On an Ancient Hilltop, a Biennial Takes Root

Just a week after the biggest names in the artworld descended on La Biennale di Venezia, another biennial opened – but this time on an ancient hilltop city where honey-yellow stone meets an expanse of blue sky. 

Perched on a limestone ridge overlooking the Mesopotamian plains in southeastern Turkey, the city of Mardin has long served as a crossroads between Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Arab world. The Syrian border  is just 30 kilometres to the south. It is here that the Mardin Biennial opened its seventh edition.

Over thousands of years, Mardin has been shaped by successive empires and the coexistence of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian and Armenian communities. Today, the old city’s streets are lined with mosques, churches and medieval madrasas, their age and proximity reflecting centuries of cultural and religious exchange. That history makes Mardin a unique setting for contemporary art, with the biennial often drawing on the city’s position at the intersection of different cultures, histories and political frontiers.

The Mardin Biennial brings together 42 artists from 20 countries. For the first time in its history, the biennial is this year extending beyond the old city, inviting visitors to explore Mardin’s contemporary urban life. 

This edition’s theme, SKYground, speaks to such dualities, proposing a conceptual passage between realms often perceived as irreconcilable: sky and ground, the individual and the collective, the past and the future. 

İrem Tok, What Remains, 2026, (installation view, 7th Mardin Biennial). Courtesy of the artist and Mardin Biennial

The last edition of the biennial was criticised by Ahmet Öğüt – the only Kurdish artist exhibited – for failing to take sufficient care with historic structures. This year’s curator, Çelenk Bafra, who is also the artistic director of Istanbul Modern, has sought to establish stronger relationships with the monuments that dot the city. “I wanted it to be context-specific, sensitive to the concerns of locals and of course involving artists from the region as much as possible,” Bafra says in an interview with The Art Journal. 

 Hüseyin Aksoy, an artist born in Mardin, displays works depicting imagined civilisations that suggest cultures are never fixed or complete but are constantly shaped and reshaped over time. Returning to work in Mardin for the biennial has given him the opportunity to break the “sterile rules” imposed by the market in places like Istanbul or Paris, he says. A fair booth or a gallery isolates the artwork from the world, he says, instead turning it into a marketable and portable commodity. “Art cannot be domesticated here,” he says. “It must enter into a conversation with the space.”

Among the six sites that opened their doors to the biennial were a restored Ottoman hammam, a fifth-century monastery and the archaeological site of the ancient city of Dara, with its rock-cut structures and underground cistern. This is known locally as the dungeon after it was used to imprison Armenians before a death march to the Syrian desert during the First World War. 

In the cistern, suspended between two columns, hangs Turkish artist Alper Aydın’s System Failed (2026). The four-metre-tall sculpture draws on the site's history of imprisonment and persecution, depicting the moment a serpent swallows an angel, its innocence, and its now-useless wings, consumed.

It was the site-specificity of working in Mardin that drew American artist Michael Rakowitz to the biennial. Descended from Iraqi Jews, Rakowitz shows papier-mâché reliefs reconstructing the Assyrian palace at Nimrud, an ancient city in northern Iraq that served as one of the capitals of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Built in the 9th century BCE, the palace was one of the civilisation’s greatest architectural achievements before being destroyed by the so-called Islamic State in 2015.

By deliberately leaving empty pieces now housed in Western institutions, Rakowitz visibly renders traces of colonialism and cultural plunder. The work was installed across several rooms in Mardin’s Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum, a building originally constructed as military barracks. It forms part of his larger ongoing project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007), which looks at what has been lost by war and exile. 

His presentation at the biennial was the most site-specific project he has done so far. “I’m interested in work that feels woven into place,” he says in an interview. “And, while white-cube galleries and art fairs exist for important reasons to artists, they are not the platforms I find most compelling.” 

Some of the public artworks will remain in the city after the biennial closes, with Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić donating her forged-metal bench to Mardin. Other site-specific works, such as Greek artist Maro Michalakakos’s braided installation, which twisted around the columns of Deyrulzafaran Monastery, will be dismantled so that their saffron-hued fabrics can be reused. 

Istanbul-based İrem Tok’s What Remains – a series of columns sculpted from encyclopaedias that reference the fourth-century School of Nisibis, an early Christian theological school that once stood in the region – was acquired by Istanbul Modern, the country’s leading museum of modern and contemporary art, designed by Renzo Piano and overlooking the Bosphorus in the city’s Galataport complex.

According to Bafra, there is no single model for what happens to commissioned works. As all works belong to the artists, most are returned to them.

Rather than being a commercial platform, the Mardin Biennial’s stated purpose is to transform Mardin into a centre of contemporary art and to enhance the visibility of the region’s heritage. According to a spokesperson for the biennial, the exhibitions were visited by a total of 245,000 people. Mardin’s cultural-heritage sites, including the venues Dara Ancient City and Deyrulzafaran Monastery, also welcomed close to 1.5 million visitors during the biennial period. 

Alper Aydın, System Failed, 2026 (installation view, 7th Mardin Biennial). Courtesy of the artist and Mardin Biennial

Rıdvan Kuday Gallery is the sole contemporary art gallery in the region. While it functions as a commercial dealership, artist Rıdvan Kuday, the founder of the gallery, says in a written interview that many visitors still perceive it as a cultural centre or nonprofit institution. “The local contemporary art ecosystem is still in its developmental phase,” Kuday says.

Beyond being a structure that solely exhibits and sells artworks, the gallery feels it has a responsibility to contribute to the establishment of a sustainable art environment, Kuday says.

The gallery notes that it is difficult to measure the biennial’s direct impact on sales, especially given Turkey’s fluctuating economic conditions. For artists at the beginning of their careers, having their work seen and discussed by professional circles is invaluable and paves the way for new exhibition and collaboration opportunities; many artists not showing in the main programme organise parallel exhibitions during the biennial, Kuday notes. To evaluate that impact “solely through economic returns would be incomplete,” says Kuday.  

It is this collaboration that allows Mardin to become “a lens through which to see an alternative model for artists working together,” says Rakowitz. For him, it was the intimate scale of the biennial that made it unique: at other exhibitions, it is “often impossible” to see all the work on show, even with a full week. “Artwork deserves a good viewer,” he says.

For artists from this region of Turkey, that visibility can be especially valuable because it introduces their work to people who may never have encountered it otherwise. “I wouldn’t measure the success of a biennial by how many works are sold”, says Bafra. “It is measured by the quality of the conversations it creates, the relationships it builds and the opportunities it opens over time”.