Dilek Winchester, Elif Saydam, İpek Duben, Merve Mepa, Sevil Tunaboylu, Şafak Şule Kemancı

18th Istanbul Biennial

SAHA supports projects by Dilek Winchester, Elif Saydam, İpek Duben, Merve Mepa, Sevil Tunaboylu, and Şafak Şule Kemancı from Türkiye in the 18th Istanbul Biennial, titled The Three-Legged Cat, curated by Christine Tohmé. The Biennial will be held between 20 September - 23 November 2025 across eight venues — Galata Greek Primary School, Zihni Han, Muradiye Han, Galeri 77, Külah Factory, Meclis-i Mebusan 35, the Garden of the Former French Orphanage, and Elhamra Han — featuring the participation of over forty artists.

Dilek Winchester’s 410 Letters: On Reading and Writing (Albanian) (2025) departs from an earlier work titled Abondoned Letters (2024) based on the ‘Istanbul alphabet’. The Istanbul alphabet was an experimental writing system devised in 1879 by Şemsettin Sami, who was a lexicographer, novelist, translator and prominent figure in both Turkish language reform and Albanian nationalism, at a time when Albanians in the Ottoman Empire lacked a unified writing system. In the video, viewers are taken through a visual landscape of Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Elbasan, Todhri, Vellara, Vezo, Berat and Latin-based scripts, including the Istanbul, Agimi and Bashkimi alphabets, as well as the current version of the Albanian alphabet. These are adapted and invented letterforms that have either been forgotten or have never been used prominently in writing Albanian. In the work, isolated letterforms appear not as code but as sculptural forms, accompanied by a sound composition created in collaboration with artist Ahmetcan Gökçeer.

Untitled (Kendinibeğen...) (2012-2025) is a textual intervention affixed to the back of the building’s rooftop pediment. A site-specific adaptation of Dilek Winchester’s 2012 work for the biennial, its title is derived from a portmanteau originated by Oğuz Atay in his 1972 novel, The Disconnected (Tutunamayanlar), with Latin letters alternating with Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian and Greek: ‘seeming-like- those-who-are-conceited-and-behave-as- if-nothing-has-ever-been-said-before-them’.

Dilek Winchester was born in 1974 in Istanbul, where she currently lives and works.

Elif Saydam's Hospitality (2024–2025) uses a deceptively modest material: laminated plastic sheets suspended together with metal binder rings. These curtain-like works hang in layered sequences, playing with transparency, surface and image. Here, interior space is both an invitation and a site of denial, a place for welcoming as well as for excluding.

Restaged and expanded for the biennial in a moment of prosecution and suppression of public expression, with widespread rhetoric framing queer communities as a threat to traditional conceptions of the family, the work has local resonances through its incorporation of Turkish folk phrases, such as on para etmez (‘not worth ten pennies’) and beş para etmez (‘not worth five pennies’), as well as its invocation of lyrics from a song by Âşık Veysel: ‘Your beauty isn’t worth a penny / if it weren’t for my love.’ The artist raises vital questions about belonging, desire, disrepair and the future of minoritarian societies in Türkiye, while contemplating what goes on behind closed doors.

Elif Saydam was born in 1985 in Calgary, they currently lives and works in Berlin.

İpek Duben’s Children of Paradise II, III, IV (2000–2011) and Peggy’s Paradise (2000–2025) embody the artist’s playful, yet subtly incisive critique of consumerism and overconsumption. Across a diorama in relief, the cornucopia of objects illustrates the draw of consumption, highlighting the artist’s interest in challenging contemporary materialistic desires. First made in 2000, the work – which strategically resembles both a store display and a shrine – has only gained in relevance as informal labour, near-instant delivery and unrelenting waste cycles have continued to grow in scale and intensity.

İpek Duben was born in 1941 in Istanbul, where she currently lives and works.

Random Walk, Feeding, and Weather (2025) disrupts linear movement and guides viewers into non-directed, embodied navigation – or, according to the artist, a ‘random walk’. A central vertical sculpture recalling data streams, nervous systems and infrastructural networks anchors the space. The work unfolds as a live, server-based ecosystem: open computers embedded in the platform generate data in real time through perpetually created browser windows, producing phrases that circulate through the gallery accompanied by airflow generated from cooling systems, turning computation into a form of ambient ‘weather’.

Merve Mepa was born in 1985 in Kocaeli. She currently lives and works in Istanbul.

Sevil Tunaboylu’s Remainder (2024) derives both from personal history and collective mythology. Moving fluidly between media, the work begins with her grandparents’ migration from Skopje to Istanbul, chronicling a symbolic history of flight, migration, persistence and loss.

Through this archaeological excavation of her family archive, past belongings and heirlooms, Tunaboylu employs and re-casts the carpentry tools of her father and grandfather, lending the work a tactile quality. The paintings further a mythical, yet deeply lived-in, approach to family history. For instance, Desolate Reunion (2024) shows a partial hand holding up a historical snapshot from her father’s archives, taken in front of the iconic Central Post Office in Skopje. Other features in her work, such as crumpled iron bars, nod to the looming reality of non-stop construction in Türkiye and its interruption of dwelling habits and urban landscapes. A series of lizard sculptures become animalistic guides to a shifting terrain, their severed tails set to regrow. Throughout the installation, references to construction processes through her family’s intergenerational workshop tools and measuring instruments speak to a perpetual project of building space, legacy and homeland.

Sevil Tunaboylu was born in 1982 in Istanbul. She currently lives and works in Istanbul.

Şafak Şule Kemancı’s practice embraces fluidity between species and forms: plants, minerals, animals and humans intertwine in trans-subjective entanglements. At the biennial, Kemancı is presenting a soft sculpture on a monumental scale, marked by its hybrid nature integrating both plant and animal attributes. The work inhabits the room and grows in a feral landscape, emerging from windows and doorways, forming an immersive environment that challenges binaries between cultivated and wild, human and non-human, natural and artificial. The shadows cast by the sculpture hint that protection is not about withdrawal or concealment, but about the possibility of sheltering others.