble the main character of the film — the illusionist Mr. Invisible — who, in a clear reference to the ‘invisible hand principle’ of the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, stands for the capitalist system but has ‘run out of new tricks.’

By extension, neither communism is presented as the usual enemy of modern democracy, nor its fall celebrated as ‘a cultural reconquest, a re-westernisation of Eastern Europe.’ [xiii] Dating from the days of communism, Vyacheslav Akhunov’s collages express a peculiar fascination with Lenin through a conceptual reworking of typical socialist propaganda iconography. His ambivalent and recontextualised messages — whether nostalgic for communism or critical of the bankruptcy of communist ideals — haunted the exhibition as specters of communism’s finest evocations. This goes hand in hand with the ‘skepticism about the obsession with being European, which shapes the daily politics and dreams of Eastern Europeans, and about the amnesia regarding the socialist past that fuels their desire for membership in the European community’ expressed by the curators and allegorised by several works. [xiv] Chto delat [What is to be done?], a group of artists, activists and writers whose collective structure reflects the Russian avant-garde’s legacy, showed two superb videos, Partisan Songspiel and Perestroika Songspiel, 2009, which theatrically foreground — like ancient tragedies, with actors and choruses — post-communist types in a caustic exploration of the political changes following the end of communism as well as the potential for socialist emancipation and collectivism. The ideal of communist collectivism is clearly lamented as it is shown ‘replaced by identity politics and an obsession with nationhood’ in Alimjan Jorobaev’s photograph Men Praying, 1982–2005, featuring workers praying with their backs turned to a public monument of Lenin. [xv]

A lot of the plethora of research-based works, explicitly or covertly, have been dedicated to unmasking, through deciphering or recoding, the underside of contemporary democracies’ security — the ‘black world’ of agencies that seemingly ‘secure’, through all kinds of terrors, the fallacious freedom of our times — starting with the Cold War era, whose fears and paranoia during Reagan-era American politics and whose relationship to war and nuclear power was captured through the control station installation in Control Room, 2008, by Lisi Raskin. Trevor Paglen’s seemingly innocent and sensuous astronomic pictures map the movement of military and reconnaissance/intelligence satellites in the night sky over Istanbul, while the Paris-based collective Bureau d’Études revealed with their Administration of Terror, 2009, the alliances between different systems of oppression and manipulation — such as media, science, and the military and industrial complexes — visualising the invisible machinations that support today’s democracies through a complex mapping of their complicities.

War as ‘the engine of capitalist economy’ [xvi] is the theme of several artists — whether through its evocation (as the historical context that frames the negotiation of a series of other matters, including the experience of dislocation, the formation of new cultural identities and the struggle against ethnic minorities), its documentation or its defeat via imagination — informing viewers about the truths of a vast range of enthic ‘cleansings’, civil struggles and seemingly humanitarian, peace-making or anti-terrorist, violent interventions. In Territory 1995, 2009, Marko Peljhan has researched the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica that took place in front of armed UN peacemakers during the war in Yugoslavia, despite the fact that Srebrenica was hailed a safe zone. In several publications, displayed amidst maps and bookshelves with further information about the genocide, the artist reconstructs the massacre, analyses international involvement in the war, and elaborates on the technologies used for the efficiency of the genocide and its concealment. The political situation in Palestine is the subject of several works, whether in Jumana Emil Abboud’s poetic evocations of dislocation — in the video Pomegrenate, 2005, where a hand violently puts the seeds of a pomegranate back into its shell, or in Smuggling Lemons, 2006, where she records the constant crossing of checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah — or in the often-humorous revelation of life under occupation during an ordinary Palestinian family dinner in Soup Over Bethlehem, 2006, by Larissa Sansour. Fantasies (such as Qalandia 2087, 2009, the installation of an architectural model by Wafa Hourani that imagines the future of the Palestinian refugee camp in the largest Israeli military checkpoint) and architectural projects for the rehabilitation or recycling of Israeli occupation architecture (designed by the collective decolonizing.ps) point to architecture as an invaluable source for imaginary escapes from the grim reality of current war zones, and an activist alternative to bankrupt utopianism.

