Pera Reverse: Difference between revisions
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
The seminar on decolonial artistic and architectural research and practice takes place at the invitation of the Pera Museum in Istanbul and is linked to the field trip in the fall of 2023. The Pera Museum, with its archival collection, neoclassical architecture, and urban setting, provides a “contact zone” for us to engage in a decolonial, decentered history of aesthetic practices and transcultural exchange. Responding to this context, we will evolve a collective exhibition and spatial intervention at the renowned museum in 2024. | |||
The making of Westernized modernity is still encoded in our aesthetic forms and practices, in architecture and art, as well as in all modes of representation, distribution, and institutionalization. Most importantly, it continues to shape our imagination. The Bauhaus –with its iterations in the U.S.– has played a dominant role in this fantasizing and claiming of a modernist distinction, as well as in the distribution of modernism to the “Orient”. With its collection's focus on "Orientalism," the Pera Museum allows us to explore interdisciplinary artifacts that have both shaped and undermined notions of modern Europe and its "Other," of center and periphery, of cultural domination and submission. We look at the role that a shift in perspective from modernist/colonial "distinction" to "encounter" might play in the concrete context of Pera, as proposed by Mary Luise Pratt through her concept of contact zones. With this concept, the influential theorist of linguistics and language rights describes spaces in “which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. We can understand contact zones as those reciprocal spaces, where interactions take place and (asymmetrical) relationships form, where perceptions and practices are shaped by encounter and co-presence. | |||
Mona Mahall, Asli Serbest, Yelta Köm | |||
== See also == | == See also == | ||
Revision as of 11:23, 14 July 2025
The seminar on decolonial artistic and architectural research and practice takes place at the invitation of the Pera Museum in Istanbul and is linked to the field trip in the fall of 2023. The Pera Museum, with its archival collection, neoclassical architecture, and urban setting, provides a “contact zone” for us to engage in a decolonial, decentered history of aesthetic practices and transcultural exchange. Responding to this context, we will evolve a collective exhibition and spatial intervention at the renowned museum in 2024. The making of Westernized modernity is still encoded in our aesthetic forms and practices, in architecture and art, as well as in all modes of representation, distribution, and institutionalization. Most importantly, it continues to shape our imagination. The Bauhaus –with its iterations in the U.S.– has played a dominant role in this fantasizing and claiming of a modernist distinction, as well as in the distribution of modernism to the “Orient”. With its collection's focus on "Orientalism," the Pera Museum allows us to explore interdisciplinary artifacts that have both shaped and undermined notions of modern Europe and its "Other," of center and periphery, of cultural domination and submission. We look at the role that a shift in perspective from modernist/colonial "distinction" to "encounter" might play in the concrete context of Pera, as proposed by Mary Luise Pratt through her concept of contact zones. With this concept, the influential theorist of linguistics and language rights describes spaces in “which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. We can understand contact zones as those reciprocal spaces, where interactions take place and (asymmetrical) relationships form, where perceptions and practices are shaped by encounter and co-presence.
Mona Mahall, Asli Serbest, Yelta Köm