18th Istanbul Biennial, “The Three-Legged Cat”

It’s easy to think of art as child’s play. It’s the prime statement of dismissive critique—“a child could make that”—but there’s also a positive, even radical connotation to play that cannot be reduced to the elementary. Play takes time and attention, adherence to and negotiation of rules; play holds the kernels of facts and forms but also imparts an understanding of process and socialization. It can cultivate imagination as much as it can dictate its limits. Play and its many modalities, from naïve to experimental, emerged as an underlying and overwhelming theme as I made my way through the 18th Istanbul Biennial, starting at Zihni Han, a 1970s commercial building refurbished for this edition.

On the top floor terrace, overlooking the Princes’ Islands from where the Bosphorus meets the Golden Horn, Marwan Rechmaoui’s Chasing the Sun (2025) is a playground complete with three wooden swings, a hopscotch game, a see-saw, a sand-box, and an oversized toy wooden horse.1 Of these, you are only allowed on the swings. Approach anything else, and you are shooed away by gallery attendants. (On my second visit, the hopscotch squares had been moved outside to the terrace, in a futile attempt to quell visitors’ desire to jump through it.) 

The institutional dulling that artworks go through in exhibition spaces creates an awkward tension, here caused by the discord between the artist’s own intention, practice, and invitation to play and the civilizational imperative on the audience to frown, step back, wrinkle, and sigh. It also evokes the presence of the superego, embodied by the gallery attendants and private security now prevalent in most art spaces, eliciting the feeling that one is doing something wrong. This awkwardness is intensified by the installation itself. A shelf, hidden in plain sight by being just off the path to the breathtaking view outside, displays a Molotov cocktail, a clumsy toy-like rifle, and a slingshot: toys of another order, that complicate straightforward differentiations between the invitation to play—both its seeming safety, and its radical potentials—and institutional control. 

Other works in the building proliferate the modes and models of play. Sara Sadik’s XENON PALACE CHAMPIONSHIP (2023) is a computer game and video installation that articulates the relationship between socialization and escapism; Karimah Ashadu’s Machine Boys (2024) documents the illicit transportation economy of “toys for big boys” motorcycle taxis in Lagos; and Elif Saydam’s Hospitality (2024–ongoing) evokes a game of cultural hide-and-seek with its maze made out of semi-opaque plastic sheets with decorative patterns blown up to unrecognizable scale. On the ground floor of Zihni Han, Celina Eceiza’s A nest is a fruit that swells (2025) is an immersive space covered with all manner of fabric. This, too, is an inviting space to play in, if only by dint of its already-played-in atmosphere, where one is surrounded by portraits and motifs that adorn every surface. The corporeal connotation of the biennial’s title, “The Three-Legged Cat,” comes alive in the lone limb in the middle of this room: a palm protruding from a seemingly weight-bearing column presses down into the ground as if sustaining the many floors of varied play above. 

Pélagie Gbaguidi’s Fragmentation (2024), an amorphous series of sixteen paintings made on flour bags and patched together unevenly, leaving gaps across the wall, and Sohail Salem’s ink-on-UN-distributed-schoolbook drawings stand out as two works that take up storytelling as play, even as the activity bears the burden of testimony. And perhaps this is where the artworks on display come tantalizingly close to the curatorial framework set by Christine Tohmé in an optimism reminiscent of the early biennials of the 1990s: “bound together by an insistence on survival, they impart valuable lessons in nurturing the imagination and in sketching out horizons of possibility.”2

Despite its claims to center survival in the face of loss, however, the exhibition seemed at times to focus more on the future of having survived than to recognize the ongoing cascade of war, genocide, global warming, and escalating fascisms. In a biennial that did not shy away from using Gaza and genocide in the same sentence, this future orientation misses opportunities to make sense of historical continuity and geographical solidarity (or lack thereof) by circumventing Turkey’s own histories of constitutive violence from the Armenian genocide and its enduring denial onto the continued persecution and incarceration of Kurdish politicians and members of civil society. Like play, then, the biennial treads a fine line between the escapism and the radical potential of futurity. At times, the exhibition felt as if it were being held in a vacuum, and not in a city whose mayor—a feasible challenger to President Erdoğan—has been imprisoned since March.

A meaningful historical engagement with the city, Pilar Quinteros’s Working Class (2025), an installation comprised of the limbs of a workers’ monument from the nearby Tophane Park (repeatedly vandalized since its installation in 1973) hung from the ceiling to float over mirrored pools. The cultural theorist Meltem Ahıska has written on the violence endured by this monument, and the significance of sculptor Muzaffer Ertoran’s persistent attempts to repair it.3 In Quinteros’s accompanying video, an actor embodying Ertoran takes on the Sisyphean task of continuous repair as a means to teach his students by repetition. As the sculptor carries the newly made limbs towards Tophane Park from the exhibition space down the street at Meclis-i Mebusan 35, he muses: “If we have a significant stock of finished parts, it’s partly because I’m training my people to succeed me in my mission. It’s not just to have spare parts on a daily basis or after my death but is also a way to train my people.”

If the installation carries undertones of the Lacanian mirror stage, before which the body struggles to congeal into a unified self, the video explores the social conditions of remaining in the midst of that struggle. And while Quinteros’s fiction carries a tongue-in-cheek modernist ethos of education, in a parallel exhibition at SALT Beyoğlu, “We’ve Been at the Tapestry Studio Since the 90s,” the radical potentials of education and play come to the fore in an homage to the legacy of a craft studio where material, craft, and community stimulated experimentation and nourished the contemporary art world. In the Tapestry Studio, where the late artist Gülçin Aksoy had been practicing radical pedagogy since her appointment as an assistant in 1992—singing, dancing, performing, bringing artists’ and professors’ children and their various games into the fold to free the body of the automated discipline of the loom—sociality upended the material basis of art-making. While chaotic, the exhibition recognizes that the practices that came out of this studio in the past thirty-five years derive from this playful sociality rather than the strictures of the craft.

Returning to another venue down the street, in Elhamra Han, I was craving a similar kind of catharsis, when I saw Mona Benyamin’s Tomorrow, again (2023). Benyamin works with her parents as amateur actors and sets them in absurdist sketches. In this eleven-minute video we watch her mother as an anchorwoman who breaks down into tears, bawling while delivering the news of an attack, while her father plays a weatherman who begins laughing, crazed, to the point of tears as he delivers the news of “a certain instability” that will “take over Palestine and the region.” Towards the end, an old clock dial takes over the weatherman’s face, almost as if it has trapped him into the 24/7 news cycle. He continues laughing hysterically. What kind of play, I wonder, could help him break free of the clock face, where the present constantly meets the future with no room for the past?



The first leg of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, “The Three-Legged Cat” will run September 20 through November 23, 2025; the second leg, through 2026; and the third leg, September 18 through November 14, 2027.