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'Untitled (Passport)'

Sue Williamson at 12th Istanbul Biennial

The 12th Istanbul Biennial explores the rich relationship between art and politics, focusing on artworks that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken. It takes as its point of departure the work of the Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996). Gonzalez-Torres was deeply attuned to both the personal and the political, and also rigorously attentive to the formal aspects of artistic production, integrating high modernist, minimal, and conceptual references with themes of everyday life.

The biennial is composed of five group exhibitions and more than 50 solo presentations, all housed in a single venue, Antrepo 3 and 5. Each of the group shows - 'Untitled (Abstraction)', 'Untitled (Ross), 'Untitled (Passport)', 'Untitled (History), and 'Untitled (Death by Gun)' - departs from a specific work by Gonzalez-Torres.

Sue Williamson's For Thirty Years Next to his Heart is included on the group exhibition 'Untitled (Passport)'. Gonzalez-Torres was personally well acquainted with the difficulty of traversing borders and the beauty of expanding horizons. He was born in Cuba and lived in Puerto Rico before settling in New York in 1979. Traveling and voyages through time and space are themes that run throughout his oeuvre. 'Untitled' (Passport #II) suggests a poetic space where the act of leaving one place and entering another is forever in process, where national and social identities are never fixed, but constantly coming into being.

National borders are finite lines determined and drawn by human will. They have always been at the root of wars and caused resentful feelings of exclusion. Many of the artists 'Untitled (Passport)' seek to shift the viewer's perspective of the accepted construction of the world map by reordering existing classifications. The works presented here revolve around subjects such as national identity, trespassing, mapping, statehood, economic migration, and political and cultural alienation.

17 September 2011 - 13 November 2011