Often manifesting the feminist concerns of the all-women curatorial collective, gender issues — ranging from gender inequality to its performativity or the subversion of stereotypes that support the fictions of normal heterosexuality — also distinguished the assorted works of the 11th Istanbul Biennial. Works range from activist documentary installations by renowned Western feminist artists — such as Margaret Harrison’s Homeworkers, 1977–78, which investigates the situation of nonunionised women doing work at home during the Equal Pay Act, or the video Exemplary, 2009, by Canan Şenol, which addresses the difficult position of contemporary Turkish women trapped between secular values and neo-religious moral conservatism—to the sensitive drawings of İnci Furni, which explore the deterioration of the ideal Turkish woman prototype, making evident the ongoing importance of feminist expression, and its urgency in such specific cultural milieus as Turkey’s changing society. The performativity of gender is subversively tackled by artists such as Michel Journiac — whose mimicry of the life of ordinary (western, middle-aged and middle-class, married) women is based on stereotypical depictions in women’s magazines, which he duplicates through photographic self-portraits in drag to upset hegemonic definitions of gender — while Nilbar Gϋreş, in her photographic compositions Unknown Sports, 2008–09, depicts women as transgender servants of men and archetypes of feminine beauty, disturbingly yet parodically challenging women’s roles and the fictions of femininity. The most direct feminist intervention — symbolically inconspicuous and tacitly straddling the three venues of the exhibition — was Iveković’s Turkish Report 09, 2009. It consisted of red sheets of paper printed with the main points of a report on the status of women in Turkey by Turkish NGOs, and tackled important issues — the most disturbing being the ongoing honor killings of women in Turkey. Treated like rubbish scattered throughout the three venues of the exhibition, the papers jeopardised the activist overtone of such feminist art gestures, mimicking ‘the fate of such reports in powerful organisations’, [xvii] while framing viewers as accomplices in gender inequality — through their hesitation to pick up and read the trashed reports — and responsible, through indifference, for the wide range of injustices, atrocities and fallacies that the rest of the exhibition revealed.

Among the highlights of the exhibition was one of many works that challenged the role of the media in contemporary society and one of the few that extended beyond the physical walls of the three venues. The performance The Inhabitants of Images of Lebanese actor and director Rabih Mroué, whose work has severely suffered from censorship by the Libanese authorities due to the uncomfortable political truths it has revealed, addressed the role of image manipulation in political propaganda through an imaginative, ideological dismantling of found, possibly fabricated, political posters from the streets of Beirut, while subtly familiarising the audience about the torn Arab society he comes from. It is with one of his intriguing video installations in Antrepo No. 3 that Mroué foregrounds, with his signature acting, the issue of guilt and the dangers of its acceptance in recent history by means of his fictitious public apology for many things, including his participation in the Libanese war. Remarkable in their pairing of documentation with alienating performativity — in inventive stagings of reality that challenge the exhibition’s documentary realisms — were Danika Dakić’s Isola Bella, 2007–08, and Igor Grubić’s East Side Story, 2006–08. In the first, a 19th-century wallpaper with the name Isola Bella, an isolated earthly paradise, ironically frames the performances of a marginalised group — the residents of the first institution in Bosnia Herzegovina for the mentally handicapped, the Home for the Protection of Children and Youth, near Sarajevo — who lived all their lives in institutional confinement; performing both as actors and their audience, wearing masks of animals, folk and pop characters, and in close collaboration with the artist, the old inhabitants shared stories, desires and delusions, creating a ‘phantasmagoric’ space of resistance within the institution. In the latter, a parallel projection of two videos juxtaposes documentary footage of the violent attacks against participants in the first Gay Pride celebrations in Belgrade and Zaghreb with uncanny dances — records, in fact — of actual, staged reinterpretations of the former violent acts, enacted in Zaghreb’s streets. As this weird body language interrupts the peacefulness of public space, it ‘challenges the official narratives of transition from postcommunist to neoliberal societies’, revealing the irruption of violence against sexual minorities as a metaphor for lurking hatred against ethnic minorities. [xviii] Violence underscores also one of the most poetic videos of the Biennale, Jinoos Taghizadeh’s Good Night, 2009, since the beautiful lullabies sung to a baby being rocked to sleep in its crib, are long forbidden revolutionary anthems from the 1979 revolution in Iran.

