House of Wisdom: Cross-Cultural Mobility and Post-Gallery Curatorial Practice

House of Wisdom: Cross-cultural Mobility and Post-gallery Curatorial Practice
Panel Discussion, Friday 29 June, 6pm-8pm, Primary Nottingham (link for details)

Reflections on archive, censorship, cultural dissidence and geopolitics in contemporary arts, followed by a Q&A. [Video Documentation]

House of Wisdom is an on-going research and a mobile, ever-evolving library/exhibition curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu & Mine Kaplangı) in 2017. Inspired by the library of the same name founded in Baghdad at the beginning of the 8th century, the House of Wisdom exhibition is investigating the political relevance of books and libraries. By creating an open space and a gathering place in different cities around the world, House of Wisdom has invited its visitors to enter the library-exhibition to read, discuss, collaborate, scheme, and exchange knowledge and ideas. The library/exhibition was first held in Dzialdov, Berlin, in May 2017, then travelled to Istanbul as part of the 15th Istanbul Biennial’s public programme and to Framer Framed, Amsterdam, in November 2017. The show will travel to Nottingham this Autumn, hosted by Bonington Gallery.

Event Organiser, Chair and Respondent: Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar (Nottingham Trent University)

Speakers“Curating House of Wisdom”, Mine Kaplangı (Collective Çukurcuma, Istanbul)
“The Unknown Story of an Infamous Library”, Işıl Eğrikavuk (Berlin)
“Just in Bookcase”, Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergül (Istanbul Queer Art Collective, London)

In her talk on “Curating House of Wisdom”, Mine Kaplangı will speak about the exhibition’s next route to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, and how the current research and production process is shaping in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary and UNESCO City of Literature.

In her talk “The Unknown Story of an Infamous Library”, the artist Işıl Eğrikavuk will speak about her contribution to House of Wisdom, namely Infamous Library, which is a project she realised in several stages between the years 2006 and 2014. Unfolding in performative, narrative and mock-documentary platforms, Eğrikavuk’s work deals with fiction, history, politics and humour. Eğrikavuk is the winner of Turkey’s first contemporary art prize, Full Art Prize in 2012. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, residencies, and her work has been published in both local and international journals. She currently lives in Berlin and is a faculty member at Universität der Künste (UdK), Department of Media.

The founding members of Istanbul Queer Art Collective Tuna Erdem & Seda Ergül will talk about their work “Just in Bookcase”, which was created especially for the House of Wisdom exhibition. “Just in Bookcase” is about the im/mobility of books/libraries, immigrants/refugees, the dead weight of books and the fleeting stories of living libraries, accumulation/collection, dismantling/dispersion and travelling/fleeing with emotional/excess baggage. In 2017, Erdem and Ergül moved to London and founded Queer Art Projects Ltd. to produce art events including performances, conferences, exhibitions, talks and parties. They currently host Turkish Delight, a monthly queer performance night at The Glory, London.

House of Wisdom’s Contributing Artists: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Burak Arıkan, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Yael Bartana, Mehtap Baydu, Kürşat Bayhan, Ekin Bernay, Burçak Bingöl, Nicky Broekhuysen, Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, Cansu Çakar, Ramesch Daha, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Didem Erk, Foundland Collective, Deniz Gül, Beril Gür, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, İstanbul Queer Art Collective (Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergül), Ali Kazma, Yazan Khalili, Göksu Kunak, Mona Kriegler, Fehras Publishing Practices, Elham Rokni, Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Ashkan Sepahvand, Sümer Sayın, Erinç Seymen, Bahia Shehab, Walid Siti, Ali Taptık, Erdem Taşdelen, Özge Topçu, Viron Erol Vert, Ali Yass, Eşref Yıldırım, Ala Younis

Documenting Art and Performance: Embodied Knowledge, Virtuality & the Archive

The Asian Art and Performance Consortium (AAPC) of the Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA) and the Finnish Theatre Academy (TeaK) of the University of the Arts Helsinki jointly hosted a symposium focused on documenting and archiving Asian and trans-cultural performance and fine arts. This is the third and final symposium organized under the Shifting Dialogues - Asian Performance and Fine Arts research project, funded by the Academy of Finland in 2011-2014.

Issues raised at the symposium included embodied, iconographic and electronic transfer of performance traditions in Asia related to live performance and traditional pedagogies. These include the use of moving image, photography, web-based presence and new media, historical and theoretical writings, the construction of archives, museums and libraries.

Cuneyt Cakirlar, in his paper “Mediation of Document: Ethnographic Turns and Art as Methodological Object in Critical Humanities”, examined relations of ethnography, contemporary art practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to a selection of artists including Kutlug Ataman, Ming Wong, Akram Zaatari, Slavs & Tatars. Concentrating on these artists’ engagement with ethnography, Cuneyt’s paper analyzed a selection of videos and gave an account of different scalar aspects of their artworks as well as the ways in which conceptual art-objects bear the potential of forming transient archives in academia to exemplify critical methodologies of ‘dealing with data’. Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this paper aimed to demonstrate the ways in which these artworks produce self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitate a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world’s documentary regionalisms and internationalisms.

Braber on the concept of identity in the East Midlands

Braber, Natalie (2014). "The concept of identity in the East Midlands of England", English Today 30(2), 3-10.

When considering language variation in the UK, linguists have frequently considered the North/South divide and the linguistic markers separating the two regions, for example by investigating the vowel speakers use in words like ‘grass’ and whether the words ‘put’ and ‘putt’ sound the same or not. But it has been noted that this is not a straightforward division and that this situation is more complex. There are clear stereotypes for the North and South – but how do areas like the East Midlands fit into the picture? The boundaries between North and South are defined in different ways and in linguistic studies the East Midlands have been described as belonging to the North and to the South. Linguistically, the question has been raised whether there is a clear North/South boundary or whether there is a transition zone in the Midlands. Natalie Braber's paper revisits this question from the point of view of young people living in the East Midlands, to examine their sense of identity and whether this cultural divide is salient to them.

The East Midlands is a problematic area in its definition geographically as there is no overall agreement in which regions belong to the East Midlands, and people may have difficulty in relating this to their own sense of identity. It seems that for many the North/South divide is a natural one but what do non-linguists, and specifically young people, think? Although the East Midlands may be the geographical centre of England, it is not in any sense the perceived centre of England. It is an area which can be hard to locate perceptually and has been referred as ‘neither here nor there’ and as a ‘no-man’s land’. It seems that a definition of where the East Midlands is and what to call it is problematic, and this paper will deal with these issues to attempt to resolve them.

For the entire article, click here. 

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