At the outset of 12th Istanbul Biennial co-curators Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann organized a conference in November 2010 at Istanbul Bilgi University. Entitled Remembering Istanbul, the conference looked at the history of the Istanbul Biennial via lectures by the previous curators as well as presentations by some of the artists who had participated in earlier editions.

The aim of this conference was for Pedrosa and Hoffmann to understand how others before them, curators and artists alike, had engaged with the specificities of the Istanbul Biennial and what their experience were. A number of key ideas emerged from the conference regarding the earlier curators’ conceptions of place, identity, history, politics, and urbanity.

Transcriptions of the conference lectures and presentations, along with visual material related to the previous biennials in Istanbul, can be found in the publication Remembering Istanbul.

ISBN: 978-975-7363-96-5