The Venice Biennale reigns supreme as the most famous of the world's now numerous art fairs, but the most precious is arguably the Istanbul Biennial. Its eighth incarnation gathered 85 artists from 42 countries to present a multidisciplinary, multi-faceted and multimedia amalgamation. Istanbul, with her fantastically visual architecture, chaotic meandering streets, energetic populace and schizophrenically rich history, was itself a central participant.

As with many recent biennials, video art took centre stage. Antrepo No. 4, a vast maritime warehouse alongside one of Istanbul's numerous ports, functioned as the central venue and lavished elaborate attention on each video piece. Large cylindrical rooms were constructed for each work, complete with interior black walls, carpeting and soundproofing. Helsinki artist Liisa Lounila's three-part video presentation Popcorn. Flirt. Play. (2001/2002/2003) made the best use of the roundness by mirroring it with Matrix-style camera rotations, capturing a single event from seemingly infinite simultaneous perspectives. Volta (2002-3), by Stephen Dean, showed massive crowds cheering, chanting, moshing and dancing at soccer matches. It seemed to explode off the screen with vibrantly hued drapes hung from the walls and ceiling of the screening room.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba made his room claustrophobic with a breathlessly gorgeous underwater video called Happy New Year - Memorial Project Vietnam II (2003), in which a New Year's dragon puppet is carried by divers through the water above an ocean reef. This saturated spectacle interprets the Lunar New Year celebration and refers to the 1968 Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War. The contrast with a nearby video called Rebels of Dance (2002), by Turkish artist Fikret Atay, betrays the brilliance of curator Dan Cameron's organization of the biennial. Both works present cultures trying to come to terms with their intrinsic dichotomies and dilemmas through suffocating, yet optimistic, festivity. Atay's video documents two Kurdish boys lured into an ATM booth by the artist. As they become comfortable under the camera's gaze, they proceed to dance and sing in a traditional Kurdish manner, creating a disjunctive combination of traditional custom and modern appliance.

The two highlights of the biennial, however, were site- specific pieces. Fiona Tan's work News from the Near Future (2003), installed in the damp, dripping Yerebatan Cistern, moved through a 9 1/2-minute montage of historical film footage documenting the ongoing battle of man against water. Images of sinking ships and flooding cities, projected onto a wall and reflected in the water below, stand as a warning about global warming from inside a monument of a defunct empire.

Danica Dakic's video Surround (2003) is projected into the ceiling dome of the Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center. Seven naked bodies (of different colours and genders) crawl towards seven sacred texts set in a circle and commence reading scripture from seven global religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Confucianism) as viewers, on a large circular bed, look up. The work ascribes to a dream of unity amongst peoples and Dakic, a Sarajevan artist, seems to plead that the dream is possible. In many ways the biennial itself is a metaphor for the same dream.