Special Issue: Revisiting Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Arts (Critical Arts)

The special issue "Revisiting Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Arts", edited by Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert, has been published in the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Cuneyt contributed to the special issue with an article focusing on documentary video in arts. 

         

Cakirlar, C. "Aesthetics of Self-Scaling: Parallaxed Transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman’s Art-Practice", Critical Arts 27(6), 2013, 684-706. 

This article examines relations of ethnography, contemporary art-practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to Kutluğ Ataman’s art-works. Having been shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate and awarded the prestigious international Carnegie Prize in 2004 with his forty-screen video installation Küba (2004), Ataman became an extremely well-known, globally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Self-conscious of their global travel and critically attentive to the contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman’s video-works perform a conscientious failure of representing cultural alterity as indigeneity. Concentrating on the artist’s engagement with ethnography, this article contains three main parts. Analyses of the selection of videos in each part will give an account of different scalar aspects of Ataman’s artworks. It will first revisit a previous study (Çakirlar 2011) on the artist’s earlier work of video-portraits including Never My Soul! (2002) and Women Who Wear Wigs (1999). A detailed discussion of Küba follows, which may be taken as the ‘hinge-work’ in Ataman’s oeuvre that marks a scalar transition in his critical focus – from body and identity to community and geopolitics. The discussion will then move to a brief analysis of the series Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, including the screen-based sculptures Dome (2009), Column (2009), Frame (2009), English as a Second Language (2009), and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2009). Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this article aims to demonstrate the ways in which Ataman’s art-practice produces self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitates a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s regionalisms and internationalisms. 

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2013.867591

Global Queer Cinema

Global Queer Cinema is an AHRC funded research network in the Translating Cultures scheme, and is located in the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. The organisers are Rosalind Galt (Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (Warwick).

The first symposium Queer Cinema and Aesthetics of the Global that Galt and Schoonover organised took place in 12-13 May 2012. This event brought together international scholars to consider the aesthetics and politics of queer cinema in a global context. Speakers included David Eng (University of Pennsylvania), Patricia White (Swarthmore College), Gayatri Gopinath (New York University), Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter), Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex), Shamira Meghani (University of Leeds) and Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU). This two-day symposium’s format was participatory and aimed to generate debate and analysis. Speakers screened short clips from queer film or other moving image media and present informal analyses. Moreover, the participants circulated samples from their current research on the subject before the event and a series of intensive workshops and roundtable discussions took place. Questions Galt and Schoonover aimed to address included:

          (i) What is rendered visible by placing these three terms together: ‘global’, ‘queer’ and ‘cinema? What tensions are revealed, what rhetorics engaged?

          (ii) How do presiding visions of the global depend upon the inclusion or exclusion of queer lives?

          (iii) How do the politics of neoliberalism and human rights discourse intersect with queer lives? How does contemporary queer film and media practice engage and refuse these tensions? How can we think about queer visual aesthetics, and how do questions of form, style and genre coalesce in contemporary queer politics?

         (iv) What kinds of global communities are produced (or precluded) by the histories of the queer film festival, or of other modes of queer media consumption?

         (v) How can we theorise the role of popular cinema, art film, the avant-garde, community and activist media in these political landscapes? Are these distinctions necessary critical tools?

The second and final workshop, which took place on 5-7 April 2013, reiterated the same format. The aim of the network was again to bring together scholars working on international topics in queer film and visual cultures, and to engage both senior and emerging scholars. The event comprised Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU), Rohit Dasgupta (University of the Arts), Samar Habib (SOAS), Hoang Nguyen (Bryn Mawr), John David Rhodes (Sussex), B. Ruby Rich (UC Santa Cruz), Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth), and Juan Suarez (Murcia).

For further details of the project, please visit http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/

For a sample of Cüneyt Çakirlar's contribution in these two events he was invited to, please visit page of the journal Screen (52:3).

Queer Art from Turkey

Earlier this year, Cuneyt Cakirlar presented his research on queer art from Turkey at an event on Turkish Society in the Neoliberal Age at the University of Oxford.

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.