Bige Örer, director of the Istanbul Biennial, steps down after tumultuous year

Bige Örer, director of the Istanbul Biennial at the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) since 2008, has announced she is stepping down. Her departure follows a row over the appointment of Iwona Blazwick as curator of the 2024 edition by İKSV (the private foundation which administers the biennial).But a spokesperson for İKSV says that “this decision was not linked to the curator selection process. Bige Örer took this decision to consider her own professional journey and future goals”. Preparations for the 18th Istanbul Biennial next year continue as planned under the coordination of the biennial team, the spokesperson adds; a new director will be announced shortly. Örer will leave her post mid January.“Under Örer’s directorship, the biennial has progressed in terms of the volume of exhibited works, new venues [used] and the number of viewers exceeding 500,000,” says a statement. In 2022, she curated the Füsun Onur exhibition, Once upon a time…, in the Turkish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Her other curatorial projects include Flâneuses (Institut français Istanbul, 2017) and Agoraphobia (13th Istanbul Biennial and TANAS, Berlin, 2013). She is also director of İKSV Contemporary Art Projects.In February, the Istanbul Biennial’s advisory board unanimously chose the Turkish curator Defne Ayas as the best candidate to curate the next biennial. But the İKSV rejected the board’s recommendation and instead appointed Blazwick, the former director of the Whitechapel Gallery. At the time of her selection, Blazwick was a serving member of the advisory panel tasked with choosing a curator for the biennial.Critics believe that Ayas was judged too risky by the foundation. They cite her curation of an exhibition by Sarkis for the Turkish Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. A catalogue accompanying the show included an essay written by Rakel Dink, the widow of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007. In her text, Dink made a passing reference to the “Armenian genocide” to describe the pain of her people. Following a complaint from the Turkish government, which denies that the genocide took place, the catalogue was withdrawn.In October more than 80 artists and curators signed an open letter calling on İKSV to disclose the selection procedure for appointing the curator of the next Istanbul Biennial. The foundation subsequently brought in new measures in a bid to improve transparency, saying that that it has carefully assessed recent criticism of how the curator of the 18th Istanbul Biennial in 2024 was selected.