16th Istanbul Biennial - The Seventh Continent
The title of the 16th Istanbul Biennial sounds like the title of a movie, so strong is the image conjured up by The Seventh Continent. As many people know, this term refers to a gigantic mass of plastic waste that now covers no less than 3.4 million square kilometres of our oceans – that is almost five times the area of Turkey. It is a new world, made up of debris. But unlike that other ‘New World’ discovered by Christopher Columbus, it is one that we ourselves have created, without even being aware that we were doing it. And what we have created is exactly what we did not want. A continent composed of everything we have rejected, it is the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene era1.
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