Curated by Hou Hanru and an international consultants team, MAXXI Rome organizes an exhibition on Istanbul, which opens on December 11 and continues until May 3rd, 2016.
MAXXI chooses to have Istanbul as its focus for the second part of its cycle on the cultural realities of the Mediterranean and the relationships between the Middle East and Europe. project on Beirut. The exhibition, set up by MAXXI with the participation of a team of exceptional curators and artists, is in line with the Foundation’s multidisciplinary vision and will be one of the prominent exhibitions of the year. Taking place in two of the museum’s main galleries, the exhibition has been conceived as a journey around great artworks and architectural approaches along with a consistent number of new productions, as well as featuring in-depth analysis and audio-visual content. It will also have a dedicated web site and a catalogue with previously unpublished contributions.
Istanbul. Passion, Joy, Fury wishes to promote an attentive analysis and to offer the museum as an important site for active exchanges among Turkish and European art and intellectual communities. The title of the exhibition underlines the aim of presenting Istanbul’s complex situation, emphasizing its dynamics, changes and cultural needs, starting from current crucial events and going back to their historical roots. The exhibition shows the passion for creativity, the joy of fulfilling goals and the fury of critics.
The project is structured in three phases: a series of meetings and workshops with curators, historians, artists and architects, which have taken place and will continue to take place both in Istanbul and Rome; a website gathering the research and experiences of the involved curators, and the exhibition itself.
Istanbul, with its new conflicts and experiences, symbolises a global change and a general state of transition. Rapid urban developments have left their mark on the city from the architectural as well as the socio-political standpoint, underlining an evolving urban tissue and a new architectural scene: the city is a breeding ground for new local and international projects, in which exciting, contradictory and often excessive phenomena are produced.
This project stems from an urgency, that of the unparalleled geopolitical challenge that Istanbul and the whole of Turkey are facing. Istanbul is at the heart of the Middle-East conflicts, of war and social changes while at the same time, it still is a bridge between the Western and the Eastern worlds.
Urban regeneration and the role of public space in Istanbul will be at center of special attention in the exhibition. A selection of emerging Turkish architects will be invited to create a project that lives on the boundary of the formal and informal, the built and the non-built, representing a “cell of interstitial resilience” within the urban and human space of the city. The idea is to offer an opportunity to imagine a new typology starting from the local intelligent knowledge.
The exhibition embodies the rooted identity of a global city along with all its dilemmas: cosmopolitan, dynamic, rapidly changing, negotiating with the urges of the world’s economics and politics. Istanbul represents one of the richest, most active sites for contemporary creativity, and here, deeply innovative ideas and projects come to life, capable of influencing the global community. While mapping the dynamic Istanbul scene, the exhibition aims at opening a new perspective to redefine the artistic activities and the innovative abilities of institutions.
