Documentary in artistic practice: accented essays from Turkey

Online talk via Teams, 1 December Wednesday, 14:00-15:00 (link)

Documentary and art are seemingly two words in conflict with one another: the former implies a kind of documentation that encloses an objective record of the real world while the latter is defined and evaluated by subjectivity and creativity. Nonetheless – as Grierson’s famous definition of documentary also suggests – subjectivity and creativity are two concepts that inevitably become significant during the documentary filmmaking process as they can produce and/or prevent conventions, possibilities and limitations in a film’s narrative. Moreover, the historical collaboration between documentary filmmakers and visual artists is an indication of the range of forms documentary can take.

As part of the Centre's research seminar series, Elif Akçalı's paper will look at the use of documentary filmmaking in artistic practices in Turkey, especially focusing on those contemporary works that adopt a first-person, subjective viewpoint, made by artists in transition. Akçalı's case studies are Didem Pekün’s Of Dice and Men (2016), Şener Özmen’s How to tell of peace to a living dove? (2015) and Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-white Tulips (2013), which she categorizes as accented essays. Akçalı will analyze the aesthetics of these three works especially in terms of how the subjective viewpoint in their narratives shape our understanding of the social and cultural context, which was largely shaped by the political events during the period in which they were made. The accented first-person address in these works, along with other stylistic choices prone to essayistic documentary filmmaking that they pursue, allow them to enjoy a multiplicity of meanings, raising personal questions that become relevant for collective issues of identity, belonging, culture, history and memory.

Dr. Elif Akçalı completed her PhD in Media Arts in 2014 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) since 2015. She teaches the practice of film editing as well as a variety of theoretical courses in screen studies within the undergraduate and graduate programmes at Khas. Her works have appeared in a variety of journals including Critical Arts, Journal of Film and Video and [in]Transition. Her research interests include film style and aesthetics, documentary and essay film, gender and audiovisual production, and videographic film studies. Currently she is leading a two-year research project funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) titled “Women on Screen and Behind the Camera: A Contemporary Outlook of Representation and Labor of Women in Film and TV Industries in Turkey (2017-2021).”

Soufiane Ababri's solo show at The PILL, Istanbul

Following his solo show, Here is a Strange and Bitter Crop, which was on display at the Space in London last year, the French-Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri has recently launched an exhibition of his recent work at the gallery The PILL (Istanbul & Paris) titled Memories of a Solitary Cruise (10 January - 23 February 2019). Through his use of the spectacular scene of traditional Turkish wrestling, Ababri's project intervenes into the racialised and sexualised modes of Orientalism. Exploring male friendship and homoeroticism in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures through the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Ababri's art of appropriation creates a productive friction by depicting Arab or "Oriental" with the aesthetic tools of Western canons/masters of homoerotic arts.

The gallery commissioned Cüneyt Çakırlar to author a piece that introduces Ababri's art practice to the Istanbul audience. The English version of Çakırlar's piece can be accessed from this link. The Turkish translation has recently been published in Manifold.

Exhibition: House of Wisdom Nottingham (27 September - 28 October 2018)

ARTISTS: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Burak Arıkan, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Yael Bartana, Mehtap Baydu, Kürşat Bayhan, Ruth Beale, 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

Curated by Collective Çukurcuma (Naz Cuguoğlu and Mine Kaplangı)

Public Programme Curator: Cüneyt Çakırlar

PREVIEW: Thursday 27 September, 5 pm – 7 pm
RSVP boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk

DATES: Friday 28 September – Saturday 27 October
TIMES: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 5 pm, Saturday, 11 am – 3 pm

VENUES: Bonington Gallery Vitrines and Atrium at Nottingham Trent University's School of Art & Design, Bromley House Library, Five Leaves Bookshop and Primary.

