Decommissioned: Başak Ertür

Building Barricades: Resistance and the Untimely

Departing from a consideration of the strange combination of untimeliness and anti-instrumentality that barricades embody, this talk draws on aesthetic and political theory to reflect on the resources and residues of resistance. Can we think of barricades as counter-monuments and of resistance as inheritance without testament?

Reading:

Arendt, Hannah. “Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future”. In Between Past and Future, 3-15. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Ross, Kristin. “Communal Luxury.” In Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, 39-65. London: Verso, 2015.

Sakr, Rita. “Reading Monumental Space at the Crossroads of Disciplines.” In Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study, 1-40. New York: Continuum, 2015.

Young, James E. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today”, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992): 267-296.

Dr Başak Ertür is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. She is currently working on a book on political trials, performativity, and sovereignty as it is articulated through spectacles and spectres. Her research revolves around critical legal thought, political violence and memory.

Başak is the editor of Manual for Conspiracy (Sharjah Art Foundation, 2011) and the co-editor of Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (Verso, 2008). She also has a translation practice, and her published translations into Turkish include Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Precarious Life. She co-produced and co-directed the documentary For the Record: World Tribunal on Iraq (2006). She has also published occasional essays on art, culture, film and politics in various outlets including Manifesta Journal, Critical Legal Thinking, Bidoun and Ibraaz.

In a series of ten lectures, Decommissioned seeks to address how strategies of disavowal, inactivity and transition are employed in contemporary art and design. When encountering cultural bias, uncertainty and co-option across the arts, how can the dominant flows of information, language, policy and ideology be circumvented? Curators, sociologists, artists, politicians, academics, queer-thinkers, bio-designers, film-theorists and others will respond through diverse fields of exciting and critical research.    

This series is curated and convened by Dr. Stephen Wilson and is staged in collaboration with Chelsea College of Arts Postgraduate Community and the University of the Arts London, CCW Graduate School.