Update: The 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will open to the public on 15 October 2020. Read the update about the Biennial here. 

Curator Mariana Pestana has announced the theme as "Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one" for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial which will take place from 26 September to 15 November 2020. 

Organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the theme of the Biennial will tackle origins of empathy, announced at a press conference held on Tuesday, December 10 at Salon İKSV in Istanbul.

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. 

Mariana Pestana from a press conference. Image courtesy of IKSV

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).

Istanbul Design Biennial Director Deniz Ova from a press conference. Image courtesy of IKSV

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

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.

From the photo series The Blue Flag, taken on summer nights during 2013 and 2014 in Izmir, Turkey. Image © Ekin Ozbicer 

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?

Furniture for humans and birds. Image © Giovanni Bellotti/Studio Ossidiana

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?

Zeytin, Bodrum, 2019. Image © Naz Şahin

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.

Gorgun Taner, Mariana Pestana, Deniz Ova. Image courtesy of IKSV

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.

Top image: Local fashion in Göcek. Fashion shoot for Biz Magazine, 2003. Image © Sitki Kösemen

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