ISTANBUL — Grazing beneath a luxury housing compound, a herd of water buffalo made an unexpected appearance in this year’s Istanbul Biennial, part of Cooking Sections’s installation “Wallowland” (2022) that examines the unbridled development that has expanded the gargantuan city into the forests, water reservoirs, and farmlands that feed Istanbul.

Art lovers trekked through hilly pastures to peek at the sleek, skittish beasts as jets roared into Europe’s biggest airport, declared a “monument to victory” by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan when he opened it in 2018. Its construction felled 13 million trees and encroached on the buffalos’ habitat, imperiling a centuries-old pastoral heritage.

Buffalo wallows lost to the airport are mapped out on the walls of a pop-up pudding shop the Turner Prize-nominated Cooking Sections opened back in the city. Creamy desserts are served in pots made by ceramicist Başak Gökalsın from the bovid’s clay wetlands, and traditional odes to the animals sung in Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, and Bulgarian are piped through the mirror-clad room.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.