The 18th Istanbul Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), will be curated by Beirut-based Christine Tohmé.
This edition of the Biennial will be structured into three distinct legs from 2025 to 2027. The first, running from 20 September to 23 November 2025, will feature exhibitions and public programmes. A permanent educational offering and quaretly public programme, established in collaboration with local art initiatives, will follow in 2026. The final leg, to be staged between 18 September and 14 November 2027, will bring together a series of exhibitions, publications, performances and discussions.
The three-part structure aims to stretch the timeframe given to artitic processes, with a focus on the production of art over its formal presentation, and on ‘the creative process, everyday exchanges, openings, studio visits, and reading groups’, as Tohmé said in a statement. ‘The 18th Istanbul Biennial should invest as much in the production process as in its presentation,’ she added. ‘The extended timeframe of three years will allow the Biennial to engage more deeply with the local scene and foster projects and collaborations around collective questions, contexts, and communities.’
The theme of the first leg of the Biennial will be focused on self-presevation and futurities in the face of precarity and recurring crises. In a call for local and international artists to participate, questions around respite, solidarity and counterstrategies of resistance are raised by Tohmé. ‘How can we inhabit our worlds as they unravel,’ she asks, ‘making space for both nightmares and dreams, impermanence and endurance?’
Tohmé is the founding director of Ashkal Alwan, a non-profit organisation in Beirut that since 1993 has supported contemporary artistic practices. She curated Sharjah Biennial 13 in 2017, which unfolded in five parts, while her work was recently recognised with the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture in 2018.