My indicative mention of these works, whose descriptions I purposively drew from the exhibition catalogue stressing content over artistic means — both in reinforcement of the curators’ interpretative prism and in a telling absence of rivaling, strong impressions of the aesthetics of their realisation—is not meant as an enumeration of great works in contradiction of the curators’ intent to avoid biennials’ usual role as shiny spectacles and loud feasts for the bourgeoisie, or of their relative leveling of the role that the diverse media and aesthetic dialects of the exhibits played in the transmission of their content through a display mode that did not draw excessive attention to itself. [xix] The latter might be called blunt, pedantic, or formulaic, while some critics have indeed justly ‘complained’ about the unconvincing match of a radical political agenda with a modernist mode of display that did not try to overcome the constraints and legacy of the ‘white cube’. [xx] No idealist today is so naïve as to truly believe that an institution like the biennale could have been so easily hijacked as to effectively foster dissident art and dissent.[xxi] Yet the curators did exemplarily combat the institutional depoliticization of every image that characterizes most exhibitions — one of the challenges of contemporary curatorship, as declared in the catalogue. [xxii] And what they successfully satisfied, above all, was their promise to educate by transmitting information and unmasking reality, which could make the exhibition worth traveling and be taught to different audiences—despite any objection about the selection of works, their aesthetics (or lack of it) and their mode of display. Although the exhibition neither subverted its structure nor proposed radical models of political art, and, above all, has not yet inspired any collective wish for artistic and political change, viewers came away enlightened by a tremendous number of dismal worldviews resulting from hegemonic economic, political, religious and identity systems throughout the world, while those of the art community who still believe that art can be a place of political articulation should have left with the challenge to surpass the WHW’s efforts to prove it.

This is why it seems to me unusually unproductive to be critical of a biennial that tried to be, and was, positively different — whether you call it political or socialist, as some have, or you disagree with its political messages. Critique was indeed a desired product of the exhibition. But in the hands of (Western) critics discombobulated by the obscure contexts and unfamiliar names that must be investigated in order to engage constructively with the work at hand, it is an easy way to annul the significance of one memorable exhibition, even if this can be understood only as the signaling of the rise of the era of ‘artistic doubt’ — a promising legacy of the financial crisis to the world of art. [xxiii] Given that the exhibition apparatus itself was inevitably not so ‘improved’, to return to Benjamin’s saying with which I started, the ultimate achievement of WHW’s effort — the reclaiming of the political role of art as art — should be still retrieved at least as the make-believe product of a tacit ‘collaboration’ between readers and spectators, between all of us who disseminate its contents, whether we ever fantasised a revolution, or not.


[i] Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, ed. and transl. by John Willet, London, A&C Black Publishers, Methuen Modern Classics, 2001, pp. 7–9, reprinted in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, eds., What, How and for Whom, and Ilkay Baliç, Istanbul, IKSV, 2009, p. 61.
[ii] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2 1927–34 , Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press, 2002, 777, reprinted in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, eds, What, How and for Whom, and Ilkay Baliç, Istanbul, IKSV, 2009, 43.
[iii] What, How & For Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zaghreb, Croatia. Its members are Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Natasa Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic, and designer and publicist Dejan Krsic. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zaghreb. ‘What’, ‘How’ and ‘For Whom’, refer to the three basic questions of economic organizations, and concern the planning, concept and realization of exhibitions as well as the production and distribution of artworks and the artist’s position in the labour market. Forming the title of WHW’s first project, these key questions became the motto and the name of the collective.
[iv] What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 59.
[v] I purposively use here Keti Chukhrov’s appellation of art connoisseurs and experts (‘Bloss Menschen or Something that Adorno Forgot and Brecht didn’t’, in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 460) who comparing the aesthetics of Adorno and Brecht, in light of their different views of collectivity, sums up the effects of their misguided application: ‘Today contemporary art finds itself split between the two directions — it either tries to be artificially populist, or, on the contrary, fears to lose itself among the “mob”, i.e., refers to a milieu of refined connoisseurs and experts. In the last case, resorting to Adorno’s aesthetics comes as a remedy against the global spectacle of art-industry.’
[vi] The breadth of the project is unthinkable without its catalogue whose multidisciplinary texts reflect the variety of the curators concerns. In addition to an essay by the WHW, excerpts from Brecht, and reprints on Brecht by Alain Badiou and Fredric Jameson, as well Harold Pinter’s Truth and Responsibility, Slavoj Žižek’s Reading Lenin with Brecht, Elin Diamond’s Unmaking Mimesis, and Bob Dylan’s On Pirate Jenny, the catalogue includes essays by a great variety of less known thinkers, including artists, art writers, cultural critics, economists, political science experts etc.: Corporate Support on Art: A vicious or virtuous cycle? by Gökçe Dervișoglu; Politics with a Mask: The ‘end’, the ‘origins’ and the possibilities of politics, by Meltem Ahiska; Secularism and Politics in Iran, by Morad Farhadpour; The Post-communist Robinson, by Boris Buden; Brecht’s Gesture, by Mladen Dolar; Brecht and Latin America, by Luis Ignacio Garcίa; Centennial Politics: On Jameson on Brecht on Method, by Darko Suvin; Charity is a Legitimate Part of our Culture, by Ayse Bugra; Can the Capitalist World Ecomony Survive the Rise of China?, by Minqi Li; The  Politics of Perception: Art and the World Economy, by Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost; Neither with Nor Without you, by Sureya Evren; Dense Objects and Sentient Viewings: Contemporary Art Criticism and the Middle East, by Omnia El Shakry; Somewhere between an Office and a Stage: A dramaturg leaves her room; a curator enters a play, by Ed Gufer; Bloss Menschen or Something that Adorno Forgot and Brecht didn’t, by Keti Chukhrov; Exit Strategies (for keeping mankind alive): Challenging Productivism in Contemporary Capitalism, by Stephen Wright.
[vii] ‘Today … the dilemma “barbarity or socialism” is more real than ever, and the future of the world appears divided between pauperized war zones and the stable fascistoid systems of the rich zones …’ WHW, “This is the 11th International Istanbul Biennial Curators’ Text”, in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, p. 120.

