Her directorship of the 2008 Biennale of Sydney was, she says “a fantastic experience”, as were subsequent trips where she travelled with the indigenous art historian and curator Hetti Perkins to remote desert communities discovering amazing art and also deprivation.

“Hettie brought to my attention the question of how complicated are the ways that we frame contemporary art, high art, craft, traditional art,” she says. “She became my best friend,” she adds of the former curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

We’ve met at Monash University; Christov Bakargiev is on a short Istanbul-inspired research trip to Australia (she says it’s too soon to be explicit about themes or artists) that also involves a talk in Brisbane, a workshop for art professionals in Sydney and a Melbourne lecture.

The topic for the latter is her directorship of documenta (it’s always lower case) in 2012, the influential gig that placed her first on Art Review’s Power 100 poll.

This sprawling city-wide exhibition is held in Kassell, Germany, every five years and is regarded as the acme of international art events.

The larger than usual contingent of Australia-based artists at documenta may bode well for Istanbul. Alongside a posse including the late Gordon Bennett, Fiona Hall, Warwick Thornton and Simryn Gill, the works selected included paintings by two Western Desert  artists, the late Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri; discussions with Perkins prompted Christov Bakargiev to cross the Western/non-Western divide and to re-contextualise the traditionally inspired works as abstracts, a Western art concept. “It was the first time that this had happened in a major international exhibition; documenta broke that division,” she says.

Alongside rather spiritual-sounding statements about art –“artists are only channelling a certain form of energy that coalesces just for a moment in the art work” – Christov Bakargiev, 56, has a nose for local issues and global frictions. She grew up in a political activist environment in Washington DC and her curatorial choices reflect that; for documenta she devised satellite events in global hot spots including Lebanon and Khabul and she embraces the philosophy of the post-war Italian arte povera movement with its rejection of commercialism and use of everyday materials. Art, she says is at heart emancipatory.

It’s what makes her sympathetic towards the artists who threatened to boycott this year’s Biennale of Sydney (curated by ACCA director Juliana Engberg) over its founding corporate partner Transfield’s recent contracts to supply garrison support services to asylum-seeker camps on Manus Island and Nauru.

“I totally understand the position of artists who feel that funding for an exhibition must be ethical,” she says. “The most important thing in art is to understand that artists are at the top of the food chain; they’re the only reason we are in art [as curators and art historians]… that doesn’t mean the world can be governed by artists, but it does mean dealing with compassionate people so you can’t avoid the problem of ethics” she says.

She’s less keen to talk about ethics in relation to Turkish human rights abuses; in many ways the country is as “modern as Australia” with a deep and rich history, she says. Yes, she acknowledges, the country is going through restive times and next year marks the centenary of the Armenian massacre. “But let’s not start talking about Turkey in a stupid way; that would be a very northern European perspective, seeing Turkey as a retrograde place” she cautions.

She’s more enthusiastic about Istanbul’s role in kick-starting the global biennale phenomenon when it began in 1987. In contrast to venerable Venice (1895), Sao Paolo (1951) and Sydney (1973), the first Istanbul Biennial signalled a move away from the Western centres of art towards the periphery. There are currently more than 200 biennales world-wide. At first, says Christiv Bakargiev, they were about creating civic societies, political struggles and “the cultural interaction between local scenes and the international art world,” she says but nowadays there is too much “self-referentiality and there’s a creeping formulaic quality that undermines what should be the uniqueness of each event.”

Her 2015 Istanbul Biennial she says will “embark looking for where to draw the line, to withdraw, to draw upon, and to draw out.”

It’s a characteristically allusive and elusive statement from the queen of the unexpected.