Online children's workshops organized by Pera Museum Learning Programs and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) in parallel with the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial are scheduled to start on Oct. 20. All workshops in the online program, which includes school groups every weekday except Monday and individual participants ages 7-12 on Saturdays, will be free of charge.

The Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation’s Pera Museum hosts the fifth Istanbul Design Biennial’s exhibitions with the theme, "Empathy Revisited: Designs for More than One," from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15. The children’s workshops are also prepared by Pera Museum Learning Programs in cooperation with IKSV.

Scheduled to take place from Oct. 20 to Nov. 14 through Zoom meetings, the program consists of workshops focusing on nature and human life, such as honeycomb design from paper, children's park installations produced by collage, plant and fruit and vegetable drawings and abstract drawing with watercolor. As part of the workshops, children will participate in the online exhibition tour, organized under a guide and will also get to know the concept of "empathy" more closely while studying works on topics such as life, food culture, ecology and climate change. After an online exhibition tour and chat session, they will produce their designs based on the concepts they have discussed.

Different design by children

In the workshop called "Designing Honeycombs," children ages 7-9 will explore the nutrient cycle through bees and honey and will produce their own mini honeycomb using paper, crayons, scissors and glue, inspired by an artwork titled "Germinator," exhibited in the biennial.

In the workshop "My Dream Park" for children ages 10-12, the participants will chat about their ideas of a dream playground and then design an image of it through different mediums, such as drawing or collage produced from old magazines, newspapers and brochures in their homes.

The workshop "Drawing Ecological Gardens," inspired by "Microbial Fruits of Istanbul," a project by artist Orkan Telhan that invents new approaches toward making urban public spaces more resilient in the face of climate change and more adaptive amid big changes, appeals to middle school groups. In the workshop, the children will chat about the ecological garden and what kind of new methods can be developed for cities to increase their resilience to climate change and to adapt to changing conditions more easily. In the second part of the workshop, the participants will draw a picture of the garden they dream of and the fruits and vegetables grown in different conditions.

In the workshop "Indefinite Patterns," primary school groups will explore basic geometrical shapes and formless patterns. Then, with inspiration from design studio The Rodina’s artwork "Map of Empathic Society," they will create free and unrestricted abstract patterns without any defined lines or shapes. They will scrape paint with colors to form color and pattern designs on paper and create abstract patterns by stripping them in a different direction with cardboard guided by their imagination.