The Biennial Plus ticket appeals to those who wish to share the excitement of the 18th Istanbul Biennial during the preview days, together with those who have contributed to it and their friends. With your Biennial Plus ticket, you will have access to the exhibition venues during the preview days from 16–19 September 2025, when the biennial will open its doors first to art professionals and members of the press from around the world. You can also attend artist performances and film screenings during the day, and DJ performances in the evening. The detailed event programme for the preview days, prepared together with curator Christine Tohmé, will be shared until 10 September with Biennial Plus ticket holders.
18th Istanbul Biennial’s public programme in the opening week features a series of performances, screenings, and live events.
Selma Selman’s Motherboards, at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, was conceived in collaboration with the artist’s family, and stages the extraction of gold from discarded electronics. At once an homage to Selman’s family business and a meditation on value, the work implicates the extractivist legacies of institutions and markets alike.
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ Untitled (Holding Horizon), at Arter’s Karbon space, is a durational dance performance that uses the box step as a vessel for rehearsing a sense of queer intimacy and collectivity, as it swings through memories of raves, funerals, and revolts.
Ahmad Ghossein’s So your heart aches, huh? or The Pit, staged as a monologue, unspools a personal attempt at remaining afloat amid Lebanon’s economic and political collapse, drawing on a self-directed study of hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin as strange alibis for joy.
The films included in the screening programme oscillate between speculative histories, geopolitical fault lines, and the autofictional. Maxime Hourani’s Stones Never Lie unfolds in the forests of Mount Lebanon. The film draws on Louis Auguste Blanqui’s speculative cosmology connecting a failed revolution, echoing the country’s civil war of 1860. Samar Al Summary’s What Goes Up navigates homesickness and displacement against the deadening backdrop of an Arizona airbase. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel examines borders and drone warfare through a single fatal bullet that crossed the USA-Mexico border in 2010. Suneil Sanzgiri’s An Impossible Address combines analogue ruin and digital reconstruction to explore shared anti-colonial histories between India and Africa, anchored in the revolutionary life – and disappearance – of Angolan anti-colonialist activist Sita Valles.
