Mardin Biennial Opens Children’s Workshops as City Hosts Parallel Exhibition
By Bosphorus News Life Desk
The 7th Mardin Biennial is extending its programme to younger audiences through a children's workshops series that brings artists, children and Mardin's layered spaces into the same creative field.
Coordinated by Ezgi Tek, the Children's Workshops Programme includes Ayhan Akikol, Bawer Doğanay, Ceren Solmaz, Ezgi Tek, Hesen Chalak, Mehmet Akan, Rıdvan Aşar and Sidar Alışık. The workshops take place across the International Design Foundation Children's Kültürhane, exhibition venues, museums, schools and public spaces.
The programme introduces children to the biennial through observation, play, memory and material work. Instead of treating the exhibition as something to be viewed from a distance, the workshops give children a way to enter its language through making.
GÖKzemin, the biennial's conceptual frame, moves between sky and earth, the imagined and the observed, the natural and the material. In the children's programme, that idea becomes a practical language of looking, touching, tracing and building.
"Sanatın Öyküsü: Bienal" introduces children to the idea of a biennial and to contemporary art production. "Yedi Gök Atölyesi" works through sky, shadow, earth and natural materials. "Fikir-Gözlem Köprüsü" draws on Raphael's "The School of Athens" to open a child-friendly path into Plato, Aristotle, ideas, place and observation.
Other workshops follow Mardin's architecture, the trace of water, collective imagination and the relationship between natural surfaces and artistic expression. The programme gives children an active place inside the biennial's cultural map, while keeping the city's own textures close to the work.
The same cultural season also includes Bilge Yıldız's solo exhibition "Duality and Life Path," on view at Zinciriye Madrasa from May 16 to June 16. The exhibition is independent from the official Mardin Biennial programme and is presented as a separate curatorial structure during the biennial period.
Yıldız works with leather, tattoo language and Anatolian motifs. Her exhibition traces a psychological map of human life through origin, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, ageing and transformation. The catalogue describes "Duality and Life Path" as the artist's first solo exhibition and places it around the tensions that shape human life, including innocence and fear, strategy and manipulation, closeness and restriction, collapse and renewal.
The catalogue also notes a thematic conversation with the biennial's reference to Aristophanes' "The Birds." While the biennial works through the idea of a city suspended between sky and earth, Yıldız's exhibition looks at human psychology through illusion, awareness, construction and dissolution. The connection remains conceptual, not institutional.
The children's workshops give young audiences a direct route into the biennial's language through material, observation and play. Yıldız's independent exhibition, running in the city during the same period, adds a separate note to Mardin's cultural season without being folded into the official biennial programme.
***Official Links:
7th Mardin Biennial Children's Workshops: https://mardinbienali.org/etkinlikdetay.aspx?id=30
Bilge Yıldız, "Duality and Life Path": https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D8AgLrUbD13zsCukTNjkfZ-wwp_GXPdb/view?pli=1