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.

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

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.