Inside the quiet that roars: Reflections from the Istanbul Biennial 2025

Stepping into the 18th Istanbul Biennial felt like walking into a living pulse of imagination. a landscape where silence could be heard and images seemed to breathe. The spaces were not loud; they whispered. Yet within those whispers, I felt the collective heartbeat of resistance, loss, and belonging. Each visual seemed to speak in its own language, connecting to my emotions in silence beyond words, beyond sound.

The Biennial, created by Christine Tohmé, unfolds across multiple venues in Istanbul, inviting visitors to move through the city itself as though it were part of the exhibition. It feels less like a traditional art show and more like a living, breathing ecosystem of memory and media a rhythm that flows between video, sound, installation, drawing, and digital form.

Echoes of Palestine: Mona Benyamin and Sohail Salem

Among the most haunting experiences were the works of Mona Benyamin, a Palestinian artist whose films merge slapstick humor with tragedy, looping between laughter and mourning. Her 2023 video “Tomorrow, again” reimagines a news broadcast featuring her parents as anchors and eyewitnesses crying, laughing, reporting, breaking down. The absurdity of repetition transforms into an emotional truth: when trauma becomes daily, the news stops being news and turns into life itself.

In her earlier film “Moonscape” (2020), Benyamin used satire to question the absurd ease with which the world dreams of escaping to the moon while Palestinians struggle to return home. Between humor and heartbreak, she exposes how global media cycles manipulate emotions and how laughter itself becomes a language of survival.

Nearby, Sohail Salem’s “Diaries from Gaza” offered a different silence not cinematic, but handwritten. His series of notebook drawings, made in ink on UNRWA school pages and smuggled out of Gaza, records the pulse of daily life under siege: children at play, broken homes, mothers waiting. Twenty of these fragile works were displayed like sacred pages, each stroke a testimony that life persists even in ruins.

Salem’s notebooks are more than art; they are endurance given form. They remind us that documentation is an act of defiance that to draw, to write, to remember is to resist erasure.

Dreamscapes of Youth and Subculture: Sara Sadik and Halil Altındere

From Gaza’s stark lines, the journey led into neon: Sara Sadik’s installation “Xenon Palace Championship” (2023) immerses visitors in a glowing hookah lounge complete with colored lights, digital smoke, and game controllers. Here, the artist transforms a space of casual leisure into a world of emotional reflection. Viewers can interact with the game as real Sadik’s friends compete within it. It’s a place where masculinity softens and friendship becomes a mode of healing.

Through her fusion of gaming culture, hip-hop, and science fiction, Sadik explores the loneliness and escapism of urban youth. The work redefines what we call “safe space” — it’s playful but deeply emotional, a soft rebellion against the stereotypes of immigrant communities.

A similar subversive humor echoes in Halil Altındere’s works, known for his mix of pop culture and politics. Altındere’s one of Turkey’s most recognized contemporary artists uses irony to challenge systems of power, sometimes through rap videos, sometimes through re-imagined everyday objects. His practice reminds us that critique can be joyous, that protest can dance.

Material Memory and the Weight of Stillness: Chen Ching-Yuan and Cevdet Erek

In a quieter room, Chen Ching-Yuan’s “The Brick and Timber” series (2020–21) from Taiwan offered meditative stillness. Created during the pandemic, his surreal compositions of broken structures and soft hues explore what collapses and what continues in the wake of crisis. Bricks become metaphors of endurance; fragments become blueprints of resistance.

Then, stepping into Cevdet Erek’s sound installation was like entering the rhythm of architecture itself. The Turkish artist’s mastery of sonic space transformed the gallery into a vibrating body every beat of sound shifting the perception of time. In his “Room of Rhythms,” walls seemed to breathe; silence itself had texture. Erek’s work reminded me that rhythm is also a form of survival, the heartbeat that keeps us grounded amid uncertainty.

The City as Exhibition: Antonio Cosentino and the Spirit of Place

As I wandered between venues from Beyoğlu to Karaköy the city itself began to feel like part of the Biennial. Street blended with the echoes of art, and Istanbul’s history turned into a canvas.

In this dialogue between art and city, Antonio Cosentino’s paintings stood out for their raw charm. Using everyday materials, signboards, tiles, street imagery, he builds poetic archives of Istanbul’s shifting urban memory. His work reflects humor, melancholy, and resilience of the city itself.

A Collective Ambiance: The Quiet Between the Notes

Together, these artists Benyamin, Salem, Sadik, Altındere, Chen, Erek, and Cosentino shaped an emotional landscape that oscillated between despair and hope, irony and intimacy. The Biennial’s ambiance was one of layered quiet: a quiet that doesn’t suppress but amplifies; a quiet filled with coded emotions, unsent messages, and unspoken prayers.

Each work, whether a smuggled notebook or a glowing digital lounge created a space for listening. Listening to grief, to laughter, to resistance, to tenderness. It was a space where “silence” was not absence but presence a pause between chaos and care.

When Art Becomes Emotion

As I reflect on the Biennial, I realize that what moved me most was not just the art itself but the dialogue it created within me. Each work whether Mona Benyamin’s looping narratives, Sohail Salem’s inked pain from Gaza, Sara Sadik’s neon emotional worlds, or Chen Ching-Yuan’s quiet resilience became part of my own research journey. As an artist and researcher, I felt how visuals could transform silence into language, how design could shape emotion, and how observation could become empathy. These works reminded me that art is not only seen but felt, that every color, sound, and gesture carries a story waiting to be heard. In my view, the Biennial stands as a testament to how contemporary art redefines attention by inviting us to slow down, connect, and see beyond the frame turning every image into a mirror of our collective consciousness.