Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Drawing on the works of artists Maria Eichhorn (Berlin) and Dilek Winchester (Istanbul), this article focuses on artistic responses to the twin processes of violence and dispossession in Germany and the late Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey, respectively. Their artistic practices respond to what is irrecoverable in loss, in contrast to dominant discussions on material restitution as a process that always projects a reversibility of past injuries and that remains limited to the logic of possession. The article argues that these practices pose an aesthetic challenge to the conceptual frameworks within which both dispossession and restitution are usually understood. They produce forms of aesthetic redistribution that open paths to alternate ways of envisioning historical justice in transformative rather than recuperative terms.

AbstractWhile the increasing interest in contemporary art from Turkey has centered on explicitly political works, discussions on the limitations of the freedom of expression have likewise come under the spotlight, not least with regard to Turkey's EU candidacy. In contrast to the attempts of complete suppression marking the 1980 coup d'état and its aftermath, current censorship mechanisms aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions (and their circulation) that can be construed as threatening the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state, and to turn their producers into targets. This article investigates selected images produced in the contemporary art world between 2005 and 2008, which were taken to transcend the limits of what constitutes tolerable depictions of Turkey's socio-political realities. It examines current modalities of censorship in the visual arts and the different actors involved in silencing efforts. The cases show that within these fields of delimitation there are considerable contingencies: The domain of the unspeakable remains unclearly mapped. I argue that it is because, not despite, this arbitrariness that delegitimizing interventions are successful, in that they (a) create incentives for self-censorship, and (b) produce defenses of artistic freedom that, by highlighting the autonomy of art, to some extent consolidate a conceptual separation of art from politics.

Orientalism – and its images – are far from dead. Despite Edward Said's forceful critique of Orientalism as a regime of representation that dominates and structures an ambiguous 'East', its discourse persists. Representations, in the form of paintings, drawings, photography, films, and maps, have been powerful means by which the 'Middle East' has been pictured in the last two centuries, and, as such, have animated imperialist projects, fueled Orientalist and self-Orientalist fantasies, and upheld reductive and essentialized understandings of the region and its people. Since September 2001, Orientalist imagery has undergone a political and social intensification, which is now compounded by the 'refugee crisis.' This intensification has been made apparent in discourses that easily interchange the 'immigrant' for the 'refugee' and 'Muslim' in Europe and the US, but also in tropes of Arab, Muslim or Oriental otherness used by political actors in the region itself. This symposium examines the continued seductiveness that Orientalism seems to hold over the production of images of the contemporary 'Middle East', both inside and outside of the region. How are (self) Orientalized images and imaginaries translated into perceptions of authenticity and identity? How do such images figure into the policies and politics in the ongoing 'global war on terror'? How do modes of contemporary image-making engage with, resist, or respond to tropes of Orientalism in the current political moment? The symposium features a talk and parallel exhibit by Tintinologist Nadim Damluji on early-to-mid 20th century Arab comic strips, which examine the genealogy of Orientalist image-making from the cartoon to cartography in the present moment. Programme Thursday, 6 July 2017 11:00 Welcome and Introduction 11:30 – 13:30 Panel I: Mapping and Geographies of Heritage Moderator: Saima Akhtar, Yale University Geographies of Orientalism Mariam Banahi (Anthropologist, Johns Hopkins University) Syrian Heritage Archive Project (SHAP): Archives as a Basis ...