[viii] Ibid, pp. 99 and 101.
[ix] Keti Chukhrov, “Bloss Menschen or Something that Adorno Forgot and Brecht didn’t,” in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 462. In contrast to the ignorance and the vulgarity of the mass, Brecht we are reminded by Chrukhrov saw Mankind not as a mass doomed to a fixed kind of being but the variable of a world and reality which are also variable. Unlike the dangerous ignorance of the man from ‘below’ that underlies the Adornian aesthetics’s dismissal of the mass and reality, Brecht believed in the sophistication of his voice ‘as singular and idiosyncratic in its belonging to this or that history, social formation or disposition’ and understood ‘the trait of a Man’ as the ‘temporary effect of political and social clashes’, hence subject of change. Instead of separating art, politics and culture into sacred spheres of ‘precious achievements’, he believed that knowledge that can be both artistic and cognitive, even though not valorised by culture, does not reside only in specialised fields but results from “mankind’s complex ‘commonality.’” See Chukhrov, pp. 462–464, for all quotes in this footnote.
[x] See the recent definition of realism by Linda Nochlin, Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. 203–204.
[xi] Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost, ‘The Politics of Perception: Art and World Economy’, in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, p. 340.
[xii] What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 113.
[xiii] WHW, in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, p. 105.
[xiv] See Suzanne Fowler, “A Croatian Collective Takes Charge at Istanbul’s Biennial,” at http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/a-croatian-collective-takes-charge-at-istanbuls-biennial/
[xv] What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 153.
[xvi] WHW, in What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Texts, p. 118.
[xvii] What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 147.
[xviii] What Keeps Mankind Alive? The Guide, p. 125.
[xix] With the exception of the use of the Feriköy Greek School as a venue. Not only because of the aesthetic harmony of works and architecture within the rather atmospheric spaces of the small school, but because the use of its classrooms as exhibition spaces enhanced the didactic character of several installations, while its own history as an ex- school of the once thriving Greek community in Istanbul (visualised on a wall print that indicated the decline of the number of students who attended it from its foundation to its closing) further charged the experience of the works on view, while it also turned the exhibition venue itself into a political artwork, a monument to another ethnic ‘cleansing’ masked by the seductive multiculturalism of the city of Istanbul as ideal hostess of an ‘international’ mega-art-show.
[xx] See the discussion of Pablo Lafuente, Maria Muhle and Pip Day in Afterall, at http://www.afterall.org/online/istanbul.biennial
[xxi] As such, the Resistanbul’s infamous protests about the incompatibility of the radical politics of the exhibition and those who sponsored it, are both justifiable, as well as welcomed, if not a form of ‘action’ invited by the WHW who did expose the limitations of the institution of an ‘international biennale’, such as that of Istanbul, as a forum for political art.
[xxii] “The most challenging creative imperative for present-day curators is not to put together imaginative and intelligent exhibitions, but to overcome deep structural impasses created by the functioning of the system, inside of which an almost obsessively anti-hegemonic and anti-institutional contemporary art returns to the wasp’s nest of institutional and hegemonic order, represented in the very structure of the exhibition, causing an instant depoliticization of every image, idea or action brought into these realms”, Ed Gufer, ‘Somewhere between an Office and a Stage: A dramaturg leaves her room; a curator enters a play’, in What Keeps Mankind Alive, The Texts, p. 448.
[xxiii] To refer to the recent article by Augustine Zenakos, published in Greek as ‘Εικαστική αμφισβήτηση εν μέσω κρίσεως [A Fine Arts Dispute During the Crisis]’ (To Vima newspaper, January 1, 2010, pp. A32–A33), that explains recent dissident artistic manifestations both in West and East as symptoms of the financial crisis, distinct from the sale or price drop, while reading them as promising signs of future movements that will challenge art as we know it, i.e. as big business.