House of Wisdom Nottingham: Exhibition Public Programme
Programme Curator: Cüneyt Çakırlar
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| Didem Erk, “Black Thread”, installation, 2017. |
Istanbul Queer Art Collective
Performance
Visiting Bibliophiles: Fellowship of Books
Following their performance of Psychic Bibliophiles: What the Cards Say in Amsterdam,
Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül will visit NTU Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies,
Gregory Woods. Presenting their Just in Bookcase, they will have a conversation
on queer archiving and memory. The video documentation of this event will be
available after the performance.
3 October 2018 Wednesday
Prof. Wendy Shaw (Freie Universität, Berlin,
Germany)
Talk
Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham NG1 2DH
Time:
19:00-21:00
Modern celebrations of the 8th century library House of Wisdom in Baghdad often paint it as the symbol of an Islamic golden age: a shining light of the East against the dark ages of the medieval West; and a shining light of the past against the dark ages of modern associations between Islam and terror. But history is much more complex. More than a single institution, the House of Wisdom was a practice of transcultural transition and layered translation, where antique philosophy rejected by Christian Rome persisted through the funnel of Sassanian Iran and informed a nascent Islam hungry for knowledge, regardless of origin. It calls on us to imagine not a golden age of Islam as distinct from its surroundings, but as part and parcel of late antique cultures whose overwhelming interest in discovering truth is all too often erased in our modern concern for authenticity. Situating the House of Wisdom not as a golden age of Islam but as a transcultural inheritance, this talk explores how the early Islamic state enriched its coffers of wisdom through recognizing the value of knowledge regardless of nation or creed. Focusing on music, epics, and fables, it looks at practices of internalization at the heart of early Islam that modernity has all too often forgotten.
10 October 2018 Wednesday
Talk
A Feeling of Loss: Mutterzunge [event details]
Venue: Primary, Reading Room, 33 Seely Road,
Nottingham NG7 3FZ
Time: 18:00-20:00
Misal Adnan Yıldız will present a lecture, which is based on his curatorial project entitled Mutterzunge. The project is composed of seven chapters and it engages in conversations with the book of the same name by Berlin-based author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Yıldız’s research draws upon mostly primary sources including studio visits and interviews with the author and participating artists, research and production notes, as well as everyday life anecdotes focusing on politics of silence, feeling of loss and biographies of transition. Presenting several new productions from Mutterzunge’s Berlin programme, the lecture will look at recent works of Şener Özmen, Mehtap Baydu, Mohammad Salemy among others with critical questions about the close connections between the global memory, transnational dynamics and how to narrate social changes within personal traumas.
17 October 2018 Wednesday
Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)
Gürcan
Keltek’s Colony (2015)
Venue: BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent
University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG
Time: 18:00-20:00
The sun rises at the
Beşparmak Mountains. The autonomous Missing Persons Committee is conducting
excavations at these mountains along with scientists and undercover witnesses.
Skeletons will be exhumed and delivered to the families. The ghosts of unopened
mass graves wander in evacuated villages, valleys. 'Colony' is a film about
psychogeography, the memory of landscape, trauma and remembrance.
22 October 2018
Monday
Talk/Workshop
Dr Aylin Kuryel
(University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
UPLEFTER: Workshop on
Political Depression
Venue: BON146, Bonington, Nottingham Trent
University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG
Time: 18:00-20:00
Over the years, we have
witnessed, across cities and groups, a
decrease in the motivation to act together and the belief in the possibility of influencing change,
especially after right-wing
victories and internal conflicts within the left. Political depression might induce feeling of anxiety and
hopelessness and can lead to
nostalgia, sarcasm and eventually cynicism. It is a less personal but more collective experience, which is not
adequately and collectively
addressed. The aim of this workshop is helping contextualize political depression, rather than
isolating it as a personal and
negative feeling that should be gotten rid of. It will provide a platform on which we will contemplate on the
diverse but related reasons behind
political depression and attempt to find various ways to deal with it and act upon it. With the participation of people from diverse backgrounds, following a set of
questions prepared in advance, it
will allow a debate on political depression as an affective condition that influences the ways in
which we relate to ourselves and
others.
24 October 2018
Wednesday
Exhibition
Walkthrough with Mine Kaplangı & Cüneyt Çakırlar
Meeting Point:
Bonington Gallery (entrance), NTU, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG
Time: 13:00-15:00
24 October 2018
Wednesday
Film Screening (introduced by Cüneyt Çakırlar, NTU)
Shevaun Mizrahi’s Distant Constellation (2017) [event
details and booking]
Venue:
BON143, Bonington, Nottingham Trent University, Dryden Street, NG1 4GG
Time: 18:00-20:00
This haunted reverie drops us inside an Istanbul retirement
home, where the battle-scarred residents bask in the camera’s attention. A
creaky- voiced woman confides her personal account of the Armenian genocide. A
sweetly deluded pianist performs a composition before confessing his love. A
blind photographer fiddles with his flash as he points his own camera back at
us. Shevaun Mizrahi’s playful, immaculately controlled film finds hypnotizing
rhythms in the residents’ limbo-like state. Meanwhile, outside, ominous
construction equipment transforms the land.
The public programme
events for the House of Wisdom Nottingham are sponsored by School of Arts and
Humanities, Nottingham Trent University. Sponsored by Arts Council England, the
exhibition and its programme are also supported by Bonington Gallery, Primary,
Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, and Bromley House
Library.
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