Art Goes Indoors At Istanbul Biennial
Amid the continuing street protests in the city, the 13th Istanbul Biennial’s decision to withdraw from public spaces aims to make the demonstrations and their message more visible.
On a crowded street in Cairo, a short-haired woman in her thirties tries to push her small frame through a sea of bulky men, all of them angry and trying to stop what she is doing.
“Do you call this art?” yells a balding man in a light blue suit. “They told you that making people walk like animals is art?”
The woman is not alone. She has a group of 15 other men following her. Young and old, dressed in poor outfits, they are down on their hands and knees, crawling their way through the crowds. This is a busy area of the city filled with hordes of people, but the men on all fours immediately stand out. Distinguished by a posture that suggests being abused, handicapped, submissive and rebellious all at once, they become "the other" — a hindrance not so much to the actual flow of traffic but to onlookers' comfort zone of accepted appearances that can veil all kinds of social malaise.
As bystanders and passers-by react in almost equal doses of anguish and anger, the woman stands her ground, saying, “I am an artist and this is an art performance,” adding, “It is important.”
