Books by Cüneyt Çakırlar
Routledge, 2022
This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born Francebased director Deniz Ga... more This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born Francebased director Deniz Gamze Ergüven's debut film Mustang (2015), which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. The film's familiar art-house style, and its universalising focus on female coming-of-age and feminist dissent, resulted in celebratory reviews from journalists and scholars of world cinema. Meanwhile, Mustang's framing of youth in the Turkish national context, and its representation of gender, divided Turkish film critics and cultural theorists. These divisions led to a debate that questions the politics of transnational feminism by criticising the film's failure to capture the local intricacies of the politics of gender and youth. While this book aims to locate Mustang within the intersection of emerging female and youth narratives in the cinema of Turkey, it also provides a critical understanding of the differences in Mustang's local and global reception. This focus on the geopolitics of representation informs the diverse criteria this study uses to evaluate Ergüven's stylistic choices. Engaging with both Anglophone and Turkish literature in youth cinema and gender studies, the book makes an original contribution to current debates on national/ transnational cinemas and gender/ youth studies and is an accessible reference for graduate and undergraduate study of contemporary film.
Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintin... more Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintings Series as a contemporary exploration of the Orientalist gaze. Upsetting both Western and Eastern master narratives, the Lost Paintings Series presents Eastern figures in a fascinating navigation of history, power and narrative. “Esma Sultan,” Ceylan’s depiction of an eighteenth-century Ottoman princess renowned for her cruel disposition, draws on the empowering mythology of passionate, ruthless and assertive womanhood that characterizes accounts of her life. In other works, an Ottoman man gazes defiantly, cigarette in hand; a pair of male lovers give a chaste farewell; a veiled woman stands before Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde.” Ceylan assembles a cast of lost characters and voices that embody the many silenced by both Orientalist and official nationalist histories. The book is published on the occasion of Ceylan’s exhibition The Lost Paintings Series at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.
Türkiye'de 2000'li yıllardan günümüze Queer kuramının ve politikalarının geçirdiği aşamaları özgü... more Türkiye'de 2000'li yıllardan günümüze Queer kuramının ve politikalarının geçirdiği aşamaları özgün bir literatür taramasıyla anlatmayı amaçlayan bu kitapta, Adnan Yıldız, Alisa Lebow, Başak Ertür, Birkan Taş, Bülent Somay, Cenk Özbay, Cihat Arınç, Erdal Partog, Evren Savcı, Fatih Özgüven, Nami Başer, Özlem Güçlü, Sibel Yardımcı, Tuna Erdem, Veysel Eşsiz ve Zeynep Direk'in yazılarının yanı sıra Deniz Kandiyoti ve Cüneyt Türel ile yapılan söyleşiler ve sanatçılar Erinç Seymen, Murat Morova, Nilbar Güreş ve Taner Ceylan'ın eserlerinden örnekler yer alıyor.
Cinsellik Muamması'nda bugüne dek Queer kuramına getirilen eleştiriler ele alınırken şu sorulara da yanıt aranıyor: Uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin söylemi, ideolojisi ve kavramları ötesinde başka/alternatif queer siyasetleri ve cemaat algıları tahayyül edilebilir mi? Yerelliğe yönelik duyarlılık uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin yarattığı "epistemolojik şiddet"i kırmada bir rol üstlenebilir mi? Yerellik ve alternatif, Batı-dışı bağlam ve politikalar üzerindeki vurgu, bir "otantiklik fetişizmi"ne ve tersten, başka türlü bir özcülüğe sürüklenme tehlikesi taşır mı?
Kitap, Türkiye'deki yerel LGBTQ kültürünün felsefe, sosyoloji, psikanaliz, kültürel incelemeler, tarih, hukuk, insan hakları, aktivizm, sanat, görsel kültür vb. sahalardaki yansımalarını ifade eden bir dil, kuram ve özgün bir literatür oluşturarak queer ile ilgili genel tartışmalara orijinal bir bağlam ve katkı sunmayı hedefliyor.
