Organised by the Mardin Cinema Association and directed by Döne Otyam and Hakan Irmak, the 6th edition of the Mardin Biennial will take place between 10 May-10 June 2024. The biennial, curated by Ali Akay, asks questions about how we can go beyond all the artistic, political and sociological problems we are experiencing today under the title “Further Away”.
Director Döne Otyam points out that the biennial has an innovative structure fed by Mardin. ‘’The biennial, which will spread to different venues in the city, will bring new approaches and interpretations to the crucial questions and problems of today’s world with the language of contemporary art,” she says.
The conceptual framework of the biennial is as follows:
Further Away (Katastema)
Where can we turn our gaze to find the possibilities of coming out from the structure surrounding us in the concentrations that impede our freedoms and to look at the globalized past of societies?
We are going through a period in which we think we have surpassed it but which re-enters an identitarian state within the open cages that grip us tightly. How can we transform the post-colonial and feminist, intersectional struggle against nature, culture (Anthropocene and capitalocene), plants, animals, other people, ethnicities, nations, classes, regions, and struggle against racism in the context of decolonial deconstruction into “coexistence”?
Without denying any of these and consistently struggling with them, How can we overcome these problems by going through them without getting tired and giving up the struggle? And how can we imagine more ‘’further’’ by transcending them?
How can we organize the changes and transformations in family relations (single-parent families, multiple marriages, and families with many children born from them, increase in non-biological family relationships) and technology (artificial intelligence, terrestrial, robotization, and informatization) in societies today?
In particular, How can we get out of the existing global scenario, and how can we communicate a “deliberative democracy” (between humans and also other living things as in the concept of “The Parliament of Things”) among living things?
The 6th Mardin Biennial will focus on these issues as a proposal to observe, think and create artistically. How can we think of going through these problems and transcending the period we live in by aiming further on the lands to be walked step by step?
Ali Akay
*For Epicurus, katastema is the moment when pain disappears and thus the body and soul reach serenity.
