7th Mardin Biennial: SKYground Concemptual Framework and Venues Revealed

Dara Ancient City, among the venues inhabited by Mardin Biennial for its 7th edition. Courtesy Mardin Biennial

7th Mardin Biennial: SKYground

On view: 15 May – 21 June
Location: Mardin, Turkey
Curator: Çelenk Bafra

https://en.mardinbienali.org/

The 7th edition of the Mardin Biennial unfolds under the title SKYground, bringing, once more, a world level art exhibition to the layered architectural, cultural, and historical landscape of Mardin, one of the most symbolically charged cities of ancient Mesopotamia.

Long shaped by Arab, Assyrian, Kurdish, Turkish, and other communities, Mardin has for centuries functioned as a crossroads of trade, belief, and culture. Its elevated position, both a strategic vantage point and a symbolic threshold between empires, has rendered the city a site where coexistence and conflict, spirituality and politics, imagination and reality are deeply intertwined. Often described as an open-air museum, Mardin carries the material and immaterial traces of millennia, offering a uniquely resonant context for artistic inquiry.

Within this setting, SKYground proposes a conceptual passage between domains often perceived as irreconcilable: sky and ground, the material and the spiritual, the individual and the collective, the past and the future. By drawing a line between what divides the horizon, the biennial opens a contemplative space in which contemporary art becomes a mediator between worlds, both imagined and lived.

At the heart of this edition stands the figure of the bird, a recurring presence in the region’s cultural memory. Moving freely between sky and ground, birds become guides through the biennial’s exhibitions, site-specific installations, and performances. Carrying the stories embedded in Mardin’s stones and shaped by the winds of its geography, they trace pathways across the city while embodying movement, transition, and the possibility of transformation.

The conceptual framework of SKYground draws on two seminal texts from different cultural traditions: Aristophanes’ The Birds and Attâr’s The Conference of the Birds (Manṭiq al-Ṭayr). In Aristophanes’ satire, humans ally with birds to found a utopian city in the clouds called Nephelokokkygia, revealing the tensions between idealism, power, and governance. Attâr’s poetic allegory, by contrast, leads birds through seven spiritual valleys toward the dissolution of the self and the pursuit of collective truth. Read together, these works converge around themes of seeking, journey, and transformation, opening an intellectual space to reimagine freedom, truth, and new horizons.

Mardin’s nature, architecture, historical depth, and social fabric shape SKYground not only in its concept but also its sensory atmosphere. The biennial explores how new imaginaries and alternative modes of living and thinking might be constructed in response to contemporary sociopolitical and existential challenges. Through the universal metaphor of birds, it recalls art’s enduring capacity for liberation and transformation, while remaining firmly grounded in lived realities.

For the first time, the Mardin Biennial expands beyond the old city, unfolding across multiple sites that together form a narrative arc between the mystical and the mundane, the ancient and the contemporary:

• Old Mardin With its multi-religious and multilingual structure, ancient architecture, and expansive panorama, Upper Mardin remains the biennial’s central site. Here, the sensation of a city suspended between sky and ground becomes a guiding metaphor for the biennial’s intellectual framework.
• Kızıltepe: Historically a centre of trade and everyday life, Kızıltepe introduces a dynamic and critical energy. Its dense urban movement and social complexity foreground the intersections of contemporary life, political tension, and collective experience.
• Dara Ancient City: Marked by archaeological layers and a powerful spiritual atmosphere, Dara oscillates between ground and sky, offering a foundation for the biennial’s sensory and conceptual explorations.

Together, these locations form a narrative arc that bridges the mystical and the mundane, the ancient and the contemporary. Artists will variously respond to Aristophanes’ satirical critique of power by imagining alternative social structures, or echo Attâr’s contemplative journey through themes of transformation, introspection, and collective awareness.

In Mardin, the “sky” is woven from imagination and utopia, while the “ground” carries the weight of complex realities. Moving between the horizons of Upper Mardin, the ancient strata of Dara, and the contemporary life of Kızıltepe, the biennial interlaces the material and the imagined, the mythical and the everyday. Together with artists and audiences, the 7th Mardin Biennial unfolds as a journey from Attâr’s seven valleys to Aristophanes’ Nephelokokkygia.

Through “SKYground,” the biennial seeks not only to present artworks but to cultivate a shared space for reflection and transformation—where the tangible meets the transcendent, and imagination becomes fertile ground for truth.