Cosmopolis Unbent.
Artists’ Collectives & Diasporic Creativity

HOUSE OF TASWIR

Performance Lecture @ AICA Turkey

January 16, 2019

Istanbul

Collective, Collaborative and Creative Consciousness*

AICA Turkey is organizing a one day conference, entitled  “Collective, Collaborative and Creative Consciousness* with Contemporary Art Professionals From Neighbor Countries” that will take place at Sofa Hotel on16 January 2019 in Istanbul.

Participants: Shulamit Bruckstein (Germany), Irina Chmyreva (Russia), Răzvan Ion (Romania), Beral Madra (Turkey), Fırat Arapoğlu (Turkey), Rachel Sukman (Israel), Syrago Tsiara (Greece).

The aim and function of this conference in Istanbul, organized by AICA Turkey is examining the state of networking, collaboration and exchange between the artists, art experts and art and culture institutions of neighbor countries and proposing new methods and actions to improve relationships and ensure the sustainability.

We are aware that current local wars and economic shortfalls in the region remain obstacles to the continuation of cultural and artistic exchange. Under the circumstances artists and experts in the region are dependent on the art market in Western EU countries rather than in their own countries. This attraction to the market and leading art and culture organizations is being influenced by private sector culture policies, by art market speculators, by collectors and art experts who collaborate with them.

Considering the geo-political and economic turmoil in the region and the neo-liberalist positioning of the official cultural policy of the governments, we should re-question the function, success and influence of contemporary art productions and activities and art- and culture-criticism in our countries as well as the germinal possibilities of working in partnerships, collective and collaborative methods for the benefit of artists and art experts.

Through this timely conference, despite political and economic difficulties, we want to enter an effective and productive turn of events in the art scene. Discussing the issues that effect our art scenes with the distinguished and experienced members of our associations will transfer a new knowledge and hope to young generations and to the public.

* The term ‘collective consciousness’ was introduced by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, in 1893, in his book The Division of Labor in Society. He stated that, the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

** Conference title and content is developed by our Honorary President Mrs. Beral Madra.

 

Even though it is not openly expressed, it is evident that artists of this region, of Turkey and its neighboring countries, far into the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and even Middle Asia, have a common past, a common history shared at times of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was, in a sense, a postmodern culture before it became a modern one. Postmodernism, in this respect, is not the end point of modernism, but is its birth, its permanent birth. (Lyotard)

Beral Madra, Neighbours in Dialogue, 2007

House of Taswir investigates the dynamics of contemporary artists’ collaboration and its cohesive methods of dissemination. It is interested not only in contemporary, but also medieval or ancient ways in which collective creative bodies disseminate knowledge, and especially in ways how artistic intelligence and resourcefulness operate under conditions of persecution and distress.  Bruckstein’s lecture performance refers to two contemporary artists’ networks dedicated to the survival of cosmopolitanism beyond national borders:  House of Taswir in Berlin, and BM Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.

Shulamit Bruckstein is a thinker, curator, theory-artist and art critic. She is the author of House of Taswir – Doing and Undoing Things. Notes on Epistemic Architecture(s) (2014), and the founder of Taswir projects, a collaborative platform for artistic research and diasporic thinking (Berlin). She held various professorships in philosophy and cultural theory in Berlin, Jerusalem, and Basel, and authored more than 70 publications in visual theory, post-structuralism, and Jewish thought. In 2010, she curated the Taswir exhibition at Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin.  Currently Shulamit holds an artists’ fellowship at Tarabya, Istanbul, extended by the German Foreign Office.