As the month-long 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial draws near, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) have revealed a full list of projects and participants. Curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the biennial—which is titled Are We Human? The Design of the Species: 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years—will revolve around one pressing provocation: that design itself needs to be redesigned.
Presenting more than 70 projects from five continents by designers, architects, artists, theorists, choreographers, filmmakers, historians, archaeologists, scientists, laboratories, institutes and NGOs, the exhibitions will be spatialized by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation and spread across five main venues – the Galata Greek Primary School, Studio-X Istanbul and Depo in Karaköy, Alt Art Space in Bomonti, and the Istanbul Archaeological Museums in Sultanahmet. The work of a dense array of international writers, video makers, and designer researchers will also be presented online.
70 Projects Presented in Four "Clouds"
Aimed at rethinking design for an age in which design has gone viral, the biennial is organised in four overlapping “clouds” of projects:
Designing the Body explores all the different ways in which the human body itself is a highly unstable artefact that is continually reconstructed, from the unique way our hands work to the latest research on the brain. Every dimension of the human is continuously adjusted, augmented or replaced.
Designing the Planet asks us to rethink the human design of vast territories and ecologies. The human radiates design in all directions and encrusts the planet in layer upon layer of artifacts as a kind of geology.
Designing Life looks at the new forms of mechanical, electronic and biological life that are being crafted. A fusion of machines, organisms, computation, and genetics is moving from the laboratory into everyday life, the land, the air, and the oceans.
Designing Time presents a unique archaeology ranging from the deep time of the very first human tools and ornaments to the ways in which social media allows humans to redesign themselves and their artefacts in as little as two seconds.