Esche and Kortun are working together on an exhibition structure that folds out of and reveals its context – the city of Istanbul. The title of this Biennial is "Istanbul", referring both to the real urban location and the imaginative charge that this city represents for the world. "Istanbul" as a metaphor, as a prediction, as a lived reality, and an inspiration has many stories to tell and the Biennial will attempt to tap directly into this rich history and possibility. The curators will not be using any of the monuments located in the historical peninsula, preferring to work in sites that have a more common reference to the every-day, the physical legacy of modernity and the shift to a consumer economy.

The Biennial will be composed of three distinct but interlinked initiatives. Firstly, the curators will commission work by artists who deal directly with the urban conditions of Istanbul. Secondly, they will provoke contrast to the city by selecting works from other milieux that provide a conscious estrangement from the surrounding reality while being present in the city through its imperial history and global presence. Thirdly, a parallel project will spotlight different cultural phenomena within the city. This project, --provisionally titled positionings--, will take various forms, from metaphoric maps, to tours and travel advice. In parallel to the Biennial, positionings will highlight specific local and international constellations, concurrent projects in the city that further elaborate and/or offer different perspectives on the proposals of the biennial.

For the commissioning of artists long-term residencies are being organised in Istanbul to give each individual presentation more time and space than is traditional in art biennials. There will be fewer artists in total and often more than one work or a series of work by each artist will be included. This will allow individual positions to become more nuanced and complex and welcome diversity within a common project. A purposeful scaling down of durational video will encourage the audience to engage with different artistic positions and reflect, without becoming overwhelmed and fatigued.

Another distinct change is to propose “Istanbul” not as a singular event, but as a series of articulated programmes with two core projects. To this end, the Biennial will be simultaneously extended to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The Eindhoven exhibition will be a parallel project, sharing some artists and drawing on the history of past Istanbul Biennials to represent the idea of ‘elsewhere’ in all its complexity within an international art museum. In doing so, it will pose questions about the hierarchy between the stable museum context and the transient Biennial event. The works and artists will therefore have the chance to represent themselves in the two situations that have most privileged art in the 21st century: the biennale and the museum. Other venues following Eindhoven are being negotiated at the present.

History of the International Istanbul Biennials:

The İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts has been organising art events for twenty four years in the fields of classical music, jazz, film, theatre and visual arts to start a dialogue between the Turkish art world and international art circles. Since 1987, İFCA has pioneered an international Biennial which aims at establishing an open-ended international visual art exchange between artists from different cultures. Through the four biennials that İFCA has organised, the opportunity for the development of an international cultural network has been secured not only for the Turkish art scene but also for the international artists, curators and art critics.

In the 1st International İstanbul Biennial held in 1987, İstanbul became host, for the first time, to internationally known artists such as Jean Michel Alberola, Marcus Lüpertz, François Morellet, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio. Additionally, there were special exhibitions from Austria, Switzerland, Poland and Yugoslavia. Turkish artists, galleries and collectors also participated.

In the 2nd International İstanbul Biennial in 1989 the concept of "Contemporary Art in Traditional Spaces" came to maturity. The general coordinator of the first and second İstanbul Biennial was Beral Madra. Hagia Eirene Museum, Yerebatan Cistern and one of the adjunct buildings of the Süleymaniye Mosque were used as exhibition sites. Among the participants who created works in situ were Sol LeWitt, Sarkis, Daniel Buren, Richard Long, Jannis Kounellis, and Anne and Patrick Poirier. There were also group exhibitions from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, the U.S.S.R and Turkey. Art galleries in İstanbul also participated in the Biennial in their respective spaces.

The theme of the 3rd International İstanbul Biennial, directed by Vasıf Kortun in 1992, was the "Production of Cultural Difference", which represented an umbrella concept under which individual countries had their own curated shows based directly on this concept or on its interpretations. The particular interest of the concept of the 3rd İstanbul Biennial was not merely the proper ratios of various races, ethnic backgrounds, gender, investments in alternative histories or in the domain of "low culture", but the actual works themselves, and the ideas a particular work may produce. The Biennial took place at a former 19th century textile plant, the Feshane, and 65 artists from 15 countries participated in the exhibition.

