Radyo Bienal

For Radyo Bienal, Oda Projesi invites other women to reflect on invisible labour, motherhood and the radio. This is a sequel to 'Radio Within a Radio', which was a series of contributions by Oda Projesi to the Turkish edition of Radyo Bienal, broadcasted throughout 2021 on Açık Radyo. Oda Projesi is also invited to the 17th Istanbul Biennial with their 'Anne(x)' newspaper on motherhood. Güneş Savaş invites four female artists Myriam Varela, María Gimeno, Karen Raicher and Aylin Önel who are not living in their birth country. They answered the same questions from within their own situatednesses and perspectives: What does it mean to feel like you belong somewhere? Through what kinds of labour action does the house become a space of belonging? Özge Açıkkol invites Elin Strand Ruin and Biray Kolluoğu. The artist/architect Elin Strand Ruin responds to a set of questions by Oda Projesi: Is it possible to make a revolution in the kitchen and if so, what kind of revolution would it be? Elin refers to her work-in-progress 'Praxagora Kitchen' that took different forms in public space in two neighbourhoods in Stockholm. Biray Kolluoğlu is a professor of Sociolgy in Boğaziçi University. She reflects on the 'invisible labour of the egg' and elaborates on the power of naturalizing and denaturalizing. Seçil Yersel invites Kija Benford, the founder of Vrouwenmantel Art Research Group that is a Dutch-based art initiative specialising on the research of the maternal arts. Kija Benford directs three questions by Oda Projesi to mother and artist Eefje Wijnings, Danni van Amstel and Chloë Marsden: Is there a connection between invisible domestic labour and the invisibility of the radio? How can invisible labour have visibility within the invisible radio field? Does gossip make the invisible, visible? Through what kinds of labour action does the house become a space of belonging?

In this episode, we lend our ears to one of the conferences of the 'Silent University', an initiative of Ahmet Öğüt, who also participates in the 17th Istanbul Biennial. The university is conceived as a learning platform that aims to empower undocumented migrants by employing them as educators.

The Poetry Channel of the 17th Istanbul Biennial is a project that calls for the poet's mind and words to help us find other ways of thinking, relocating our senses that have been attenuated, of comprehending again, and of coming together in these unprecedented times. It brings together 15 contemporary leading and emerging poets who write in Turkish to experiment and respond to the current course of world events, and to the corporate and government created digital media paradigm by inviting them to write monthly poems throughout 2021. In this episode of Radyo Bienal, the poets reflect on the experience and read their selected poems.

In this episode, a journalist and writer who deals with ecology, food safety, politics, culture, labour and social movements, Seçil Türkkan is in conversation with Aydın Erdem, an analyst at the public research company of Konda. They talk about the themes of the 17th Istanbul Biennial and Konda's most recent research outcomes. Oda Projesi contributes to the episode with sounds that revolve around the question of 'What is a vacation for the subjects of invisible labour?', excerpts from the play 'The Adventures of Venusian Women' by Sevgi Soysal and the archive of 101.7 FM.

This episode of Radyo Bienal starts with a conversation between Neslihan Koyuncu from the 23.5 Hrant Dink Memory Space and the Hrant Dink Foundation's dear friends Fethiye Çetin and Levon Bağış. We listen to the story of how they managed to organise the Kayseri Conference that was cancelled by the governor, by turning it into a Dumpling Festival, using censorhip as a creative tool. Later, we listen to some songs from the Dumpling Festival.

In this episode, editor and translator Çiğdem Öztürk's guests are the artist Gülsün Karamustafa who will participate in the Istanbul Biennial for the 4th time this year, joined by musician and sound designer Selim Atakan who collaborated with Karamustafa on many of her projects. The conversation is accompanied by their musical collaborations 'Male Cries', 'Stairs', 'Fugitive', 'Data of the Square' and 'Secret Panther Fashion in the City'.

In this episode of Radyo Bienal, Zeyno Pekünlü is in conversation with the founders and curators of the Museum for the Displaced, a social and cultural foundation that focuses on forced migration, displacement and statelessness, Ana Sophie Salazar, Canan Batur and Mohammed Golabi. They converse on the projects and future of the foundation as well as different geographies of displacement.

In this episode, the founding director of SAHA Studio, a programme designed for artists and curators to interact and produce, and curator Çelenk Bafra is in conversation with a SAHA Studio resident Merve Ünsal, Özgür Demirci from the İzmir Cultural Iniative Platform and Ute Meta Bauer and David Teh from the curatorial team of the 17th Istanbul Biennial. The topic of the conversation is the place of residency programmes in the art ecology, its potential and its limits.

Artist and Public Programme Coordinator of the Istanbul Biennial Zeyno Pekünlü is in conversation with SALT Research and Programmes Director Meriç Öner and Alon Schwabe of the artist duo Cooking Sections who participate in the 17th Istanbul Biennial.

In this short presentation, artist Eva Egermann talks about her entry into the project of 'Crip Magazine' and disability studies. Crip Magazine is a self-published magazine by Egermann comprising contributions on subjects such as crip pop culture, the history and presence of radical crip movements, and the subcultural, left and queer contexts of disability. We listen to Eva Egermann's 'Editorial' and Alyson Patsavas's 'An Archive of Pain' from the second issue of the Crip Magazine.

