Bridge to the complex thinking

“My mother was an archaeologist. She had a very special way to place something next to another, or install them or organize them, decorating the house with objects that she found. When I was a child during the Vietnam War, she received numerous visitors in Washington, and when I woke up in the morning, I never knew exactly who had slept over. I have the feeling that the dOCUMENTA (13) and other exhibits that I drafted tend to recreate that atmosphere. On the one hand, the vitality of different people in the house, and on the other hand, the presence of objects that she had collected, some of them precious and others random. The importance of the relationship between cultural material, the history of the past and the politics of the present.”

In this section of the interview to CI MAG, a Turkish publication, published in Istanbul in September this year, the artistic director Carolyne Christov–Bakarguiev, who has just been considered one of the TOP 10 in the ranking of 100 most influential people in the art world by the renowned English publication ART Review, poetically summarizes why the Istanbul Biennale may have largely contributed to the validation of the theory of complex thinking in contemporary times, and how contemporary art is a pivot, a trigger element to reflect on the individual, history, politics, science and literature.

“If we try to think about the fact that we are, at the same time, physical, biological, social, cultural, psychological and spiritual beings, it is clear that complexity is trying to conceive the articulation, the identity and the differences of all these aspects, while the over–simplifying way of thinking separates these different aspects or unifies them by a crippling reduction.”

This phrase coined by sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin in the 70s, launched the concept of ​​what came to be known as “complex thinking”, a critique of the scientific paradigm of modernity, a challenge and a motivation to think about ourselves, and to our surroundings, differently from the way we were induced and taught to look at the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when we should study and understand the phenomena into separate disciplines, isolated, and believe in them as long as they could be measured by the standards of scientific determinism and mechanistic.

Since 1970, the concept of “inter–disciplinarily” and “trans–disciplinarily”, followed by biologist and Swiss educational psychologist Jean Piaget and by the Franco–Romanian physicist and philosopher Basarab Nicolescu, respectively, brought the possibility of admitting the existence of a new type of knowledge approach, one that synthesized the juxtaposition of various disciplines, through epistemological boundaries of each science and allowing an experience of the different levels of reality: reflective, sensory and experimental.

Entitled SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms, the Istanbul Biennale provided the backdrop for developing this idea and cause the “displacement” of space and thought possible.

On foot, by boat, by car or “tranvai” visitors from Turkey and around the world attended facilities, specific sites and saw works that addressed different layers of history, geography and use of technology.

In the words of Carolyne, “there are streams of people, ideas, wars, weapons, love – everything but they are not always visible.” 

Oceanic movements that bathe the coasts of Turkey, with chains that cross the Bosporus channel, the Mediterranean to the Sea of ​​Marmara and the Black Sea, produce underground movements that carry debris from several continents and are home to endless stories of power in our civilization.

The city of Constantinople – now Istanbul – is located between the main trade routes linking Asia to Europe, and was the centre of the Roman and Byzantine Empire, and later, seat of the Ottoman Empire, which aroused in the eleventh century, when nomadic Turkic tribes settled in Anatolia, a region that is now part of the Turkish territory. The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, encompassing much of the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa. It lost its supremacy over the course of History. The Turks fought in World War I (1914–1918) on the side of Germany. Its defeat in the war further disrupted an already crumbling empire, which was eventually abolished soon after, in 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed.

One of the social traumas brought out by the Biennale in different perspectives is the genocide in 1915, thousands of Armenians suspected of “nationalist sentiments” of hostility against the central government.

On May 26, 1915, a special law authorized the deportation of Armenians for internal security reasons. Then, on September 13, a law was passed that determined the confiscation of their property.

The Armenian population of Anatolia and Cilicia was sentenced to exile in the deserts of Mesopotamia. Many Armenians died on the journey or in concentration camps.

One hundred years later, the Turkish republican government became involved once again in conflicts with neighbouring countries, in this case, with Syria.

The art translates human suffering. Human suffering takes different forms and develop symptoms at every age.

The contemporary artist investigates pain, geography, biology, the past. Their works update the images of the human memory and transform the present. It investigates and creates files.

Forms of expression that organize human knowledge based on different perspectives and revisit memory came to stay. Beauty is not and has not been the same for a very long time.