MUSIBET / ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL

Emre Arolat was the co-curator of the 1^st Istanbul Design Biennale organized by IKSV, along with Joseph Grima. He was the curator of the exhibition  “Musibet” which focused on the grand urban transformations taking place in Istanbul and many parts of the world.

‘Grand Transformation’, on one hand, immediately attracts broad appeal and enjoys increasing influence, being based on arguments which eliminates the doubts about its legitimacy and essentiality; on the other hand, has radical effects on all segments of the community that have been immediately impacted by it. Moreover, it reveals many situations that should be questioned at the level of individual rights and freedoms. This wind melts in the same pot the attitudes which seem to be contradictory at first sight. New and historical, local and displaced, genuine and imitation fairs in this climate. Musibet exhibition, although it placed Istanbul on its main axis, aimed to display the multiple faces of the big transformations that are continuously being realized in different geographies and to create a small gap inside where the self-styled-marvelous legitimate arguments of the design activities might be questioned in this context.