From its ridge high above the Mesopotamian plain, the city of Mardin in southeastern Turkey appears suspended between Earth and sky, its honey-hued buildings mixing with bands of heat and light.
This meeting between the ethereal and the earthly underpins SKYground, the seventh edition of the Mardin Biennial, that brings the ancient city’s mythic image into conversation with the complexities of its past and present.
Mardin's Ulu Cami's magnificent stone ablution fountain.
Ancient Dara's Necropolis with a balloon seller outside it's gates.
The exhibition this year reaches beyond the city centre into the surrounding landscape with installations at the millennia-old Deyrulzafaran Monastery, the Roman fortress city of Dara and a disused hammam in Kızıltepe, a town just north of the Syrian border. For curator Çelenk Bafra, moving between the venues helps reveal the region’s sometimes contrasting realities
“There's a utopian, idealised, exoticised aspect to Mardin, but when you dig a little deeper and examine it, you come across the hard ground of truth,” she said. “Art offers a means to learn something new, to look at events from a different perspective … like the swallows we see rising and descending through passing clouds above.”
Curator Çelenk Bafra, on the steps of the Deyrulzafaran Monastery introducing Vahap Avşar's work.
The Mardin Biennial, running through June 21, has grown into one of the country’s most important contemporary art events outside of Istanbul. This year, more than 40 artists from across the world are showing work in SKYground. Almost a quarter of them have their roots in the region, and at least half of the artists are women.
The region’s art community embraces the Mardin Biennial as a rare and vital opportunity to connect local production with national and international audiences. Parallel events with work by 165 artists have sprung up in spaces across the city, many organised by the artists themselves.
“In this part of the country, beyond Istanbul, the biennale generates significant impact and resonance for artists, creating ripples and waves of influence,” said Ridvan Kuday, who owns the sole contemporary art gallery in the region’s largest city of Diyarbakir. He is showing work by 18 artists in parallel with the biennale.
A pair of snow leopards crouch on the wall of the Deyrulzafaran Monastery in Swarm Works, by Malatya-born and New York-based artist Vahap Avşar.
Created for last year’s Bukhara Biennial, the beasts are carved of 200-year wood salvaged from the columns of demolished buildings in the Silk Road city. Avsar borrowed a colony from a local beekeeper to implant in the leopards’ torsos. “It is a living sculpture … about empathy, comradery and community,” he said.
Athens-based Maro Michalakakos worked with local artisans to produce the newly commissioned textile installation The Journey, which transforms the braid of a woman’s hair, called kezi in Kurdish and a source of feminine pride, into a large scale, serpentine weave that recalls the biennale's wider themes of pilgrimage and self-discovery, while the saffron-coloured fabric alludes to Deyrulzafaran, named for the golden tint of its walls that is said to come from saffron mixed into the mortar.
In a second work, Future Proof (2016), bird-like shapes shaved into red velvet panels symbolise what she describes as an encounter with troubling emotional terrain that can lead to transformation.
Vibrant wings and blue sails render the 13th century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds into a physical space to wander through, much as the birds in the Persian allegory search for a truth they ultimately find within themselves.
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, born in Thessaloniki and working between Cairo and Paris, meditates on the “in-between state of what we are and what we want to be” in her fabric and audio installation The Bird, the Thread and the Open Sea.
A still from artist Basim Magdy’s The Birds Choose the Cards offers an absurdist reflection on a world shaped by war, algorithms and uncertainty.
The 2016 film moves through a disquieting sequence of loosely connected images, places and events that Magdy describes as a deliberate “level of ambiguity, even confusion … to open the doors to think about this moment based on people’s own experiences.”
Mardin's persistent winds and terraced houses make kite flying a favourite pastime, and 32-year-old kitemaker Zahit Mungan uses local symbols, such as the benevolent serpent queen Shahmaran and the sacred peacock, to elevate the craft to an art form. His monumental House of the Scorpion is a yellow arachnid - both a familiar menace in the arid climate and a local folklore motif - hovering from the ceiling at the Sakıp Sabancı Mardin City Museum.