In this episode of Radyo Bienal, curator, academic, researcher and the recipient of the 6th Keith Haring Arts and Activism Award in 2019, Pelin Tan meets the Istanbul Biennial participants Atıf Akın and Orkan Telhan. Atıf Akın, an artist, designer and academic who studies science, science history, nature, movementation and their politics, and Orkan Telhan, an artist, designer, researcher and academic who carries interdisciplinary works on social, cultural and environmental responsibilities, talk about the links between technology, arts and politics. Then we listen to sonic fragments from the video series 'The Ring of Fire - The Flame of the Pacific' by artists Irwan Ahmett and Tita Salina. Initiated in 2014, the series focus on aggressive economic policies, exploitation and frequent natural disasters, as rising sea levels threaten livelihoods and habitats in the Pacific rim.

Artist Martha Atienza shares sounds from an animistic festival that later turned Catholic – the Ati-Atihan, which takes place in the Madridejos Municipality of Bantayan Island in the Philippines. Then we listen to a conversation between Seçil Türkkan, journalist and writer who deals with the subjects of ecology, food safety, politics, culture, labour and societal movements, and Mine Yıldırım, a researcher and academic from 'A City On All Fours', where they talk about the history of four legged animals since 1910, their struggle between violence and care through modernity, urbanization and deforestation.

Tarek Atoui works with sound and performance. He has recently been working on harbour activity in Athens, Singapor, Abu Dhabi, and on the occasion of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, added Istanbul to his research fields. During their field trips to harbours with the sound recorder Eric La Casa, the duo found themselves in urban, industrial, natural and military settings. In this episode about what sound can be in our days, different ways of hearing and of creating a relationship with sound, Atoui offers fragments from sound works by his colleagues Enis Çakar and Jad Atoui, who also worked with the recordings of Eric La Casa. In artist's own words, this compilation is an introduction to the composition to come for the biennial.

Green Papaya Art Projects, since its foundation in 2000, has been supporting artists working in a range of fields such as dance, music, visual arts and film. One of the longest standing independent and multidisciplinary art platform in the Philippines and a participant of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, the platform contributes to Radyo Bienal with their sound, music and performance project titled 'Idiolia', executed by Maldoror and Teenage Granny in 2016.

Celebrated theatre-maker, writer and visual artist Danarto was a fixture of Indonesia's vanguard art scene through the Cold War. For the 17th Istanbul Biennial, an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers, 'Danarto & Friends', come together to explore his legacy through a mixture of performance, conversation, and creative archiving. In this episode of Radyo Bienal, the group takes us back to the year 1975. An imaginary news stream frames Danarto's poetic experiments with the tensions of a world newly connected by satellite and electronic media.

Since its foundation in 2011, Nepal Picture Library aims to create an extensive and inclusive visual archive of Nepal's social and cultural history. Also a participant of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Nepal Picture Library invites listeners to discover Nepal's feminist history through their sound archive in this episode. The recording that follows this segment is from the founder of the Women's Library and Information Centre Foundation, Füsun Ertuğ. In her documentary, 'Feminist Steps', Ertuğ points her camera to the Solidarity March Against Violence that took place in Yoğurtçu Park situated in Kadiköy on 17 May 1987 and the Women Celebration and Campain Against Violence at the Edirnekapı Kariye Museum on 4 October 1987. The recordings meet the audience at Radyo Bienal in the scope of 'In Time/On Ground', a research project carried out by Merve Elveren and Çağla Özbek for the 17th Istanbul Biennial.

Bread and Puppet Theatre started in a small loft rented by a group of scruffy troubadours in the early 1960s on New York's Lower East Side. Combining daily life and art practice with chewed sourdough bread, accompanied by puppet theatre, it is considered one of the most important formations of political theatre. Sections from 'Honey Let's Go Home Opera', created in 2017, are shared as a part of this episode.

In this session, artist Laura Anderson Barbata and puppeteer, stilt walker and theater historian John Bell speak with Roberto Salas San Juan, a member of the Giganteria Theater in Cuba, about the local histories of stilt walking, its ritualistic use and its place in today's art practices. Barbata has been collaborating with stilt artists and collectives such as the Brooklyn Jumbies, Chris Walker and Jarana Beat for many years. Bell, on the other hand, has worked with Bread and Puppet Theatre since the 1970s as a puppeteer and stilt walker himself. Roberto Salas San Juan is known for his comprehensive studies on this popular art form. It is followed by Laura Anderson Barbata's performance called 'Ocean Calling' recorded in Papua New Guinea, in which speech, costume, music and dance come together with ritual, marching, protest and stilt-walking. Next is the artist's 'The Intervention: Indigo' project, which took place in New York in 2015 in collaboration with The Brooklyn Jumbies, Chris Walker and Jarana Beat. It can be described as a worldwide practice to remind us of the crisis impacting the lives of people of colour living in the USA. We close with another recording of Barbata, a song sung by Lucas Yamahunawë, a leader of the Yanomami community in the High Orinoco region of the Venezuelan Amazon, in accordance with shamanic traditions.

In this debut episode of Radyo Bienal, members of the curatorial team of the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Ute Meta Bauer, Amar Kanwar and David Teh, talk with Çiğdem Öztürk on the radio as a venue and a medium. It is followed by the video and sound intervention titled 'Acoustic Ocean', produced by Ursula Biemann in 2018, that invites us to explore the sonic ecology of marine life in Northern Norway's Lofoten Islands.