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.” 
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book, 1925

Throughout history, libraries have been perceived as places where information on life and space are organised, read, and interpreted. Their political significance, however, has at times been underestimated. As in the example of the original House of Wisdom*, libraries are also known as centers of research, learning, and sharing. This concentration and exchange of knowledge makes them important symbols of political power and the formation of cultural identity. Based on the power of libraries, and Foucault’s notion of the archive as ‘the general system of the formation and transformation of statements’, the curators followed their archival urge and decided to build their own archive-library. To shed light on the increasing levels of censorship on information, knowledge and the current sociopolitical situation in and around Turkey, they invited artists and researchers to take part in the project. The House of Wisdom, ever-evolving library-exhibition aims to rethink the political nature of books, whose mere existence is under threat, and ultimately asks the question: ‘What could be the outcome of collectively rethinking the notion of the archive and knowledge production through art, particularly when issues such as censorship and suppression of information are involved?’


House of Wisdom is an open space, a gathering place. Visitors are invited to enter and discover the library-exhibition to read, discuss, collaborate, scheme, and exchange knowledge and ideas. And with its fourth location, the exhibition is expanding throughout the city of Nottingham. Inviting visitors to walk and discover the city with the exhibition map, House of Wisdom will utilise the Vitrines of Bonington Gallery and the Atrium of the Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art and Design. Artworks and books will also be placed in other venues like local bookshops (The Five Leaves Bookshop) an old primary school that has been transformed into an art space (Primary) and a historical library (Bromley House Library). By expanding the exhibition space from one room to various spaces around the city, House of Wisdom is hoping the build an invisible relation between being a visitor and being a wanderer. And this year the exhibition’s public program is curated by Dr. Cüneyt Çakırlar from Nottingham Trent University, who organised a series of events including performances, workshops, reading groups, talks and screenings.

More details about the exhibition's public programme will be announced shortly.

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*House of Wisdom (Bayt-al Hikma) was a library founded in the beginning of the 8th century in Baghdad, where thousands of books in various languages from different regions, on philosophy, art, science, and history were housed. Researchers from different regions came together to make research, and work on techniques of translation, writing, and discussion.

**House of Wisdom is a mobile and ever-evolving library/exhibition curated by Collective Çukurcuma. It was previously shown at Dzialdov (Berlin, 2017), IKSV Building (Public program of the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2017) and Framer Framed (Amsterdam, 2017).

House of Wisdom Nottingham is produced and organised by Queer Art Projects and made possible by Arts Council National Lottery Project Grants with the support of Nottingham Trent University, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, Bromley House Library, Primary and Five Leaves Bookshop.
http://www.boningtongallery.co.uk/exhibitions/bonington-vitrines-8-house-of-wisdom

Image credit: ALI TAPTIK, "Atlas" from the "Meridians" series, 2011 [on display in House of Wisdom]
Image credit: MONA KRIEGLER, Pain and Memory, digital still, 2012 – 13 [on display in HoW]

On the Gimp

Gary Needham has recently published an article on the gimp as an image of SM in popular culture very much in the spirit of Gayle Rubin’s work in seeking to understand why sex is so terrifying for mainstream culture. The article appears in Fashion Theory Vol.18 No.2. 

The article investigates the cultural power associated with the gimp and the gimp mask. The gimp is a clothed or costumed SM body, frequently a submissive that often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture. Since the gimp’s first public outing and naming in the Quentin Tarantino film Pulp Fiction it has become the byword for the head-to-toe leather SM look that has been appropriated by a number of designers as way of exploring and exploiting the relationship between fashion, fetishism, and transgression. As a counterpoint to the popular image of SM in fashion and popular film, the article also explores how the artists Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe have represented the gimp, not as an index of horror or transgressive style rather as an affirmative image of their own SM communities that, while still intended to shock and confront, is a defiant attempt to rescue or reclaim the gimp from its negative associations.

