Istanbul Design Biennial - Musibet The Aestheticization of Context and Anti-Context in Design along the Axis of the Grand Transformation

Istanbul Modern hosted one of the two curated exhibitions of the 1^st Istanbul Design Biennial, which was held for the first time in Istanbul by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and whose main theme was “Imperfection.”

The exhibition “Musibet / The Aestheticization of Context and Anti-Context in Design along the Axis of the Grand Transformation”, which was curated by Emre Arolat and held at Istanbul Modern between October 13 – December 12, 2012, took up the processes of urban transformation occurring in Istanbul and other cities of Turkey, and two antithetical design attitudes that go hand in hand with these processes; one was the aestheticization of context and specificity and the other that of acontextuality and innovation. Through a series of problematizations carried out within the framework of the exhibition, many current phenomena occurring in Istanbul and other cities of Turkey was examined, such as housing development projects that rendered their contexts problematic, social inequalities which were re-produced through urban transformation, the fact that architecture and city planning became a vehicle for governments to display their power, and trended toward fraudulent historicism that impose identities on public buildings.

Istanbul Design Biennial’s co-curator Joseph Grima’s exhibition was held on the same dates at the Galata Greek Primary School.

For detailed information about the Design Biennial: istanbultasarimbienali.iksv.org