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Organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will take place on 26 September – 8 November 2020. Curator Mariana Pestana announced the theme, Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one at a press conference held on Tuesday, 10 December at Salon İKSV in Istanbul.

Attending the press conference were Deniz Ova, Istanbul Design Biennial Director, and Mariana Pestana, curator of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, in addition to press members, academics, and professionals.

Starting off from the idea that design comprises the devices, platforms and interfaces through which we relate to one another, Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one wants to think of design as the element that mediates interconnections. In revisiting the origins of the notion of empathy it aims to reimagine a role for design concerned with feelings, affects and relations.

In a time marked by technological speed and environmental crisis, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial is attentive to practices of care, rituals of connection, and things we can feel with. Curious about new-animism or indigenous perspectivism, the biennial will absorb southern and eastern influences in the way it thinks about the relations between things, between people, and both. The 2020 edition privileges local knowledges and territorial practices in face of the increasing homogeny of a globalizing world.

Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one celebrates commensality and other protocols for sharing. Interested in tables, pots and dinner sets but also virtual reality headsets, digital currencies and online chat rooms, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will avoid cataloguing or classifying. Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one will welcome myth and ceremony. It will be about how design brings us together. Some of the fundamental questions that this edition raises are, what structures of collective feeling does design put forward, and how might we design for – and from – more than one perspective, one dimension, one body? It proposes that we address these questions by revitalising our understanding of empathy.

 

Joining Mariana Pestana for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial’s curatorial team will be Billie Muraben (Assistant Curator & Deputy Editor) and Sumitra Upham (Curator of Programmes).

The Istanbul-based group Future Anecdotes will undertake the exhibition design of the biennial, while Studio Maria João Macedo will do the graphic design.

On empathy

The word empathy was invented in the 1910s. The prefix em next to the Greek pathos sought to capture the idea of feeling with, a translation of the German Einfühlung. The term emerged in psychology circles, when a word was required to describe how the aesthetic experience of an object extended to the viewer’s body, emphasizing the transference of feeling from a thing to a human. If nowadays the term is used to describe the capacity to perceive other people’s expressions and feelings, in the 1910s it was much more generous in that it encompassed the relations between bodies other than the human.

In her book titled Empathy: A History, Susan Lanzoni explains how Violet Page, who used the male pseudonym “Vernon Lee” as she recorded her bodily sensations when observing sculptures in museums in Rome and Florence, thought of empathy as the lending of one’s life to a thing. Historically, empathy has meant the ability to inhabit the other’s perspective, entering alien forms, transforming into objects, living other realities. Be it in psychological, political or aesthetic contexts, empathy has been linked with simulation, transference and reflection.

Now, 100 years after its inception, it seems like the right time to revisit the original sentiment of the term. The ecological crisis we live in can be directly linked with notions of progress and development based on practices of extraction and exploration. The Cartesian model that dominated Western thinking since the Enlightenment is no longer suiting. The post-human paradigm suggests that all things have their own relations with the world, that reality is a multinatural continuum across all living and non-living entities.

In revisiting the word empathy, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial wants to reimagine a role for design concerned with feelings, affects and relations. Under the contemporary post-human philosophical gaze, and in face of the current technological horizon, these gestures gain a whole new potential.

Scope of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial

By revisiting empathy, the biennial wishes to celebrate design for:

More than one PERSPECTIVE (or design as re-centring)

Empathy begins with acknowledging the position of our body in relation to the world. It is from a specific place that we perceive, and that place determines what we feel. Astronauts that have seen the earth from space describe an aesthetic experience of “awe and wonder,” a feeling that became known as the “overview effect.” This deeply emotional state promotes a sense of connectedness with the Earth and with one another.

Much like this cognitive shift experienced by astronauts, design tools like mirrors, lenses, cameras and scanners allow us to re-centre our viewpoint and see things that we couldn’t otherwise perceive. New perspectives evoke new feelings and understandings of reality. What design tools reveal what perspectives today? How does design help us sense the world?

More than one DIMENSION (or design as transference)

Empathy describes the transference of feeling from one body to another. It’s about two bodies being connected with one another remotely. Artificial intelligence is based on the transference of knowledge and thinking processes from humans to machines. The promise of the 5G city is one in which information travels across living and non-living bodies. The Internet of Things is based on the collection of data “sensed” by a network of objects. Augmented reality allows bodies to exist simultaneously across parallel realms. Platforms like Twitch, watched by more people than television, mix up virtual and real worlds. How does empathy form across these platforms? What structures of feeling and care do new mediums put forward?

More than one BODY (or design as immanence)

Empathy describes moments when we are more than one. In Posthuman Knowledge, feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti suggests that the post-human paradigm, beyond anthropocentrism, invites us to search new forms of social bonding and community building. How may we think of design as a practice not suited just for one body but something that links many bodies, be them human bodies, animal bodies, vegetable bodies or mineral bodies? And, if objects orient life in limiting ways by choreographing normative behaviours, as scholars such as Sara Ahmed suggests, what objects distort and disorient established forms of collectivity?

