3rd Istanbul Design Biennial will be held from 22 October to 4 December 2016. The curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announced the concept of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial at a media meeting held on Tuesday, 1 December in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums Library.

Following the welcome speech by the director of the Istanbul Design Biennial Deniz Ova, the curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley announced that the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial is entitled “ARE WE HUMAN? : The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years” and will explore the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “human.” The Biennial Deiz Ova invites a wide arrange of designers and thinkers from around the world to respond to a compact set of eight interlinked propositions:

DESIGN IS ALWAYS DESIGN OF THE HUMAN
THE HUMAN IS THE DESIGNING ANIMAL
OUR SPECIES IS COMPLETELY SUSPENDED IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF DESIGN 
DESIGN RADICALLY EXPANDS HUMAN CAPABILITY
DESIGN ROUTINELY CONSTRUCTS RADICAL INEQUALITIES
DESIGN IS EVEN THE DESIGN OF NEGLECT
“GOOD DESIGN” IS AN ANESTHETIC
DESIGN WITHOUT ANESTHETIC ASKS URGENT QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR HUMANITY

These propositions will be explored over the coming year in events, classes, workshops, and online discussions – including open calls for responses to the propositions by short videos. The details of the open call for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial will be announced as of 1 February 2016.

Colomina and Wigley said

“Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Design is what makes the human. It is the basis of social life, from the very first artefacts to the exponential expansion of human capability. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect. More people than ever in history are forcibly displaced by war, lawlessness, poverty, and climate at the same time that the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of “good design.” Design needs to be redesigned.”

 

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Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Ms. Colomina has taught in the School since 1988, and is the Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, a graduate program that promotes the interdisciplinary study of forms of culture that came to prominence during the last century and looks at the interplay between culture and technology. In 2006-2007 she curated, with a group of Princeton Ph.D. students, the exhibition "Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X" at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. The exhibition continues to travel around the world, in the Museum of Design of Barcelona and the Colegio de Arquitectos de Murcia, at the NAI Maastricht and Santiago de Chile and Montevideo. Over 100 reviews and articles on the exhibition have been published worldwide. An exhibition catalog is forthcoming from ACTAR.

Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects, has already been translated into many languages and is coming out in Spanish and in Turkish. In addition, Ms. Colomina has published Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), which was awarded the 1993 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects; and Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988). She has contributed to many volumes, including The Banham Lectures, Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, Beyond Transparency and catalogues of the work of Dan Graham, Muntadas and SANAA, among others. In addition she has published Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, co-edited with AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Double Exposure: Architecture through Art) (Madrid: Akal, 2006), and Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007). She was selected to be a Juror for the 2010 Venice Biennale and a juror in the architectural competition for the new headquarters of CAF (Corporación Andina de Fomento), in Caracas, Venezuela. She presented "Women in Architecture," a keynote lecture in the conference Female Forces, 100 year anniversary, at the Royal Academy Copenhagen. In addition to being the Editor of the Multimedia Section of the JSAH (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians) she has written numerous other publications and presented lectures throughout the world, including at MoMA, the MAXXI museum in Rome, the Guggenheim museum, DoCoMoMo in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Chandigarh, Osaka, Tokyo, Florence, Oslo, Thesaloniki, Patras, Guadalajara, Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Ohio, Pamplona, Porto, Toronto, Houston, Texas AM, Yale, Chicago and Harvard University.

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Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect, author, and (since 2004 until 2014) Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, USA.

In 2005, Wigley founded Volume Magazine together with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman. A collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO Rotterdam and C-lab (Columbia University NY), Volume Magazine is an experimental think tank focusing on the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. The magazine aims to explore "beyond architecture’s definition of 'making buildings'" by presenting global views on architecture and design, broader attitudes to social structures and created environments; and embodies progressive journalism.

Created and founded in collaboration with Brett Steele the Institute of Failure; essentially an academic institution for the instruction and theory of failure (as opposed to success).

An accomplished scholar and design teacher, Mark Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995); and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001). Wigley has served as curator for widely attended exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam. He received both his Bachelor of Architecture (1979) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

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Born in Germany, Stuttgart, Deniz Ova graduated from the University of Stuttgart in Political Science and Linguistics. After working as an assistant director in several theatre productions at the Stuttgart State and City Theatre, she started to work for the management and organisation of festival events in Stuttgart. Her first hospitality management was during the Şimdi Stuttgart festival in 2005 which brought her in touch with the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).

In 2007 she moved to Istanbul to lead the international projects department of İKSV and since then she has developed and organised the festivals and events of İKSV in European cities. (Co-productions for the 400th anniversary celebrations of diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Turkey, 2012; Şimdi Now Sweden and Denmark, 2011; Anna Lindh Foundation Head of Network Turkey co-coordination and events; Spot On: Turkey Now, Vienna 2009; Turkey at one Glance. Excerpts from Life and Culture, Vienna 2008, the Frankfurt Book Fair Guest of Honour, Turkey Department of Music and Performing Arts, 2008). Besides the festivals she coordinates the Pavilion of Turkey at the Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and the artist residency studio “Turquie” at Cite International des Arts. In 2009 Deniz Ova was appointed to write with Görgün Taner and Deniz Unsal a critical report on the Arts and Culture scene in Amsterdam following the nomination of Görgün Taner as Art Advisor for the Amsterdam City Council. 
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Published on: December 1, 2015
Cite: "The concept of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial announced" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/concept-3rd-istanbul-design-biennial-announced> ISSN 1139-6415
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