ISTANBUL — Back in January, Fulya Erdemci, the curator of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, decided to focus the exhibition on art in public spaces. The city was booming, but at what cost, and for whose benefit? It had become the central question there. Ms. Erdemci wanted artists to engage with the issue, and citizens to engage with public art.

During the winter, organizers of the Biennial, which opens to the public on Saturday, began applying for permits to install works around the city and in buildings slated for demolition. Then in May, Gezi Park, a once-dingy area near the city’s central Taksim Square, erupted, as Turks of all backgrounds took to the streets in a wide-ranging protest set off by anger at how the government was developing the city without the consent or participation of residents. Riots broke out, police tear gas flowed and the Biennial was forced to move inside.

The organizers are trying to cast that change in a positive light. “When Gezi happened, we were so excited,” Ms. Erdemci said last week as she stood at a Biennial site in a former industrial warehouse in front of an installation by the Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake — a long brick wall with a copy of Kafka’s novel “The Castle” tucked underneath. The demonstrations, she said, asked the same question she had hoped would be raised in the Biennial: “If it’s possible to have multiple publics come together, live together, act together?”

Now in its 13th edition, this year’s Istanbul Biennial, which runs through Oct. 20, is called “Mom, Am I Barbarian?” taking its title from a book by the Turkish poet Lale Muldur. It fills five venues in Istanbul’s bustling downtown, bringing together 88 artists from around the world: 15 of them are Turkish, others are from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and North Africa.