A visit to west Africa inspired Jakup Ferri to transpose his miniature drawings onto textiles. Since 2011, he has worked with Kosovo and Albanian embroiderers who use traditional techniques to create joyous, almost psychedelic tapestries in which animals, humans and imaginary life forms exist on equal footing. “You have to forget everything you know to make a new image because we are so full from phones,” he says.
Suspended between two columns in Dara’s underground cistern is Turkish artist Alper Aydın's monumental System Failed. The four-metre-tall, 3D-printed sculpture captures the moment a serpent devours an angel, a vision of innocence overcome by darkness in a space locals call "the dungeon" after it was used to imprison Armenians before their deportation to the Syrian desert during the First World War.
Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić sits among the ruins of Dara on Agape Bench, inscribed with words for love from different languages. The sculpture, created for the biennale, posits that understanding comes not from perfect translation but through the act of gathering. After the exhibition closes, the bench will remain in Mardin as a permanent gift to the community.
For Michael Rakowitz, art is a way of restoring what history has tried to erase. In an address at the biennale’s opening, the Chicago-based artist of Iraqi Jewish descent described how the identity he grew up with has been contested since the creation of Israel. “I feel a volatile and unjust pressure to admit I’ve made a mistake in identifying as an Arab Jew and for the work I do, as if I should apologise for who I am,” he said. His papier-mâché surrogate of a relief from the 3,000-year-old palace of Nimrud, ravaged by the Islamic State in Iraq in 2015, is part of the ongoing project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, an endeavour to show what has been lost by war, exile and cultural theft.
Carlos Aires stands before the Ateş Beyler Hamam, where Sweet Dreams Are Made of This shows riot police dancing a tango to a cover of the 1980s Eurythmics song. The 2016 video matches coercive power with choreographed performance and was made despite Spain’s “gag law” restricting the dissemination of police images. Its presentation in a former bathhouse, a traditional space of male socialisation, echoes tango’s origins as a dance performed between men. At the opening in Kızıltepe, young viewers approached Aires to say the work resonated with them. “All art is political,” the artist said. “It is impossible not to be political while living in the reality of our time.”
Hilal Can stands before Hilmeran, a mythical figure from her sprawling A Place for Those Who Look Within, which unfolds across the chambers of the former hammam. Commissioned for the biennale, the textile mural work reflects SKYground's attempt to bridge seemingly opposing worlds, proposing that the earthly and the cosmic coexist in each of us.
Fatma Alara Akgün and Senem Râbia Sekban of the artist collective Bi Acayip Hane stand beside What You See in the Sky Are Not Stars; The Firmament Is Pierced Here and There. The seven-tiered sculpture’s thin layers draw on the Anatolian folk artist Aşık Veysel’s I’m on a Long and Narrow Road about the life-long quest for truth, while fragmentary scenes can be glimpsed within the object through small apertures.
Hüseyin Aksoy, who is from Kızıltepe, builds an intricate, Escheresque world rooted in archaeology and mythology in A Review on a Creation of a Civilization (2026), rendered in walnut paint and watercolour.
Not sure if you have an image of this, it was at Marangozlar on the terrace
Bingöl-born and Berlin-based Mehtap Baydu’s rooftop intervention White Flag (2026) translates a traditional gesture of de-escalation – in which women remove their headscarves to prevent bloodshed – into a polyester mould of her skin to serve as a symbolic shield.
PARALLEL EVENTS
Photographer Amar Kılıç is showing monochromatic landscapes from remote and striking corners of southeastern Turkey, many long difficult to access for security reasons, alongside delicate cyanotypes cast onto fabric. Work made by children participating in his community photography programme are also on display at his studio situated in a historical Mardin stone house.
Mahmut Akdemir
“I wanted to take a real piece of the plain and force people to look at it,” says Mahmut Akdemir of No Phoenixes Remain in the Plain to Rise From the Ashes, a warning about the havoc created by stubble fires set by farmers. His installation of a charred patch of earth blanketed in styrofoam eggs perches atop a roof and disrupts the view of the grasslands below the biennial venue Marangozlar Kahvesi, or Carpenters' Cafe. The 31-year-old Mardin artist’s concern with what is lost also runs through a gallery exhibition of his pixelated mosaic works encased in glass.