Here’s an extract from the article on Catherine Opie’s iconic work Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994):

[…] In contradistinction to Pulp Fiction and the gimp monsters of popular culture and the horror film, in the same year as Pulp Fiction photographer Catherine Opie produced a self-portrait of herself in a gimp mask called Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994). In the self-portrait Opie is sitting in front of chintzy brocade wallpaper, lettering freshly cut in to her bleeding skin which reads ‘pervert’, and she is pierced along each arm with forty-six evenly spaced temporary needles; at the time Opie belonged to the San Francisco SM community. Why would Opie make an image that is so difficult to look at? Why would anyone do that to their body? Why would a self-portrait deny access to the artist’s face? These are important questions the work provokes. In Self-Portrait/Pervert Opie recalls that she ‘wanted to push the whole realm of beauty and elegance, but also to make people scared out of their wits’ (Ferguson 2008: 106). Unlike the scare tactics of Pulp Fiction Opie’s intentions are altogether different. Self-Portrait/Pervert also challenges the conventions of portraiture by having Opie’s head covered by a gimp mask so that the viewer has no access to her face - she denies them a way to access her identity and instead evokes a confrontation with SM and pain and the questions posed above. Indirectly Self-Portrait/Pervert responds to the politics of Pulp Fiction that invokes a popular culture version of SM by making the gimp on/scene, while concurrently the real queers and SM subculture remain obscene, off stage, silenced, censored. Opie in Self-Portrait/Pervert and related works from around this period challenged the ongoing demonization of SM and the censoring of transgressive queer art which includes hostility from ‘normalized’ gays and lesbians. Self-Portrait/Pervert symbolizes the silences and the obliteration of identity that queers experience by heteronormative culture and other gays and lesbians; it is a work born out of the AIDS epidemic, which turns the pain associated with SM into a political statement to the point where the images test the limits of legibility, both in the extremity of the image of cutting and piercing and the gimp mask’s erasure of the face as a point of identification. Opie explains the impetus behind the self-portrait:

‘Perverts’ [sic] is a very angry piece. I was pissed off. I really wanted to make that piece because of what was happening culturally in the US: the [NEA] censorship, the fuss around the Mapplethorpe show and what was happening in mainstream gay culture. All of a sudden mainstream gays and lesbians were calling themselves ‘normal’ and yet a lot of communities were being pushed further and further out in a certain way.’ (Blessing 2008: 16)

Opie also goes on to describe Self-Portrait/Pervert as ‘a decorative image of pride; for people outside that subculture, it is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down’ (2008: 16) and she means those normalized gays and lesbians as much as the assumed audiences for Pulp Fiction. Despite an obvious delineation of these two texts, Pulp Fiction and Self-Portrait/Pervert, nonetheless get yoked together in reference to Mapplethorpe’s SM pictures as Stockton remarks in her analysis of Pulp Fiction’s black and queer debasement and shaming that ‘Tarantino's film puts into motion images reminiscent of Mapplethorpe's photography' (2006: 104).  Mapplethorpe and the discourses around his photographs of gay leathermen and SM is a thread that links many of the ideas raised in this article about representation, the reification and reception of SM in culture as something risky and to be feared, horror being continually evoked but also as a source of pride and defiance. […]

Jake Yuzna's Open at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart

The exhibition at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart, Skeptical Thoughts on Love, departs from artistic perspectives that conjecture multiple forms of attachment, intimacy, and obsession. Methodologically speaking, it is inspired from the physical reality, potential impact and transformative power of love. The exhibition speculates on the potentiality of love as if it is the only possible form of resistance for cognitive/collective revolution in our contemporary solitude, demands silence as a conceptual tool to deal with human relationships and art works, and proposes to operate as a testing ground for introspection, self-analysis and self-reflection.




Participating artists:

Natalie Czech, Keren Cytter, Mariechen Danz, Leyla Gediz, Judith Hopf, Matthias Megyeri, Henrik Olesen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Johannes Paul Raether, Sophie Reinhold, Emily Roysdon, Eva Schmeckenbecher, Jake Yuzna and Adbusters

The show ends with the screening and discussion of Jake Yuzna's film Open (2010). Open generates a strong vision, and contemporary panorama of how gender, sexuality and identity transform through diverse forms of love, attachment and intimacy. It is the first American film to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Teddy Award (Premier: Berlin Film Festival in 2010). The film also won Best Narrative Film at the TLV Festival in Tel Aviv Israel, Best Performance at Newfest, as well as having the Jake Yuzna named a Four in Focus filmmaker at Outfest. Much of the film was inspired by the artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge, who served as creative consultant on the film and an interview with her made by Yuzna has been shown as part of the installation at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. 