(Tanıtım Bülteninden)
This book aims to challenge heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and homo/transphobic violence in Turkey by investigating local historical and cultural narratives, social practices and forms of relationality in creative, dissident and queer ways. It interrogates the possibilities of an alternative critical practice that defies heteronormativity and its “partners in crime”, namely neoliberalism, nationalism, militarism and religious conservatism in contemporary Turkey. The critical agenda of this study is not only informed by a liberal human rights discourse that relies on sexual identity categories and identity politics. It is also inspired by sexual multitudes and ambiguities inherent within the local and historical cultural texture. Invoking unique possibilities of the local, this project looks at the ways in which the global travel of Western sexual identity categories and theories transform and assimilate local cultural forms of sexual subjectivity. While it questions the validity and applicability of categories and theories, this book also argues that the critical stance towards global sexual identity categories should not turn into an “authenticity fetishism”. Global sexual identity categories and Western theories can be appropriated critically and strategically, for different purposes, in different contexts. Rather than seeing the travel of global theories and categories as a hierarchical, single-dimensional imposition, this collection of essays suggests a reciprocal interaction always changing and transforming both the local and the global.
Papers by Cüneyt Çakırlar
Frames Cinema Journal, 2023
An output of the British Academy project titled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Poli... more An output of the British Academy project titled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics [https://folkhorrorproject.uk], this article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnational horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of recent curatorial attempts to frame the “folk horror revival” in transnational settings (including Severin Films’ All The Haunts Be Hours: A Compendium of Folk Horror [2021] and Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror [2021]), this study focuses on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which the author curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folklore-through-horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary to historically significant examples of folk horror that fall outside its Anglo-American canon. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, the author also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinemas through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article provides a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror and its reception in international festival settings.
Keywords: folk horror, curatorial, transnationalism, anti-canonisation, genre, mode, film programming, film festivals
Routledge eBooks, Nov 25, 2022
The performative agenda of young British artists (yBas) of the 1990s crystallised around an empha... more The performative agenda of young British artists (yBas) of the 1990s crystallised around an emphasis on non-art, a populist attempt to merge art and life, a refusal of bourgeois conventions of high art, or in more general terms, an artistic philistinism "valuing the denial itself " (Bull 1996: 25) and allowing the voluptuous to emerge within art practice. Philistinism, as defined by Dave Beech and John Roberts, "accuses the cultivated refinement of the body as a motivated denial of voluptuousness and excess" and contests how "the ethical value of [the modern] art is secured by impoverishing the body and elevating aesthetic experience and art beyond the voluptuous contingencies, activities and delight" (1996: 126; also 1998; 2002). Julian Stallabrass's critical take on yBa as "high art lite", however, emphasises its easily consumable intellectual "lightness" and its "lite" re-enactment of avant-gardism: "[yBa] captures the idea of a fast food version of the less digestible art that preceded it" (Stallabrass 2006: 2). Stallabrass positions these artists in a postmodern political vacuum: A facile postmodernism, the basis for a ubiquitous irony, was the foundation of this new art, one which took no principle terribly seriously, which pretended not to separate high from mass culture and which, given this relativism, accepted the system just as it was, and sought only to work within it. The new art would be quite as dreadful as the philistines said it was -obscene, trivial, soiled with bodily fluids, and exhibiting a fuck-you attitude -but this time to deliberately use the philistines' energy and power in the mass media against them. [...] The level of recursion of reference in these projects has moved on from what went before: these artists are not so much engaged in masquerade (in putting on an identity as you would a costume) as in a masquerade of masquerade. High art lite is post-psychoanalytic (2006: 26-48). However, what Stallabrass regards as "anti-intellectualism" or ideological emptiness in yBas (e.
This is the Turkish translation of Judith Butler's "Bodies That Matter", the first ... more This is the Turkish translation of Judith Butler's "Bodies That Matter", the first chapter of the book Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the ph... more In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan engages with the questions of history and Orientalism by creating yet another visual allegory. The mischievous gaze of the smoking Ottoman boy in 1881 and the homoerotic farewell scene in 1923 are followed this time by an ingenious montage of Pascal Sebah's photograph from the 1880s and Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866). In this intricately crafted oil painting, Ceylan juxtaposes different yet related histories of artistic style and connoisseurship to trigger a rethinking of Orientalism, femininity, the veil and the gaze. Recovering and drawing together forgotten legacies and silenced voices in a brilliantly imagined new setting, Ceylan invites the viewer to look behind the veil of Orientalism and the politics of representation. Rather than offering a corrective, the artist amalgamates irony, playfulness and r...
