Article: Artists in the city: engagement with the urban environment and the local public was the theme of this year's Istanbul Biennial.(9th International Istanbul Biennial )

With international biennial exhibitions now numbering in the hundreds, their curators seem increasingly anxious to inoculate themselves against charges of redundancy, irrelevance and pandering to the demands of cultural tourism. Frequently, they do this by conceiving of formats that make links between biennial participants and the local art scene or the surrounding environment. Community participation and art projects with a public aspect are seen as ways of avoiding the sameness and lack of place that plague many biennials. But though such strategies are posed (at least by the organizers) as bold, convention-breaking gestures that signify a resistant, antiestablishment ...

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