Istanbul Conversations

Istanbul Conversations

Istanbul Conversations is an international gathering that brings together a growing community of organizations and individuals committed to supporting and reimagining the field of contemporary art across different regions and contexts. Building on the inaugural edition, Vienna Conversations (2025), the second edition expands the dialogue to include arts-support organizations alongside non-profit institutions, residency programs, curators, and artists, creating a platform for exchanging perspectives, experiences, and approaches to sustaining contemporary art.

Hosted by SAHA as part of its 15th anniversary year between 24-26 June 2026, the program reflects the organization's long-standing commitment to fostering international collaboration, artist mobility, and cultural exchange. Through panel discussions, institutional visits, and conversations, participants explore the changing conditions of cultural production, institutional models, and opportunities for future partnerships, while engaging with Istanbul's diverse and evolving contemporary art ecosystem. The program aims to cultivate lasting professional relationships and strengthen dialogue between art practitioners and institutions across different geographies.

Panel Program

24 June 2026, Wednesday

Discussion 1
Coaction in times of precarity and division 
Moderator: Chus Martinez 
Speakers: Ruben Arevshatyan, Sten Ojavee, Aykan Safoğlu, Ulya Soley 

The discussion explores how geopolitics shape artistic collaboration and mobility, while questioning what “international collaboration” means under increasingly unequal conditions. Panelists will reflect on how institutions and art professionals can respond to precarity without reproducing hierarchies, and consider the blurred boundaries between cultural support, diplomacy, and political influence. The conversation asks when neutrality becomes complicity, and how solidarity and cooperation can be sustained across fractured global contexts.

25 June 2026, Thursday 

Discussion 2
Rethinking Biennials
Moderator: Juha Huuskonen 
Speakers: Nawar Al Qasimi, Diana Campbell, Cecilie C. Ragnheiðardóttir Gaihede

The panel brings together representatives of funding and organizing institutions, artistic directors, and artists to reflect on the future of international biennials. Framed by recent debates around major exhibitions, it examines how biennials are responding to critiques of institutional neutrality, discursive saturation, tokenistic inclusion, and extractive curatorial models. The conversation asks whether biennials can move beyond systems driven by scale, visibility, and rapid circulation toward slower and more sustainable forms of engagement. The panelists will also explore care-based and low-impact practices, considering ecological responsibility, labor, and reciprocal collaboration as essential to rethinking how biennials are organized and experienced today.

Discussion 3
Ecologies of Dialogue
Moderator: Merve Elveren 
Speakers: Maria-Thalia Carras, Monica Carroquino, Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, Ruben Steinum 

The session reflects on how institutions understand the changing realities, pressures, and expectations shaping contemporary art today. The discussion considers the feedback mechanisms used to “check the pulse” of the field, and questions where consultation meaningfully informs policy and funding decisions. Panelists will examine how dialogue can move beyond symbolic participation toward genuine influence, particularly amid shifting social, political, and economic conditions, asking how institutions can build more responsive, reciprocal, and transparent relationships with artists and cultural workers, and how listening itself can become an active institutional practice.

Discussion 4
Unpacking the Residency
Moderator: Merve Ünsal
Speakers: Fernanda Brenner, Lena Malm, Tracian Meikle, Arvid van der Rijt 

The panel brings together residency and visiting program professionals from different regional contexts to reflect on the changing role of residencies in contemporary art. The panel explores how residencies can foster meaningful place-making, exchange, and long-term engagement beyond temporary hosting models. The panelists discuss what conditions enable artists and visiting curators to develop new ideas and sustainable relationships within unfamiliar contexts, while questioning whether mobility and international circulation remain necessary for artistic and professional development. Panelists will also address the emotional, professional, and financial tolls of restricted mobility, and how residency programs can respond more ethically and supportively today.

26 June 2026, Friday

Discussion 5
One Battle After Another: Institutional Practice in a Multipolar World
Moderator: Sohrab Mohebbi 
Speakers: Özge Ersoy, Asena Günal, Moataz Nasreldin, Ibrahim Nehme 

This panel will explore how institutional work is inherently context-specific, and how models must be continually reinvented and reconfigured in relation to an organization’s mission and location. Conventional distinctions—such as non-profit vs. for-profit, or public vs. private—do not translate uniformly across geographies. Art institutions are also constantly negotiating the demands of multiple constituencies, which are often contradictory or misaligned. Within this, the panel will consider the conditions of speech, the structuring force of funding, institutional vision and framing, and the role of social media—and how their limits and possibilities shift depending on where and when institutions operate.

Discussion 6
It takes a village: On philanthrophy
Moderator: Ingo Niermann 
Speakers: Margherita Belcredi, Füsun Eczacıbaşı, Elina Kountouri, Michelle Newton

The last panel convenes institutions rooted in artistic patronage alongside pioneering cultural philanthropists to examine how support systems in the arts can evolve beyond transactional funding models. Drawing from earlier panel conversations on sustainability, collaboration, and access, the discussion asks: what does meaningful stewardship of culture look like today? How can institutions, patrons, artists, and communities build horizontal ties that redistribute opportunity, knowledge, and visibility across the ecosystem? And how might philanthropy foster long-term cultural resilience rather than short-term visibility? The panel explores collective responsibility in shaping artistic futures through shared infrastructures, interdependence, and more equitable models of cultural support.