Sezgin Boynik at Summer School as School 2022
August 10, 2022, 20:00
Venue: Boxing Club
Living with Contradictions: Contemporary Art and Nationalism
Discussant: Andi Haxhiu
The aim of the lecture as a part of the Public Program is to discuss the relationship between contemporary art and nationalism. The lecture will challenge the widely accepted claim that contemporary art is unsusceptible of nationalism. I argue that despite the incompatible differences, nationalism is reproduced in the field of contemporary art through very subtle and sophisticated structures. However, the link between contemporary art practices and nationalist ideologies which are mediated by cultural institutions is full of contradictions. By studying and discussing these contradictions, the aim is to shift the theoretical and methodological perspective of the study of nationalism to more challenging grounds.
Sezgin will be focusing on the conceptual implications of aligning nationalism with contemporary art, as well as discussing the historical precedence of the shift of contemporary art to nationalism by researching the role of postmodernism in the eighties. It will attempt to specify at which point the social tendency of contemporary art practice became centered around the questions of nation and identity.
Biographies:
Sezgin Boynik is a theoretician based in Helsinki. He completed his Ph.D. in Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema. He co-edited Nationalism and Contemporary Art: Critical Reader (MM & Exit, 2007) and History of Punk and Underground in Turkey (BAS, 2008). Recent publications include Noise After Babel: Language Unrestrained (Spector Books, 2015, with Minna Henriksson), In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project (Rab-Rab Journal Vol. 4, No. 2, 2017, with Michael Corris) and Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language (Rab-Rab Press, 2018). He is currently working on a monograph about the theoretical and political context of Black Audio Film Collective and on the collection of Yugoslav concrete poetry. He is editor of Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, and Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform based in Helsinki.
Andi Haxhiu holds an MSc in Nationalism Studies and is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He is a Teaching Assistant in Nations and Nationalism and Sociological Imagination in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include the role of museums in nation-building, memory studies in divided societies and the decolonisation of museums.