Mardin Biennial aims to bring contemporary art from Turkey’s west to its east; to enliven Mardin’s already enriching geography furthermore with artists, academicians, students and diverse communities; to create a new platform of dialogue; to add new dimension to the notion of the “center” and to place Mardin in a unique position through series of exhibitions. The Biennia takes place in locations that are embedded within Mardin’s unique historical architecture and surrounded by as well as embedded in the daily life of the local people.
This edition is called MYTHOLOGIES and locates Mardin within a geography of antique civilizations, stretching from Egypt to India. Despite the cultural destruction it has undergone due to the political and economical violence of recent years, it still retains noteworthy traces of the symbolic world, the universe of icons and myths, the art and literature it has created, amassed and, in turn, benefitted for centuries. These traces still survive in the daily lives of Mardin’s inhabitants, in their living environment as much as in the ethnographical and architectural heritage of the city.
The 3rd Mardin Biennial is curated by a collective, constituted mostly of locals. Likewise, many of the artists are also locals, among them also artisans and craftsman. Hence, this version of the Mardin Biennial suggests an alternative approach by questioning the prevailing biennial procedure where a single curator, who is unfamiliar with the context and setting, single-handedly decides who to exhibit, what to exhibit, and how to exhibit it. This Biennial vehemently opposes the reduction of the local cultural milieu to an exhibition décor and the identification of the locals with an exhibition forced on them, in other words, to the branding of Mardin by an autocratic curator who imposes a certain view upon the city, its memory and its history. Instead, the proposal is to conceive the Biennial as a Mardin carnival, therefore evoking such concepts as game, chance, spontaneity, serendipidy, intimacy and collectivity as means for political resistance.
AC/E supports the participation of the Spanish artists Oriol Vilanova, Elena Bajo, Iratxe Jaio y Claudia Segura win this year's edition of the BIenial with their artwork.