When preparing a September holiday in 2017 I found I would be able to visit the Istanbul Bienali, the bi-annual exhibition of modern art. As I, long ago, had loved the Venice Biennale, I thought the Istanbul one might be a feast for the senses also. I visited several though not all of its venues, and soon decided I was hardly interested. The most joy I had visiting the recently restored (not quite finished) Küçük Mustafa Paşa bathhouse, near the Gül or Rose Mosque. That was to a large extent because I could finally visit that building that I’d seen closed for some time, but also because the exhibits inside, all by one man, were fun, loud, attractive. But many of the works on other sites were – to me – mainly boring. I am increasingly finding that I cannot get excited any more by piles of old furniture, some branches piled together in a corner, torn papers telling a story that I can only understand after having read a text of a quasi-philosophical nature with psychological, sociological, political insights that tires me, rather than giving me any insight of a nature that reading a good article will give me.
Whatever, I took some pictures, and here they are. I’ll later add some captions, and there is a website of the (now closed) events, that you can peruse for yourself.
In 2019 things were not much different. In Istanbul itself there were 2 venues, one the Pera Museum, one a building of the Mimar Sinan University (that I liked as a building, it’s close to the building site where the Istanbul Modern once stood). The works in the Pera museum were fine, the ones in the other building were like I described above, and mainly boring.

I'll add captions in a few hours.