Biennial trains children for art

ISTANBUL

All children aged between five and 15 will be able to participate in the International Canakkale Children’s Biennial. There will be also a special workshop targeting 5th grade primary school students.

A children’s biennial titled the “International Canakkale Children’s Biennial” will be held in the Aegean province of Çanakkale throughout November and December. The idea of organizing a children’s biennial was suggested by children and first held during the 2nd International Çanakkale Biennial in 2010. As part of the project, workshops were held with the participation of around 200 primary school students, and an exhibition of the same name was organized. The exhibition was also taken to Istanbul, where it was shown as part of the Istanbul Children and Youth Art Biennial.

The interest in the project shown by children in 2010 inspired the curator Mustafa Horasan to plan further activities. Based on this experience, the International Çanakkale Children’s Biennial will take place under the coordination of the Mavitay Children’s Home for Culture and Çanakkale Municipality, and with cooperation of various local, national and international organizations and individuals.

The event aims to familiarize children, youngsters, and teachers with a variety of different arts disciplines, materials, techniques and forms of expressions, and to stimulate them to produce their own original works. It aims to establish workshops, seminars, discussions and meetings with artists, and to exhibit the works produced during these activities. It also plans to foster cooperation with a number of cities both in Turkey and abroad.

All children aged between five and 15 will be able to participate in the International Canakkale Children’s Biennial. There will be also a special workshop targeting 5th grade primary school students (aged 11-12).

According to the executive board and the curators of the event, they are seeking to turn the act of making art into a kind of play, to turn the attention of children over to different aspects of life, to free them from a stereotypical approach to art, and to draw out their creativity and energy. According to a written statement sent by the board, the workshops will attempt to place emphasis on the value of children as individuals and to encourage them to create work without inhibition. “Our goal is to create children who are more curious, skeptical, creative, and participatory,” it said.

The biennial committee is interested in collecting children’s art works from all over the country and world. All children are free to send in any subject of artwork that they have produced.

Biennial workshops

In May of this year, “My Friend Biennial” workshops were held in the southeastern city of Mardin.
As part of the project, a painting titled “Mardin in My Dreams” was created, in which a total number of 41 children from the local Mardin Cumhuriyet Primary School took part, with the guidance of their teacher Havva Gücer.

Another city in which workshops were held in May was Diyarbakır. At the event, 34 schoolchildren from the 24 Kasım Primary School worked on a group painting named “Surroundings.”

Some 133 children attended the workshop held in the northwestern province of Tekirdağ’s Aka College, where they chatted about art and produced their own original works with the shrink paper.
Finally, the project travelled to the Aegean town of Eceabat at the end of May. At the events held at “Eceabat Youth Centre,” 85 children from Köprülü Hamdi Bey and Türközü Primary Schools created original works.

A total of 343 children joined the workshops, which were realized with the guidance of Erdinç Alnıak, Evren Aldoğan, Elif Feyizoğlu and Emel Sezer.