Istanbul Biennial

In Spike's summer 2024 issue, The State of the Arts, we invited Daniel Baumann, art historian, critic and former long-time director of the Kunsthalle Zurich, to write on a vocation that, it turned out, he believes is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

After the digital republication of his print article struck a chord online, the magazine brought together a roundtable in November 2025, featuring Daniel himself, independent curator Övül Ö, Durmuşoğlu, who has worked with the Istanbul Biennial, Kunsthallevin and Documenta 13, among others, and Luca Lopinto, former artistic director of MACRO, Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome.

Moderated by writer and editor Pablo Larios, they discussed what went wrong in the trajectory of a vocation that, not so long ago, was the darling of global art.

Good evening, everyone.

So already you arrive as a curator at a very complex situation and you're given only a year, year and a half to be able to understand and also relate or select and then produce works with the artists and these structures that we are not breaking.

you know, we are not that kind of shouldering, I think also is really affecting the outcome.

The recent Istanbul Biennial is also using a similar model now.

It's called Three-Legged Cat and it is starting with a smaller exhibition, continuing with the academia situation and then a final exhibition which then also again expands and tries to open up a more intimate and relational space which is I think what we need.

I studied in Istanbul.

And it was the late 90s or the 2000s, even though we had, you know, Istanbul Biennial, a very important one since 1987.

And we had an art magazine called Artist.

It was still very new that we didn't really also know what a curator does.