DECOLONIZING CREATIVE GEOGRAPHIES OF ART BIENNIALS: A Study of Istanbul's Yeditepe Biennial through the Cultural Politics of Turkish Islamic Nationalism

Abstract

This article examines the Yeditepe Biennial—Turkey's first Islamic and traditional arts biennial—as a creative festival shaped by the socio-political and spatial dynamics of Turkish-Islamist nationalism. Counterposed against the Istanbul Biennial and the Western-oriented secular cultural legacy of the Turkish Republic, the Yeditepe Biennial highlights ‘Islamic and traditional’ art forms that have long been marginalized. It does so by embedding these forms within Istanbul's urban cultural heritage through a Turkish-Islamic nationalist framework of space and time. These arts are situated within a narrative tailored to the needs of political Islam, where a specific iteration of Ottoman Turkish history is foregrounded. Drawing on geographic and interdisciplinary debates on biennials, creativity and urban cultural heritage, this article explores how Yeditepe mobilizes art to assert a Turkish-Islamic aesthetic and identity. Through ethnographic research on the first three editions of the biennial, it investigates the entanglement of creativity and politics, and the reimagination of Istanbul's cultural heritage as the former imperial capital. In doing so, it contributes to critiques of Eurocentric epistemologies by foregrounding Muslim creative geographies and their deeply spatial articulation at the intersections of Western-oriented and secular cultural modalities and Turkish-Islamic nationalism, with their respective constructions of urban cultural heritage.