Curator: Christine Tohmé
It is said that a cat has nine lives. A revered city dweller, the cat slips between gridlines, scavenges for the overlooked, and basks in the sun. Relying on wit and charm, it plays the unruly companion to neighbours and passers-by. Despite millennia of domestication, it preserves its wildness in times of peril.
Oscillating between play and danger, the cat has an anxious spirit that guides it through obscure passages. In a blasted landscape, this might cost it dearly, even a limb. The three-legged cat treads about silently, slinking in and out of view. Its altered gait carries the echoes of untold horror. Yet it still finds momentary respite, raising its gaze to the sky and questioning the planetary horizon. It practices new gymnastics, often faltering yet resolving with ceaseless grace. Following it off the beaten path allows us to mimic the cat’s mischief and make room for transformation, finding solace in the sun’s warmth.
Accelerated destruction, forced displacement, and runaway crises shatter all horizons and futurities. Facing an ever-tightening present, our bodies are forced to adopt multiple clocks – some speedy, some slow, others broken. Caught in a double movement, stuttering and hurtling – we strive to take another balancing step. We pivot, contort, disappear, and reappear like the cat. In search of our bearings, we reclaim rest, as well as those parts of ourselves that need to be preserved and restituted.
Resting on three legs from 2025 through 2027, the 18th Istanbul Biennial is thoroughly feline. It secures its footing by stretching in time, following a rhythm nourished by conversations, gymnastics, and incessant news streams. Its first leg, running from 20 September to 23 November 2025, presents an exhibition with over 40 artists, alongside performances, screenings, and talks centred on themes of self-preservation and futurity. The second leg, in 2026, is dedicated to creating an academy and collaborating with local initiatives on a series of public programmes. In 2027, the biennial leans on its third leg to rest, bringing together what has been encountered along the way through a final round of exhibitions and workshops.
About the work
Celina Eceiza’s installations unfold across surfaces and architectures, drawing on techniques
such as patchwork, collage, painting, plaster, and chalk to create immersive, mutable
environments. Her expansive textiles drape from ceilings and spread across floors, operating
both as structure and skin—haptic spaces to be entered and inhabited. At the heart of Eceiza’s
practice is the recurring gesture of dressing architecture as an affective act, treating it like a
body.
For the Biennial, Eceiza expands this logic by presenting an immersive installation rooted in
hospitality that builds an open space within another—an inhabitable architecture made
entirely of textile and found matter. Dyed and constructed by hand from raw cotton, burlap,
towels, and recycled fabrics, it forms an ecosystem of images, energies, beliefs, and
memories. Featuring an array of motifs delineating windows that gently merge interiority and
exteriority, alongside floating bodies, eyes, and limbs reaching toward one another, as well as
socks in pursuit of their missing pair, the textiles extend an invitation to an 'open house' of
leisure and rest. Visitors are invited not only to observe but to dwell: to step onto hand-
stitched floor coverings, lie on embroidered mattress-paintings, and rest among cushions and
poems. The space is sewn together with care—walls covered in charcoal drawings on canvas,
stitched and dyed textiles, and patchworked figures suspended like nighttime windows.
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Un nido es una fruta que se hincha / A nest is a fruit that swells, 2025 Cotton fabric, dye pigments, cords, ropes, plaster and gauze, cans, wall paint, avocado peels, clay, burlap, felt rugs, bleach, cement, bells, recycled plastic containers, stones, tree branches
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist
This work was realised with the assistance of Salomé Alis Altın, Ezel Dayı, Kiki Peri ggNash, Umut Ballıkaya.
Venue: Zihni Han