This audiovisual essay explores Julianne Moore’s on-screen image as an unconventional maternal em... more This audiovisual essay explores Julianne Moore’s on-screen image as an unconventional maternal embodiment. Throughout her career, what has considerably marked Moore’s star image is, I contend, not a particularly authentic signature in her acting style but the thematic and erotic investment in her appearances cast as maternal women of grief, ambivalence, transgression and detachment. My exploration in this video capitalizes upon this maternal erotic and treats it as the core component of Moore’s persona. Through expressive use of editing and sound, the video operates within an expository poetic mode that appropriates the tribute/compilation format and tackles different analytical scales of sampling and audiovisual interpretation in star studies. The piece attempts to articulate a performative approach to expose the thematic continuities in Moore’s performances of mothers (or mother-substitutes) and to queer the on-screen operation of her maternal image.
This is the Turkish translation of Judith Butler's "Bodies That Matter", the first ... more This is the Turkish translation of Judith Butler's "Bodies That Matter", the first chapter of the book Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
This article was commissioned, by Zilberman Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey & Berlin, Germany) and the ... more This article was commissioned, by Zilberman Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey & Berlin, Germany) and the artist Erinc Seymen, for his solo show Homo Fragilis which had been on display during 13/9/2017-4/11/2017. Reviewed by the artist, the gallery curators and the editors of the exhibition monograph, this essay was originally written in English. Both the English original and the Turkish translation was published in this monograph. In line with the commissioning brief, the article provides a critical analysis of Seymen's artworks in Homo Fragilis while also locating the artist's practice within an original theoretical framework informed by the contemporary fields of queer studies and critical affect theory.
In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the ph... more In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan engages with the questions of history and Orientalism by creating yet another visual allegory. The mischievous gaze of the smoking Ottoman boy in 1881 and the homoerotic farewell scene in 1923 are followed this time by an ingenious montage of Pascal Sebah's photograph from the 1880s and Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866). In this intricately crafted oil painting, Ceylan juxtaposes different yet related histories of artistic style and connoisseurship to trigger a rethinking of Orientalism, femininity, the veil and the gaze. Recovering and drawing together forgotten legacies and silenced voices in a brilliantly imagined new setting, Ceylan invites the viewer to look behind the veil of Orientalism and the politics of representation. Rather than offering a corrective, the artist amalgamates irony, playfulness and r...
Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintin... more Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintings Series as a contemporary exploration of the Orientalist gaze. Upsetting both Western and Eastern master narratives, the Lost Paintings Series presents Eastern figures in a fascinating navigation of history, power and narrative. “Esma Sultan,” Ceylan’s depiction of an eighteenth-century Ottoman princess renowned for her cruel disposition, draws on the empowering mythology of passionate, ruthless and assertive womanhood that characterizes accounts of her life. In other works, an Ottoman man gazes defiantly, cigarette in hand; a pair of male lovers give a chaste farewell; a veiled woman stands before Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde.” Ceylan assembles a cast of lost characters and voices that embody the many silenced by both Orientalist and official nationalist histories. The book is published on the occasion of Ceylan’s exhibition The Lost Paintings Series at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.
This audiovisual essay explores Julianne Moore’s on-screen image as an unconventional maternal em... more This audiovisual essay explores Julianne Moore’s on-screen image as an unconventional maternal embodiment. Throughout her career, what has considerably marked Moore’s star image is, I contend, not a particularly authentic signature in her acting style but the thematic and erotic investment in her appearances cast as maternal women of grief, ambivalence, transgression and detachment. My exploration in this video capitalizes upon this maternal erotic and treats it as the core component of Moore’s persona. Through expressive use of editing and sound, the video operates within an expository poetic mode that appropriates the tribute/compilation format and tackles different analytical scales of sampling and audiovisual interpretation in star studies. The piece attempts to articulate a performative approach to expose the thematic continuities in Moore’s performances of mothers (or mother-substitutes) and to queer the on-screen operation of her maternal image.
This article was commissioned, by Zilberman Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey & Berlin, Germany) and the ... more This article was commissioned, by Zilberman Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey & Berlin, Germany) and the artist Erinc Seymen, for his solo show Homo Fragilis which had been on display during 13/9/2017-4/11/2017. Reviewed by the artist, the gallery curators and the editors of the exhibition monograph, this essay was originally written in English. Both the English original and the Turkish translation was published in this monograph. In line with the commissioning brief, the article provides a critical analysis of Seymen's artworks in Homo Fragilis while also locating the artist's practice within an original theoretical framework informed by the contemporary fields of queer studies and critical affect theory.
Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintin... more Well known for his provocative realist paintings, Taner Ceylan (born 1967) began his Lost Paintings Series as a contemporary exploration of the Orientalist gaze. Upsetting both Western and Eastern master narratives, the Lost Paintings Series presents Eastern figures in a fascinating navigation of history, power and narrative. “Esma Sultan,” Ceylan’s depiction of an eighteenth-century Ottoman princess renowned for her cruel disposition, draws on the empowering mythology of passionate, ruthless and assertive womanhood that characterizes accounts of her life. In other works, an Ottoman man gazes defiantly, cigarette in hand; a pair of male lovers give a chaste farewell; a veiled woman stands before Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde.” Ceylan assembles a cast of lost characters and voices that embody the many silenced by both Orientalist and official nationalist histories. The book is published on the occasion of Ceylan’s exhibition The Lost Paintings Series at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York.
Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engag... more Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics of and the erotics within representation in Orientalist painting by confronting the viewer with a re-imagined figure of an odalisque. Following his highly acclaimed Lost Painting Series that featured Fake World (2011), 1640 (2011), 1879 (2011), 1923 (2010) and 1881 (2010), Cage of Flesh uses an ingenious amalgam of allusions to both Orientalist eroticisation of female flesh and the Sufi tradition of imagining the flesh as a cage of worldly desires. Referring to the infatuation of the Orientalist male gaze with Oriental female carnality, Ceylan envisages the flesh as a cage in which the odalisque is incarcerated. The reduction of "Oriental" woman to a silenced, oppressed and submissive body codified as beautiful, smooth and sensual flesh to invite and satisfy the Western male gaze deprives the odalisque of her individuality and renders her flesh a cage in wh...
Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engag... more Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics of and the erotics within representation in Orientalist painting by confronting the viewer with a re-imagined figure of an odalisque. Following his highly acclaimed Lost Painting Series that featured Fake World (2011), 1640 (2011), 1879 (2011), 1923 (2010) and 1881 (2010), Cage of Flesh uses an ingenious amalgam of allusions to both Orientalist eroticisation of female flesh and the Sufi tradition of imagining the flesh as a cage of worldly desires. Referring to the infatuation of the Orientalist male gaze with Oriental female carnality, Ceylan envisages the flesh as a cage in which the odalisque is incarcerated. The reduction of "Oriental" woman to a silenced, oppressed and submissive body codified as beautiful, smooth and sensual flesh to invite and satisfy the Western male gaze deprives the odalisque of her individuality and renders her flesh a cage in wh...
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Books by Cüneyt Çakırlar
Cinsellik Muamması'nda bugüne dek Queer kuramına getirilen eleştiriler ele alınırken şu sorulara da yanıt aranıyor: Uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin söylemi, ideolojisi ve kavramları ötesinde başka/alternatif queer siyasetleri ve cemaat algıları tahayyül edilebilir mi? Yerelliğe yönelik duyarlılık uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin yarattığı "epistemolojik şiddet"i kırmada bir rol üstlenebilir mi? Yerellik ve alternatif, Batı-dışı bağlam ve politikalar üzerindeki vurgu, bir "otantiklik fetişizmi"ne ve tersten, başka türlü bir özcülüğe sürüklenme tehlikesi taşır mı?
Kitap, Türkiye'deki yerel LGBTQ kültürünün felsefe, sosyoloji, psikanaliz, kültürel incelemeler, tarih, hukuk, insan hakları, aktivizm, sanat, görsel kültür vb. sahalardaki yansımalarını ifade eden bir dil, kuram ve özgün bir literatür oluşturarak queer ile ilgili genel tartışmalara orijinal bir bağlam ve katkı sunmayı hedefliyor.
(Tanıtım Bülteninden)
This book aims to challenge heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and homo/transphobic violence in Turkey by investigating local historical and cultural narratives, social practices and forms of relationality in creative, dissident and queer ways. It interrogates the possibilities of an alternative critical practice that defies heteronormativity and its “partners in crime”, namely neoliberalism, nationalism, militarism and religious conservatism in contemporary Turkey. The critical agenda of this study is not only informed by a liberal human rights discourse that relies on sexual identity categories and identity politics. It is also inspired by sexual multitudes and ambiguities inherent within the local and historical cultural texture. Invoking unique possibilities of the local, this project looks at the ways in which the global travel of Western sexual identity categories and theories transform and assimilate local cultural forms of sexual subjectivity. While it questions the validity and applicability of categories and theories, this book also argues that the critical stance towards global sexual identity categories should not turn into an “authenticity fetishism”. Global sexual identity categories and Western theories can be appropriated critically and strategically, for different purposes, in different contexts. Rather than seeing the travel of global theories and categories as a hierarchical, single-dimensional imposition, this collection of essays suggests a reciprocal interaction always changing and transforming both the local and the global.
Papers by Cüneyt Çakırlar
Keywords: folk horror, curatorial, transnationalism, anti-canonisation, genre, mode, film programming, film festivals
Cinsellik Muamması'nda bugüne dek Queer kuramına getirilen eleştiriler ele alınırken şu sorulara da yanıt aranıyor: Uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin söylemi, ideolojisi ve kavramları ötesinde başka/alternatif queer siyasetleri ve cemaat algıları tahayyül edilebilir mi? Yerelliğe yönelik duyarlılık uluslararası LGBTQ hareketinin yarattığı "epistemolojik şiddet"i kırmada bir rol üstlenebilir mi? Yerellik ve alternatif, Batı-dışı bağlam ve politikalar üzerindeki vurgu, bir "otantiklik fetişizmi"ne ve tersten, başka türlü bir özcülüğe sürüklenme tehlikesi taşır mı?
Kitap, Türkiye'deki yerel LGBTQ kültürünün felsefe, sosyoloji, psikanaliz, kültürel incelemeler, tarih, hukuk, insan hakları, aktivizm, sanat, görsel kültür vb. sahalardaki yansımalarını ifade eden bir dil, kuram ve özgün bir literatür oluşturarak queer ile ilgili genel tartışmalara orijinal bir bağlam ve katkı sunmayı hedefliyor.
(Tanıtım Bülteninden)
This book aims to challenge heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and homo/transphobic violence in Turkey by investigating local historical and cultural narratives, social practices and forms of relationality in creative, dissident and queer ways. It interrogates the possibilities of an alternative critical practice that defies heteronormativity and its “partners in crime”, namely neoliberalism, nationalism, militarism and religious conservatism in contemporary Turkey. The critical agenda of this study is not only informed by a liberal human rights discourse that relies on sexual identity categories and identity politics. It is also inspired by sexual multitudes and ambiguities inherent within the local and historical cultural texture. Invoking unique possibilities of the local, this project looks at the ways in which the global travel of Western sexual identity categories and theories transform and assimilate local cultural forms of sexual subjectivity. While it questions the validity and applicability of categories and theories, this book also argues that the critical stance towards global sexual identity categories should not turn into an “authenticity fetishism”. Global sexual identity categories and Western theories can be appropriated critically and strategically, for different purposes, in different contexts. Rather than seeing the travel of global theories and categories as a hierarchical, single-dimensional imposition, this collection of essays suggests a reciprocal interaction always changing and transforming both the local and the global.
Keywords: folk horror, curatorial, transnationalism, anti-canonisation, genre, mode, film programming, film festivals