5th Istanbul Design Biennial to Tackle Origins of Empathy

Top of a Restaurant in Gocek. Local fashion in Gocek, fashion shoot for Biz Magazine, 2003. Photo by Sitki Koseman.

5th Istanbul Design Biennial
Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one
September 26 – November 8, 2020
https://tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en

Organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will take place on 26 September – 8 November 2020. Curator Mariana Pestana announced the theme, Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one at a press conference held on Tuesday, 10 December at Salon İKSV in Istanbul.

Attending the press conference were Deniz Ova, Istanbul Design Biennial Director, and Mariana Pestana, curator of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, in addition to press members, academics, and professionals.

Starting off from the idea that design comprises the devices, platforms and interfaces through which we relate to one another, Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one wants to think of design as the element that mediates interconnections. In revisiting the origins of the notion of empathy it aims to reimagine a role for design concerned with feelings, affects and relations.

In a time marked by technological speed and environmental crisis, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial is attentive to practices of care, rituals of connection, and things we can feel with. Curious about new-animism or indigenous perspectivism, the biennial will absorb southern and eastern influences in the way it thinks about the relations between things, between people, and both. The 2020 edition privileges local knowledges and territorial practices in face of the increasing homogeny of a globalizing world.

Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one celebrates commensality and other protocols for sharing. Interested in tables, pots and dinner sets but also virtual reality headsets, digital currencies and online chat rooms, the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will avoid cataloguing or classifying. Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one will welcome myth and ceremony. It will be about how design brings us together. Some of the fundamental questions that this edition raises are, what structures of collective feeling does design put forward, and how might we design for – and from – more than one perspective, one dimension, one body? It proposes that we address these questions by revitalising our understanding of empathy.

Joining Mariana Pestana for the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial’s curatorial team will be Billie Muraben (Assistant Curator & Deputy Editor) and Sumitra Upham (Curator of Programmes).

The Istanbul-based group Future Anecdotes will undertake the exhibition design of the biennial, while Studio Maria João Macedo will do the graphic design.