Cities of today are mostly sites of intersecting social relations and movements, as well as loci for competing cultural claims and conflicts. For the most part, cities of today connote amnesia and alienation. Contemporary artistic practices respond by transforming and chronicling its struggles in heterogeneous ways, thereby incorporating the past to its present and future.

This roundtable takes its cue from the understanding of art in the urban context both as a source of sustenance that facilitates connectivity, creativity, and participatory processes, and as a tool for recording various types of cultural interactions specific to each moment of a city. The four complimentary perspectives aim to explore how contemporary artistic practices generate access to the built and lived spaces of the city.

Participants:
Ahmet Sami Özbudak (Playwright)
In Özbudak’s work, (notably his latest play Museum of Balat Monologues), Theatre works as an archive that documents the conflicting, dislocated, and fragmentary stories of the old neighborhoods of the city, thereby both inscribing them into the city’s collective memory and transforming the ruptured stories into an aesthetic whole.
Antonio Cosentino (Artist)
Cosentino’s work takes its inspiration from the street and the everyday life of city dwellers. Any object on the streets, from a tin box to a piece of nylon bag, an old car to the leftovers of a broken mirror, emerges from what the city offers, that is limitless. His ephemeral observations and reuse of objects, further expands the idea of the city as archive/archive as a city.
Ayşe Erek (Art Historian)
Researcher and writer on contemporary art and exhibition practices. She works on space and city image in art as well as poetic and political fictions of space. She's faculty member at Yeditepe University.
Esra Almas (NIT Research Fellow)
Esra Almas works on the intersections of literary capital, urban imaginary, memory, and identity. Her latest work traces Istanbul’s fogscapes across the twentieth century, and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum(s) of Innocence. Almas teaches in the translation department at Halic University.
 

The event will be in Turkish but discussions may be summarized in English on a needs basis.

Registration is not required.

Images:
Left: From the Istanbul Atlas 1996-2007, Antonio Cosentino
Right: Museum of Balat Monologues, Galata Perform - Ahmet Sami Özbudak