Structure of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial

The biennial will comprise a Kitchen and an Observatory, which will manifest in two separate venues.

Much like a laboratory, the Kitchen is a place of experimentation, but one open to both professionals and amateurs. From the kitchen we can watch social, economic and urban dynamics. It is a space of hospitality. In the kitchen, the tongue is both for tasting and speaking. The kitchen table conveys the action of bodies other than the office table or the meeting table. Through food we will access the pluriverses that our post-human existence touches upon and constructs, from microbial life to agricultural rituals.

In this programme the kitchen will work both metaphorically and literally. A library of objects comprising dining sets, cutlery, seating arrangements, pots, pans and other objects necessary for the collective preparation and ingestion of food will be on display and in use. Thus the Kitchen will convey different forms of design practice: from plates, tablecloths, chairs and glasses to soups, broths and pickles. A range of guests will be hosting on rotation transforming the space, the menu and the conversations that take place in the Kitchen. This programme is inspired by the cultural significance of the Turkish word “sofra”, which means a ground cloth or table for dining, but more so evokes an act of togetherness.

An open call will be announced in January for projects and events that revolve around the Kitchen.

Food practitioners, cooks, product designers, architects and dining enthusiasts will be welcome to apply.

The Observatory will manifest in the form of exhibition, and will be a platform to watch, record and perform practices of empathy in today’s world. It will comprise tools, devices, installations and other objects; design for more than one perspective, more than one dimension and more than one body.

Young Curators Group

The Young Curators Group will be formed of young curators based in Istanbul, working as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial.

This group will be responsible for contextualizing the theme of the biennial locally by connecting to practitioners, thinkers and makers in the city, and establishing links between the programme and historical approaches in Turkey. It is hoped that, as representatives of a younger generation, they may put forward a particular perspective to complement that of the other curators.                                                              

Biographies

Mariana Pestana is an architect and curator interested in critical social practice and the role of fiction in re-imagining futures for an age marked by technological progress and an ecological crisis. She co-founded the collective The Decorators, an interdisciplinary practice that makes collaborative public realm interventions and cultural programmes, currently design fellows at Stanley Picker Gallery. Previously Mariana worked as a curator at the Department of Architecture, Design and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum and lectured at Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Arts, and Royal College of Arts. Recently, she co-curated the exhibitions The Future Starts Here, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2018) and Eco Visionaries: Art and Architecture After the Anthropocene at MAAT (2018), Eco Visionaries: Towards an Interspecies Future at Matadero (2019), and a third iteration of the latter at The Royal Academy (2019). She curated Fiction Practice, the Young Curators Lab for Porto Design Biennale 2019. Pestana holds a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Billie Muraben is a writer, editor and lecturer based in London. She has written for Artsy, Disegno, Elephant, Eye, Maharam Stories, Port and Varoom among other publications, and was previously Online Editor of The Gourmand. Her work is informed by an interest in design by its broadest definition, and challenging the spaces, places and practices that we privilege in the context of art and design. Of British/Turkish descent, she has a particular interest in practices rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. She’s previously written about television as a potential site of distribution for art practice; postmodern architecture and ruin value; and dancing water fountains as monumental symbols of power. She teaches on the Experience & Environment platform of BA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins, and previously taught MA Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art and BA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts. She is currently Editorial Advisor on the third edition of A Line which Forms a Volume, a publication and symposium on design research by MA Graphic Media Design at London College of Communication. She holds an MA in Visual Communication from the RCA.

Sumitra Upham is a London-based curator working at the intersection of art, design and technology. She is currently Senior Curator of Public Programmes at the Design Museum where she is responsible for public programming, residencies and temporary projects. Previously, she was Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Design Curator at Coin Street Community Builders, and part of the exhibitions team at White Cube, London. Last year she sat on the curatorial committee for London Festival of Architecture 2018.

Future Anecdotes works collectively, with a strong interest in building narratives and spaces. The group has been investigating issues of display, exhibition-making, publication and public-action since 2010. Future Anecdotes have undertaken design collaborations for exhibitions such as The Way Beyond Art (2018-2021) the permanent collection display for Van Abbemuseum, and the accompanying userspaces titled Werksalon; Trespassing Modernities (2013) at SALT and The City of Tomorrow (2019-2020), a travelling exhibition on Soviet Modernisms in Yerevan, Minsk, and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Future Anecdotes were also the authors of the Reading Room at the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial.

Maria João Macedo has been establishing her graphic design practice around books and visual identities since 2008. Her approach prioritizes content over signature, where conversation and exchange play a crucial role. Working mainly with artists, curators and cultural institutions, her studio is responsible for the new visual identity of Culturgest (since 2018), the publication series devoted to the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum Collection (since 2014), and several books with artists such as Von Calhau, Bruno Pacheco, Vasco Barata, Alberto Carneiro or Nairy Baghramian. She is also a founding member and head of the editorial programme of Sismógrafo, a non-profit art space curating and presenting contemporary art exhibitions in Porto since 2014.

VitrA’s support continues

The Istanbul Design Biennial thanks VitrA, which has made the realisation of the biennial possible since the inaugural edition in 2012.