Historiography and Heterochronic Imagination in Contemporary Art from Turkey (1990-present)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes a selection of contemporary art practices from the post-1990 era that have offered alternative modes of recalling and engaging violent pasts, particularly as a challenge to nationalist official historiography. Delving into the rich and multidisciplinary sources of four contemporary artists from Turkey I coin the term heterochronic imagination to designate a mode of art practice that reflects upon violent pasts, not simply historically, but through the continued reverberations of those pasts in the present day. Ultimately, I argue that practices that cultivate heterochronic imagination seek to challenge the persistence of violence, sustained not only by the ongoing material, socio-political, and affective consequences of historical violence but also epistemically, through repression and denial often embodied within official historiography. By evoking imagination, I consider artistic practice in relation to intellectual history, fiction, and experimentation and pose a counterpoint to the transparency and immediate legibility of what we come to expect from representation. Chapters analyze İz Öztat’s ongoing spectral practice Untimely Collaboration with Zişan (2012-ongoing); Aydan Murtezaoğlu’s Blackboard works (1992, 1993) and Dilek Winchester’s On Reading and Writing (2007, 2012) which engage the ongoing resonances of the language and script reforms of 1928 in the 1990s and 2000s respectively; and Banu Cennetoğlu’s oeuvre, which asks after the potentials of opacity in documentary media, photography, and archives.