The Mardin Biennial—now in its sixth edition and this year titled Further Away, running until 10 June—is coming into its own, securing long-term sponsorship from the Istanbul-based Hitay Foundation that should guarantee at least another five editions. After the 2024 Istanbul Biennial was postponed over divisions about its choice of curator, Turkey’s main art event this year is in Mardin. With that has come greater responsibility in Turkey’s impoverished, strife-hit southeast, local artists have argued. [...] A four-decade insurgency has scarred the southeast, and Ayşe Erkmen’s monumental swathe of fabric draped across a hilltop visible from Mardin is called 1907/32, referencing the Hague Convention article that requires negotiating with the bearer of a white flag on the battlefield.

You might think autumn would be a stupid time to open an outdoor sculpture exhibition. But that hasn’t stopped Frieze from returning to Regent’s Park once again with their annual outdoor sculpture extravaganza (from 20 September to 29 October) [...] Go get the beanies and brollies, we’re going arting. Moss has been big in art for a few years now, it’s a ubiquitous, damp trend that shows no signs of abating, especially now that Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen has whacked this big moss column up.

Kicking off the events this autumn will be Frieze Sculpture, which runs in the park between September 20 and October 29 and is organised for the first time by the curator Fatos Üstek. She promises about 20 works in the park, mostly for sale, which will comprise “the monumental and the ephemeral”. These include large-scale pieces by Zac Ové (“The Mothership Connection”, 2021, Gallery 1957), which lights up, and Ayse Erkmen’s more muted “Model for Moss Column” (2023, Dirimart gallery)

Für die Gruppenausstellung „Assembly“ am Frankfurter Portikus hat das Kuratorinnen-Duo Liberty Adrien und Carina Bukuts gemeinsam mit fünf Künstlerinnen und Künstlern eine ganze Reihe Interventionen im urbanen Raum geschaffen. Die Spazierroute läuft durch den Stadtteil Sachsenhausen – sieben Orte ermöglichen Formen der Zusammenkunft („Assembly“) und reflektieren globalen und lokalen Austausch, außerhalb des rigiden White Cubes. Die Intervention „Lonesome George“ (2020) von Ayse Erkmen ist die minimalistische Bronzereproduktion eines Schneckenhauses: Im Grunde braucht es Koordinaten, um die Mikro-Skulptur unterhalb der Baumkrone einer riesigen Platane im historischen Metzlerpark zu entdecken.

Portikus presents Assembly (May 6–July 16, 2023), a series of interventions in public space featuring works by James Gregory Atkinson, Thomas Bayrle, Ayşe Erkmen, Slavs and Tatars, and Sung Tieu. Institutions, much like living organisms, are influenced by, coexist with, and depend on their environment. For Assembly, Portikus invites five artists to respond to public sites in its immediate surroundings, the neighborhood of Sachsenhausen, thus addressing its location on Frankfurt’s Alte Brücke (Old Bridge).

On October 24, on the bank of the Golden Horn, an inlet dividing the historical peninsula from the European side of Istanbul, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), organizers of the Istanbul Biennial, revealed a permanent sculpture by Turkish artist Ayşe Erkmen, Golden Horn in Golden Horn (2022)

A trailblazing sculptor who first gained recognition in the 1970s, Ayșe Erkmen has become Turkey’s premier conceptual artist, exploring the foundations of art spaces via a series of interventions.

In Dirimart’s smaller gallery, a single panel, Studio Green, was presented adjacent to Scrolling (2021), a fourteen-minute, single-channel video that scrolls through the artist’s multifarious works, collapsing and simplifying her career into pixelated fragments. A nonchronological, non-thematic stream of consciousness, the video offers a meandering view of Erkmen’s practice, occasionally pausing on a work that may have taken years to realize before abruptly jumping to another.