His paper focused on the
contemporary art scene in Turkey which has gained a
considerable international visibility in the last decade. The currently
expanding traffic of art galleries, institutional investors and art collectors
as well as the international networks in the country have made the scene as one
of the most crucial territories of cultural capital, in which the artists and
their collaborators working in neighboring fields of expertise (such as
academics and activists) channel their critical voices through art. The
neoliberal regimes and the political economy within this international travel
of art-as-capital deserve critical focus. His research, however, focuses on
in-depth analyses of art-works by the key queer figures from the contemporary
art scene of Turkey. Being a part of a much more extended project, his talk addressed a critical space where the glocalization and/or
internationalization of contemporary arts and that of queer (and/or LGBTT)
practices intersect and nurture each other.
Cuneyt's use of “queer figures” refers not
necessarily to certain active members of LGBT communities in Turkey but
particularly to artists whose art engages with issues of gender and sexuality
in creative and dissident ways. The current academic, artistic and cultural
visibility of queer practices in Turkey opens up curious critical possibilities
to articulate the problematic of cross-cultural translations as well as global
form(ul)ations of sexual dissidence within the post-9/11, second-generation
queer theory. The main aim of this project is to examine the art-practices of
Kutluğ Ataman, Taner Ceylan, Nilbar Güreş, Murat Morova and Erinç Seymen by
focusing on their transregional strategies of inhabiting the “queerly
critical”. While their art-works may be said to engage with the hegemonic
intersections between localism, nationalism, heteronormativity and masculinity
in contemporary Turkey, they instrumentalize the transregional formations of
criticism, theory and contemporaneity in dissident arts. Thus, though sceptical
of an unproblematically performed de-contextualization of queer theories from
its western referent, his discussion investigated the possible strategies
of translating and transposing queer aesthetics into a practice that not merely
insist on a local political context but also act as a methodological object in
its potential to reciprocate the geopolitics of critical theory and that of the
global contemporary art market.
His ongoing study proposes a critical agenda
of reading these practices as theoretical and methodological objects of theory,
aesthetics, visual culture and media that transposes a certain queer alterity
to Turkish cultural memory – and vice versa – through a constant
disidentificatory distance working on and against the local/global binary.
While these artists “pursue the decisive strategy of scuffling with all
dimensions of its geography-culture” (Kosova, 2009), their artistic agenda also
demonstrates a curious self-awareness of cultural globalization within
contemporary arts. Their art practice entails layers of critical appropriation
which do neither escape nor entirely forego the globalizing imperatives of
theory, politics and art-practice. The mode of critique within, and the
queerness of, their methodologies, which is nurtured by the so-called global
trends in contemporary art (such as actionism, performance, exposure,
appropriation, parody/pastiche, intermediality, etc.) can be neither reduced to
an Occidentalist internalization nor overinterpreted as self-localization that
enacts an innate geographic alterity.
“Queer
Art from Turkey: Aesthetics of the Glocal, Erotics of Translation” Invited
Lecture, Authority and Subversion:
Turkish Society in the Neoliberal Age, organized by Kerem Öktem, Lauren
Mignon and Celia Kerslake, University of Oxford, 9 May 2012.
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