Months of secrecy have just come to an end. Yesterday, the much anticipated "Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)," 2011, curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, opened for a preview. The 4000 guests were finally allowed to look at an exhibition, which until then, had been kept strictly under wraps.

It was well worth the wait. Inspired by the work of Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the 12th Istanbul Biennial is a thoughtful and tightly curated presentation, which smartly avoids the pitfalls inherent to large-scale exhibitions of this kind. There's no grand overarching curatorial concept here. Five small group exhibitions, each titled after a piece by Gonzalez-Torres  "Untitled (Abstraction)," "Untitled (Ross)," "Untitled, (Passport)," "Untitled (History)," and "Untitled (Death by Gun)"  provide the conceptual core of the biennial, and allow Hoffmann and Pedrosa to explore in depth themes as varied as the legacy of the modernist grid, love and loss, mapping, historical narrative, and the ubiquity of violence. These intimate "cabinet shows" are interwoven with more than fifty solo presentations by the likes of Taysir Batniji, Mark Bradford, Claire Fontaine and Renata Lucas. On a scorching Turkish afternoon, ARTINFO UKsat down with the duo to discuss their muse and the need to diversify curatorial practice.

When in the process did this idea of using Felix Gonzalez-Torres' works as starting points come up?

Adriano Pedrosa: From our experience of looking at the Istanbul Biennial, we both knew that it has always had an emphasis on the political. In the last edition, this became quite a radical position. We thought that it was interesting to rescue the visual, formal, and aesthetic concerns while maintaining this focus on the political. Felix Gonzalez-Torres came at that moment in our thinking process as a very fine example of an artist who does exactly that.

His work addresses both the formal and the political... 

Adriano Pedrosa: And the personal and the bodily.... You see a lot of solo shows in biennials. But we are particularly interested in the cabinet show, an intimate exhibition bringing many different works in a single room, establishing dialogues among them. This is how we came to these five specific works as points of departures. We also thought that it would be interesting to weave together group shows and solo shows, like we did at the San Juan Triennial in 2009.

Most biennials have titles that are so broad that they become meaningless. Do you see your project as a critique of this phenomena?

Jens Hoffmann: It's not so much a critique as it is an attempt to diversify curatorial practice. Since the biennial boom that began in the mid-1990s, a certain language and a way to receive it has established itself. We tried to circumnavigate and challenge that  to critique that in a certain way. Not having a title was part of it. Often biennials have all encompassing titles, any work ever made would fit somehow. That wasn't interesting for us. In a way, our title is much more open  and the exhibition becomes much tighter through that.

It seems to be the great paradox of this biennial: by being so open you become much more focused.

Adriano Pedrosa: We found this Felix Gonzalez-Torres quote where he says: "The work is untitled because meaning is always changing in time and place." It's something that is very close to our project. We are not really subscribing to the spoon-feeding of messages to the viewer. Like Felix does in his work, we are really offering certain elements which hopefully will be a provocation. It is rather open, but it's also very specific: it's specific to Felix Gonzalez-Torres' work.

Jens Hoffmann: What's important to think about is that each biennial is one chapter of a larger conversation. They add to one another rather than being individual narratives. So the question is: how can you continue this conversation that someone else has begun? Not only in Istanbul, but all over the place.

You've known each other for years, you've worked with each other in the past, but you are also both known for your strong individual curatorial personalities. How did it work when you had to put these two personalities together?

Adriano Pedrosa: We created a third one!

Jens Hoffmann: It's true, something like that.

Adriano Pedrosa: We thought: this is not something that I'm going to curate on my own, and not something that you are going to curate on your own. Let's create a third, hybrid form of curating. We come from very different backgrounds, from different generations. We are based in different hemispheres. But we have worked with many of the same artists and share an interest in the exhibition itself. So it's not really one of these blind date situations. Our relationship is relaxed. It's really based on trust. 

Tell me about the production process.

Jens Hoffmann: There's a lot of newly developed pieces in this exhibition, and we were able to realize certain projects that artists had done before but didn't have the means to produce the way they really wanted them to be produced.

Adriano Pedrosa: For example, the work of Bisan Abu-Eisheh from Palestine. He's perhaps the youngest artist that we have, he's still in the academy there. The piece was a school project that he had done in a small gallery in Ramallah. I've said: do you want to try to do this in a larger scale? We re-configured the work and redeveloped it. Because we are trying to articulate a dialogue between the works, we are never inviting an artist and saying: this is your space, do whatever you want. [Artist] Rivane Neuenschwander had done a grid with found elements before, but never in the context of a dialogue with abstraction, and in dialogue with other works. Here it becomes something completely different.

In your introduction, you quote Gonzalez-Torres "I'm not a voice of authority. I make mistakes. I might be wrong." If you had to do the Istanbul Biennial again, what would you do differently?

Jens Hoffmann: Biennials are not the final manifestations of any truths. They are very much of the moment. This is of the moment where Adriano is, where I am, and what we see, read, and what our conversation is at this point. In two years time, we might do another biennial, or another show together, and it will be something else altogether. Again, this touches on Gonzalez-Torres's quote about meaning changing in time and place.