Thinking: the Ruin
Thinking: the Ruin
Kadir Has University: 22-29 May 2009
The following is a description of the excellent town of Constantinople. May God preserve her from decay and fall!
Evliya Çelebi, Book Of Travels [Seyahatname] (1670)
Sipping our tea or rakı in our café on the Galata Bridge, we rest out eyes once more on the gray and ruined beauty of Stamboul, crowned with imperial monuments on its seven ancient hills.
Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely, Strolling Through Istanbul: A Guide to the City (1972)
Can all architecture be defined as a future ruin?
Is nostalgia the the ruin, or the ruining of the past?
Is all reading an effort to resurrect that ruin which is writing itself?
Is desire itself founded upon the logic of the ruin?
The Istanbul Studies Center at Kadir Has University is pleased to present Thinking: The Ruin, the first in a series of theory-driven lectures by a selected group of innovative scholars and artists willing to think beyond the narrow confines of traditional disciplines, and offered as a sequence delivered over the course of a week.
The lectures in the Thinking: x series all spring from or reflect upon the same image or idea or topos or trope. Lectures need not directly focus on the city of Istanbul per se; but Istanbul will be a frame, a foil, an intertext, a point of reference for all the talks.
The subject of our inaugural Thinking: x series will be on the image/idea/topos/trope of the ruin. All lectures will take place at 16:00 in the Fener Salonu.
Program
Friday 22 May
Matthew Gumpert: Opening Remarks
Walid Raad: Sweet Talk
Reception
Monday 25 May
Trevor Hope: City as Monument: Pierre Loti
Tuesday 26 May
Trevor Hope: City as Archive: Orhan Pamuk
Wednesday 27 May
Jalal Toufic: Ruins
Film Screening: The Shining
Thursday 28 May
Jalal Toufic: Ruins
Friday 29 May
Pelin Tan: Did You Say Architectonic Homo Sacer or Vampires?
Speakers
*Matthew Gumpert is a professor of classics and critical theory at Kadir Has University, where he also serves as Director of the Istanbul Studies Center. Much of his research focuses on the persistence of classical culture in the post-classical world. Matthew Gumpert’s most recent work includes articles on mimesis in early modern poetry in French Forum and tragedy in contemporary theater in Contemporary Theatre Review. His first book, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. His second book, entitled, The End of Meaning: Studies in Catastrophe, will be coming out with Bilgi University Press in the Fall of 2009.
*Trevor Hope teaches American Culture and Literature at Ankara University and has a background in Comparative Literature. He has published in the fields of psychoanalytical theory and gender and sexuality studies. The focus of his current research is questions of national identification and collective memory: the national “archive.”
*Walid Raad is a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a contemporary media artist. Raad’s works include video, photography and literary essays. His work is also often concerned with the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions; and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence. Raad received his BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989. He went on to complete his MA and Ph.D. in Cultural and Visual Studies at the University of Rochester in 1993 and 1996, respectively. His works have been exhibited at Documenta 11 (Kassel), The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), The Ayloul Festival (Beirut, Lebanon) and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
*Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Istanbul. Co-editor of Muhtelif contemporary art magazine and a book about public space and contemporary art (Istanbul: Bilgi Press, 2008, with S. Boynik). She has been a Researcher at ITU Institute of Social Sciences, Architecture Faculty, Istanbul, since 2001. Tan was a PhD. researcher at Art History - Humboldt University, Berlin (DAAD, 2006-2007), IASPIS resident, 2008. Tan lectured about space politics at TU-Berlin and at Nüernberg Art Academy. In several publications, she wrote about the relation between subjectivities and deconstructed spaces in the context of contemporary art. As a guest professor, she recently lectured about Agamben and Toufic’s works in the Architecture and Urban Studies MA program at the Art Academy of Nürenberg 2008. Currently, she completed her PhD dissertation, “Locality as a Discursive Term in Recent Socially-Engaged Art Practices,” and is working on a book about “Derrida’s notion of Hospitality and Architecture” (2009).
*Jalal Toufic is a professor in the Department of Communication Design at Kadir Has University. Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist. He is the author of Distracted (Station Hill, 1991; 2nd ed., Tuumba, 2003), Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Station Hill, 1993; 2nd ed., Post-Apollo, 2003), Over-Sensitivity (Sun & Moon, 1996), Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000), and Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post-Apollo, 2002). His videos and mixed media works have been presented in North America, Brazil, the Middle East and Europe, most recently at the 16th International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA) in a “Focus Jalal Toufic” program. He co-edited the special Discourse issue Gilles Deleuze: A Reason to Believe in this World, and edited the special Discourse issues Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee and Mortals to Death. Toufic has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of the Arts, and USC.
