Meteors_Keltek

Testimony as Environment:

Violence, Aesthetics, Agency

Symposium, 18-20 January 2019, London School of Economics (LSE)

Curated and convened by Eray Çaylı (European Institute, LSE)

Attendance free; booking essential via this link (please make sure to book separately for each day).

Please click here for the full programme.

The environment—with all its more-than-human entities, scales and forces—has recently come to feature prominently in processes of testifying to political violence. How might this inform the ways in which to identify and act upon rights violations? What role might aesthetics play in these processes beyond serving to enhance testimony's ability to establish particular subject positions involved in violence (e.g., victim and perpetrator) by rendering it materially or 'sensibly' verifiable? How might it help account for violence's impact on agency, which is much more than just the differential between event-specific subject positions as it is the stuff of the continually open-ended quest that is subjectivity? This symposium explores these questions through an evening screening of moving image works focusing on Turkey and two days of talks by critical geographers, art theorists, anthropologists and architects.

18.01 (6-8.30pm) @ Hong Kong Theatre (Clement House, 97-99 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG):

SCREENING of moving image works Road to Arguvan (Vahap Avşar, 2013), Recounting Nightmares to Running Water (İz Öztat, 2015), “Chapter V” from Meteors (Gürcan Keltek, 2017), September-October 2015, Cizre (belit sağ, 2015), and A Wall of Water (Serkan Taycan, 2018), followed by panel discussion and Q&A with the artists (discussant: Alisa Lebow, University of Sussex; chaired by Eray Çaylı).

19.01 (10.30am-6.30pm) + 20.01 (10am-4pm) @ OLD.4.10 (Old Building, Houghton St, WC2A 2AE):

TALKS/RESPONSES by Nishat Awan (Goldsmiths, University of London), Andrew Barry (University College London), Merve Bedir (Hong Kong University), Zerrin Özlem Biner (University of Kent), Lindsay Bremner (University of Westminster), Nerea Calvillo (University of Warwick), Ryan Centner (LSE), Eray Çaylı (LSE), Ayça Çubukçu (LSE), Mangalika de Silva (New York University), TJ Demos (University of California Santa Cruz), Başak Ertür (Birkbeck College), Allen Feldman (New York University Steinhardt), Tariq Jazeel (University College London), Helene Kazan (The New School’s Vera List Center for Art & Politics), Hannah Meszaros Martin (Goldsmiths, University of London), Esra Özyürek (LSE), Peg Rawes (University College London), Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths, University of London), and Austin Zeiderman (LSE).

For any queries about this event, please email Florence Samuels: f.samuels@lse.ac.uk

Header image: Still from Meteors (2017) courtesy of the filmmaker Gürcan Keltek.

Funded by the BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme.