The Asian Art and
Performance Consortium (AAPC) of the Academy of Fine Arts (Kuva) and the
Finnish Theatre Academy Helsinki (Teak) hosted a symposium focusing on
manifestations of sex, sexuality and gender in Asian art and performance on
17-19 October. This was the second symposium organized under the ongoing
research project, Shifting Dialogues. The project is funded by the Academy of Finland in 2011-2014.
Following the
focus on “The Politics of Site, Locality & Context in Performance and
Visual Arts” last year, this year’s project targets at issues of sexual
embodiment and gender subjectitivy in Asian/Asiatic art-practice with emphasis
on performance arts, film, video art, installation, live art, and dialogical
work.
In his paper “Troubled
Objects of Nationalism and Masculinity”, Cüneyt Çakırlar explored the role of
scalar, regional, and global/international discourses in contemporary art
criticism. Cüneyt’s paper discussed the practice of a selection of artists producing
work from/on/about the Middle East (Erinç Seymen, Taner Ceylan, Akram Zaatari,
Slavs and Tatars, etc.). Questioning their critical use of geo-political
location, region and scale in their aesthetic framework, Cüneyt talked about
performative, transregional methodological/theoretical approaches to globalized
art forms, which would contextualize, if not re-enact, the ways in which these
artistic subjectivities inhabit the world.
