16th Istanbul Biennial
urated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the 16th Istanbul Biennial was titled “The Seventh Continent,” after the Pacific garbage patch, and featured 56 artists (2019), an installation depicting Anatolian animal spirits, and Korakrit Arunanondchai’s paintings and video starring the green serpentine Naga. Politics became real in Chang En-Man’s three-channel video (2018), portraying Indigenous groups in Kaohsiung displaced by new developments in the Taiwanese city. Mika Rottenberg’s mash-up video (2019) captured the surreal qualities of the Anthropocene with shots of materials in a product-testing facility interspliced with scenes of potato harvesters, the Large Hadron Collider, and Tuvan throat singers.
