Venice Biennale 2015: Turkish Pavilion

Sarkis[1]  at Biennale Curated by Defne Ayas[2], the presentation will take place at a dedicated new location at the Arsenale as recently secured by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) for the duration of 20 years from 2014 to 2034. 

Sarkis Zabunyan, known simply as Sarkis[1], is a Turkish-born, Paris-based Armenian artist whose influential conceptual practice—grounded in social critique—has addressed such disparate subjects as the old wheat mills of Istanbul, the legacy of Joseph Beuys, and the materiality of candle wax. This year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the devastating Armenian genocide, Turkey has invited Sarkis to be its representative at the Venice Biennale. He will commemorate the centennial, along with fellow artists of Armenian descent, at the Republic of Armenia’s national pavilion, but he maintains that his solo exhibition for Turkey, “is about something beyond history.” SOURCE

Mavi Boncuk |
Venice Biennale 2015: National Participation
Turkey
Artist: Sarkis[1]
Commissioner: Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts.
Curator: Defne Ayas
Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale – Sale d’Armi

The exhibition, titled “Respiro” (meaning “breath” in Italian), fills the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi with multimedia works that use the universally-recognized symbol of a rainbow to explore concepts of transformation and shared human experience. Two large-scale, site-specific neon rainbows—made from fragile, wavering lines of color—light a series of 36 stained glass panes that depict imagery related to nature, spirituality, and the sublime. “In ‘Respiro,’” Sarkis explains, “I will be reaching out beyond geopolitics, to a more expansive context of a million plus years, going back to the creation of the universe and the beginning of time, back to the first-ever rainbow—the very first magical breaking point of light.” A meditative soundscape, arranged by Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi and inspired by a drawing by Sarkis illustrating the colors of the rainbow as a “system of partitions,” will play over the installation, day and night. SOURCE

[1] Sarkis b. 1938 Istanbul, Turkey. Lives in Paris, France and Istanbul,Turkey.
A graduate of Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, Sarkis had his first exhibition at the Istanbul Art Gallery in 1960. Throughout his career, he has worked with various mediums and has been, since the end of the 1960s, an icon of installation art in particular. His works have been shown worldwide in important art institutions, museums, and galleries, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Kunst-und-Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, the Louvre in Paris and the Bode Museum in Berlin. Sarkis was also part of “When Attitudes Become Form: Works - Concepts - Processes - Situation – Information” (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969),” Documenta VI and VII” (Kassel, 1977 and 1982), and the biennials of Sydney, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Moscow, and Istanbul. Recently, he has had solo in Turkey and abroad. He has been living and working in Paris since 1964. The curator of the pavilion, 

[2] Defne Ayas, has been the director and curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, since 2012. Since 2005, she has been a curator at Performa, the biennial of performance art in New York. In September 2012, Ayas co-curated the 11th edition of the Baltic Triennial of International Art, to great acclaim. The Advisory Board consists of artist Ali Kazma, associate professor of Art History at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Art Burcu Pelvanoğlu, independent curator and art critic Cristiana Perrella, Bahçeşehir University’s Associate Professor in history and theory of art and visual culture Lewis Johnson and Yıldız Technical University art and design faculty member Zerrin İren Boynudelik.. Sarkis, is no stranger to large-scale, international art exhibitions. He took part in curator and artist Harald Szeemann’s well-known exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form,” originally staged at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 and reenacted at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She has also participated in Documenta VI (1977) and VII (1982) and 45th Venice Biennale (1993). 

Ayas is also the founding co-curator of Blind Dates Project (with Neery Melkonian), an artistic platform that is dedicated to tackling what remains of the peoples, places and cultures of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923). Under the title Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, thirteen new collaborative artistic projects including by Nina Katchadourian, Ahmet Ogut, Jalal Toufic, and Michael Blum-Damir Naksic were launched in 2010, together with a series of related public programs which began two years prior to the resulting exhibition, providing a rare platform, particularly in the North American context, for both artists and non-artists. 

On May 7, Sarkis will unveil two separate installations—one in Geneva (at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), one in Istanbul (at the Hrant Dink Foundation)—to complement his work in this year’s Biennale.