The 4th International İstanbul Biennial was held in 1995, at three very different but centrally positioned venues, namely Antrepo I (a former customs warehouse by the Bosphorus), Hagia Eirene Museum and the Yerebatan Cistern. With the 4th Biennial, directed by Fulya Erdemci, the İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts started a new and contemporary approach in curatorial systems, allowing the artistic director to make the selection of all the artists and to lead the exhibition to a statement of its own through the critical dialogue between the art works. The Artistic Director of the 4th Biennial, René Block, invited artists who produced works in accordance with the concept of the exhibition: "ORIENT/ATION, The Vision of Art in a Paradoxical World", and his selection of artists focused especially on the international diaspora of artists. With the participation of 119 artists from 47 countries in the exhibition, İstanbul became the centre of attention for the international art circles.

The 5th International İstanbul Biennial was held from 5 October to 9 November 1997 under the title "ON LIFE, BEAUTY, TRANSLATIONS AND OTHER DIFFICULTIES". Rosa Martínez was appointed as the artistic director of the 5th İstanbul Biennial. Located inside the Topkapı Palace gardens, the old Imperial Mint, Darphane, -which perfectly embodies the idea of a city within a city- was the main venue. Other spaces such as Hagia Eireni, Yerebatan Cistern and the Women's Library and Information Center also hosted art projects as well as the "gateways" of İstanbul; the Atatürk Airport, Sirkeci and Haydarpaşa Train Stations and the Leander Tower. Together with the public and environmental spaces, the Biennial was both an exhibition and a promenade.

The 6th International İstanbul Biennial, curated by Paolo Colombo took place from the September 17 to October 30, 1999 under the title "THE PASSION AND THE WAVE". Following the extreme pain and hardship that the August 17 earthquake has caused to the country and to the city of İstanbul itself, the İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts decided to hold the exhibition in the hopes that it can help in the healing and in the reconstruction processes, with the specific aim of using the Biennial to bring concrete assistance to the earthquake victims. With the participation of 56 artists, "The Passion and the Wave" addressed the significance of personal histories and the weight of emotional investment in the contemporary world. It reflected the rapid changes, the technological advances and the clash of cultures that are central to our experience of the world.

The 7th International İstanbul Biennial, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, was held September 21 - November 17, 2001 and has been a great success both locally and internationally. The exhibition presented the works of 63 artists under the conceptual framework "Egofugal: Fugue from Ego for the Next Emergence". Though only 10 days after the 11th of September, the 7th International İstanbul Biennial hosted in total 4.500 guests at the opening, with the presence of the participating artists and about 1.200 international guests, curators, art critics and other art professionals, and the total number of the visitors came up to 68.000 at the end of the exhibition. On the occasion of the exhibition four panel discussions were held under the topics "Co-existence", "Collective Consciousness", "Collective Intelligence" and "Co-dependence" which were the main concepts the participating artists were reflecting upon. 7th International Istanbul Biennial also hosted UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts and an international jury of five eminent specialists from different geo-cultural regions awarded 5 of the participating artists, Natascha Sadr Haghighian (Germany), Ömer Ali Kazma (Turkey), Mathieu Briand (France), Leandro Erlich (Argentina) and Du Weng Sig (Taiwan).

The 8th International İstanbul Biennial was held between 20 September - 16 November 2003, and curated by Dan Cameron under the conceptual framework "Poetic Justice". The exhibition was visited by 60,000 local and international art lovers in eight weeks with admission. Furthermore, as they are public spaces, approximately 8,000 daily visitors of both the Hagia Sophia Museum and Yerebatan Cistern had the chance to experience the Biennial works exhibited there. During the exhibition four panel discussions were held under the topics “Art and Societies in Transition”, “Justice and The Creative Act”, “The Geopolitics of Culture”, “Radical Poetics” at the Fine Arts Faculty of the Mimar Sinan University with the participation of highly prominent speakers such as Prof. Ute Meta Bauer, Saskia Bos, Francesco Bonami, Shirin Neshat, Hou Hanru, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and achieved an international cultural and intellectual engagement in İstanbul. Furthermore, to start a dialogue on contemporary art with the Central Asian region, a panel discussion on “New Countries-New Identity-New Art” was held with the participation of art professionals and artists from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The 9th International Istanbul Biennial opened: September 16, 2005;
Will be colosed on 30 October 2005. Curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun.