Three Meditations on Relationality and hegemony

Transform/ eipcp, 2007

This collective text by Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC) is a critical discussion of the politics of relational art published online by Transform/eipcp in 2007.

Manifestations of Relational Artist Practices, 2010

1 Acknowledgements The journey of this thesis would not have been possible without the guidance of many. I am particularly thankful to my supervisors for their patience and support; Dr. Outi Lahtinen, especially for her insights about authorship reaching beyond the confines of the work at hand and her compassion; and Dr. Milija Gluhovic for pushing me further at all times and for his strategic interventions at crucial turning points. Dr. Tim White, Erin Brubacher and Diego De La Vega Wood were always available with their emotional and academic support. The creative and recreative companionship that Erin, Diego and I had in the form of NED/END/DEN fed into this research in innumerable ways. I am indebted to Seçil Yersel (Oda Projesi) and Julie Upmeyer for sharing their archives, making time to meet me more than once in the scarcity of time, particularly for their opennes to discuss and let fruitful exchanges arise out of our agreements and disagreements. Asu Aksoy and Pelin Tan have been valuable counselors over the course of the project, leading me to crucial resources and people. Bahadir Turan, Öncel Naldemirci and İrem Bostancı were constant inspiration and always available for discussing ideas, reading drafts or sharing the anxiety of writing. Adam Putz provided valuable support during the last cries for help of the thesis and was particularly generous and patient in providing the corrections. Last but not the least, I am thankful to my parents Tülay Özerengin and Remzi Tosun, for being so supportive of my nomadisms, though deep inside them they would like to see me on their side, as a permanent dweller.

This article, a revised and extended version of a presentation to the 6 th International Conference of the Arts in Society, Berlin, May 2011, elaborates the dialectical relationship between visual art forms and the social structures in which they are produced, by extending Robert Witkin's taxonomy first presented in his 1995 book Art and Social Structure. Witkin tracked the history of visual art from pre-modern times, for which he invented the label invocational art, to the advent of Modernism, described in terms of evocational and then provocational art. The article then extrapolates from Witkin's model to include post-Modernism, for which the author's term revocational art has been coined, and goes on to discuss Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of Altermodernism, his term for describing the relationship between contemporary art practices and the social conditions of today, for which the author suggests an alternativeconvocational art -a synonym for Bourriaud's term relational art. The paper then introduces a systemic-functional semiotic model for the analysis of relational art, and concludes with a demonstration of the model as applied to the work of Anton Vidokle.

Angelaki, 2019

This paper proposes a reflection on relational aesthetics, developed in the 90s by the French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. To this end, elects as a counterpoint Marcel Mauss' thought, specifically his essay on the gift, in order to understand the similarities and differences between the approaches of the two authors to the concepts of relationship and exchange. The question that motivates this text is well prepared: sociability models proposed by Bourriaud reinforce and reproduce the logic of consumer capitalism or suggest alternatives to it? Keywords Relational Aesthetics. Contemporary Art. Models of Sociability. Sociology of Art.

Third text, 2007

The text presents a discussion of possible connections between the ideas of Erik Rietveld and concepts of relationality and materiality in modern architecture, with a special focus on Dutch Structuralism and the New Brutalism.

The text is a concise form of chapter 3 of my PhD thesis ‘Performing a Practice-led Research on the Gastarbeiter Legacy: Toward the Production of an Aesthetics of Relation’.

This paper examines five artists whose work puts into play various ways of thinking about social bonds, or social relations. They are: the French artist, Sophie Calle, and in particular her recent work, Take Care of Yourself; the Australian artist Barbara Campbell and her net-based work, 1001 Nights; the Danish artist, Jens Haaning, specifically his works which involve exchange; the large scale spectacles of Belgian-Mexican artist Francis Alÿs; and the cardboard box works of the Spanish artist also resident in Mexico, Santiago Sierra. Participation, or at the very least reliance upon others, is a key feature of all of these works whether at the point of production, in the case of Calle, Alÿs, and Campbell, or at the point of reception, in the case of Sierra and Haaning. My central concern in this paper, however, is not with the participatory aspect of these works, rather I want to explore the kinds of social ties or bonds that such relations of dependence produce.

2016

What really happened in the 90’s? Well, we learned the art of collecting frequent flyer miles, travelling to peripheries in search of the new.1 Nordic Art Review Today’s fight for modernity is being waged in the same terms as yesterday’s, barring the fact that the avant-garde has stopped patrolling like some scout, the troop having come to a cautious standstill around a bivouac of certainties (biuoac de certitudes). Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world; today it is modelling possible universes.2