Vardiya / the Shift

Curated by Kerem Piker and coordinated by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the Pavilion of Turkey will present Vardiya / the Shift at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, taking place from May 26 to November 25 2018. Co-sponsored by Schüco Turkey and VitrA, the Pavilion of Turkey is located at Sale d’Armi, Arsenale, one of the main venues of the biennale.

Conceived in response to the theme of Freespace, the title of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018, Vardiya / the Shift offers a programme of public events with the Pavilion of Turkey, providing an open space for encounter, exhibition and production.

Envisioned as a spatial and temporal staging base, the Pavilion of Turkey will provide a participatory platform for workshops, digital roundtable discussions and meetings. Piker’s curatorial programme will welcome 122 international architecture students, as well as academics, professionals, keynote speakers and visitors, inviting a diversity of voices to participate in a continuous process of learning and production throughout the twenty-five weeks of the Biennale.

Placing the study of architecture at the centre of the programme, Vardiya / the Shift launched an open call for video responses to the questions: why does the biennial exist? What does the biennial do? For whom does the biennial exist? 452 students from 29 different countries and 70 cities from USA to China, India to Costa Rica applied for the project. 80% of the applicants were undergraduate students and 20% were graduate students; 70% of the applicants were female and 30% were male.

Out of these applicants, 122 international architecture students will be invited to visit the Pavilion of Turkey in weekly shifts as active producers of the evolving exhibition content. These students are currently studying at universities such as Cornell, Columbia, Cape Town, Harvard, Princeton, Rice, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt, Politecnico di Milano, Sri Venkateswara, Sumatera Institute of Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University and Yale, as well as Çukurova, Dokuz Eylül, Erciyes, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts, Istanbul Techincal University, Mardin Artuklu and Middle East Technical University in Turkey.

The programme will kick off with video installations, through which participating students question the purpose and role of the biennial; 12 workshops run by invited professionals and student groups, focusing on a variety of topics; around 50 digital meetings, with participants from a range of disciplines; and six lectures by keynote speakers, including an international roster of leading architects.

Vardiya / the Shift is intended to solicit a critical dialogue amongst invited guests, visitors and architecture and design professionals around the role of the biennial. In addition to creating a space for all parties to benefit from this opportunity of interplay, the Pavilion of Turkey hopes to incorporate individual and collective experiments from young creative minds into the locus of contemporary architectural agendum.

Vardiya / the Shift is curated by Kerem Piker. Associate curators are Cansu Cürgen, Yelta Köm, Nizam Onur Sönmez, Yağız Söylev and Erdem Tüzün.

The Pavilion of Turkey exhibition is coordinated by İKSV, and realised through the co-sponsorship of Schüco Turkey and VitrA, with the lighting support of TEPTA Lighting, the contribution of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey. The Pavilion of Turkey opened at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, in 2014 for the first time, upon a 20-year allotment of the Arsenale with İKSV’s initiation and the contribution of 21 supporters.

For press inquiries please contact:
İKSV Media Relations: media [​at​] iksv.org
Flint PR: Funda Küçükyılmaz at Flint Istanbul: funda.kucukyilmaz [​at​] flint-pr.com or T +90 533 496 48 14
Emily Saunders at Flint London: emily.saunders [​at​] flint-pr.com or T +44 7914 817 795

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