Cuneyt Cakirlar gives an introductory talk on the film and moderates the post-screening discussion with the curator of the show Adnan Yıldız on 30 March 2014. 

Shifting Dialogues II: Sexual Artifice in Asian Art and Performance

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.

Taner Ceylan's Lost Paintings

Well-known for his provocative photo-realist paintings, the Istanbul-based artist Taner Ceylan (b. 1967) began his Lost Paintings Series as a contemporary exploration of the Orientalist gaze. Upsetting both Western and national master narratives, the Lost Paintings Series presents “Oriental” figures in a fascinating navigation of history, power and narrative. Esma Sultan (2012), Ceylan’s depiction of an eighteenth-century Ottoman princess renowned for her cruel disposition, draws on the empowering mythology of passionate, ruthless and assertive womanhood that characterizes accounts of her life. Deploying a male body under jewelled tulle, 1553 (2013) creates a queer image of Roxolana who, initiating the era of what is known as the Sultanate of Women, made a huge impact on the evolution of Ottoman politics and, as the chief minister to the Sultan, played a crucial role in the Empire’s external and internal affairs. Recovering and drawing together forgotten legacies and silenced voices in a brilliantly imagined new setting, ten paintings in Ceylan’s series invite the viewer to look behind the veil of Orientalism and the politics of representation. Rather than offering a corrective, the artist amalgamates irony, playfulness and realism to recast Orientalism as heterogeneous and susceptible to negotiation, contestation and even subversion.

Collaborating with Serkan Delice (UAL) and Wendy Meryem Kural Shaw (Universitaet Bern), Cüneyt Çakırlar co-authored the artist’s monograph The Lost Paintings, which is to be published in September 2013 on the occasion of Ceylan’s solo exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.

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.

Visuality and Politics: Queer Media in China

On Monday 26 March 2012, we will be hosting a research workshop on Visuality and Politics: Queer Media in China. Organizied by Dr Hongwei Bao, the workshop will explore the following issues:
 
For Jacques Rancière (2004), the visual is intrinsically political; art and politics have in common the potential to delimit the visible and the invisible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, as well as the possible and the impossible. This is certainly true of queer art, film and activism in contemporary China. Since China began its neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s, one of the most interesting phenomena that indicates drastic social changes has been the (re-)emergence of gay identity. Same-sex desire, which used to be rendered invisible and unthinkable during China’s socialist era, began to surface in the postsocialist public discourse. With the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1997 and depathologisation of homosexuality in 2001, an increasing number of lesbians and gays have ‘come out’ to the public and have begun to demand gender and sexual equality. Many of them have chosen to use various forms of media, including painting, installation, digital video film and the Internet, to engage in political activism.

The use of media in China’s queer community poses a number of interrelated questions to scholars in media studies and queer studies: what role do the media play in queer activism in the transnational context? How do gays and lesbians ‘queer’ the use of media, if at all? How does the ‘queer media’, an exploratory term that requires definition and discussion, as a form of alternative media or ‘citizen media’, may contribute to political and social change? How do ‘queer media’ render contested socialist histories, the neoliberal present and imagined futures both visible and invisible, both thinkable and unthinkable, and both possible and impossible? How does the transnationalisation of queer theory and politics may be fraught with tensions, slippages, as well as complicated postcolonial and anti-neoliberal struggles? What can queer media practices in China inform the Western academia of issues and debates concerning alternative media, queer theory, aesthetics and politics, theory and praxis, decolonising academic knowledge production and revitalising political activism?

This workshop will bring queer scholars, filmmakers, magazine editors and artists from China and the UK into critical dialogue with each other. It will also showcase a selection of queer documentary films and queer art works made by China’s leading queer filmmakers and artists including Cui Zi’en, Wei Jiangang, Shitou and Mingming.

The event takes play  in Newton Lecture Theatre 4 at the city site of Nottingham Trent University. Participation in this workshop is free. For enquires and to book your place please contact Dr Hongwei Bao (email: hongwei.bao@ntu.ac.uk)