The Performance of Protest: a panel on visual culture and aesthetics

Speaker biographies

• Pelin Basaran

  Pelin Basaran is a curator and producer with an extensive experience of developing and delivering high-profile contemporary performance projects across Europe. She is currently working as programme manager at Contact, Manchester. She  founded and worked as director of PARC which supported artistic creation and the presentation of the contemporary performance in Turkey. She also founded and worked as the researcher and co-director of the project “Siyah Bant-Freedom of Expression in the Arts” in Turkey.

• Isil Egrikavuk

  In her regular newspaper column, mock TV shows and other works, Isil Egrikavuk creates absurd situations that highlight the manipulative power of the media. Eğrikavuk studied literature in Istanbul then went to The School of The Art Institute of Chicago for her MFA in Performance Art. She is the creator of a column Güncel Sanat Kafası, in which she writes on contemporary art in Istanbul’s daily newspaper Radikal. Eğrikavuk also teaches media and video art at Istanbul Bilgi University.

• Dr Umut Korkut

  Dr Umut Korkut is a Reader in International Economics at Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University. His current research focus is broadly social policy, liberalization, religion and gender rights, migration, democratization and Europeanization in Central and Eastern Europe and Turkey. His first book was entitled Liberalisation Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism by Palgrave. He has published an edited volume entitled The Discourses and Politics of Migration in Europe by Palgrave in Europe in Transition: The NYU European Studies Series. He has received an AHRC research grant for The Aesthetics of Protest: Visual Culture & Communication in Turkey. Dr Korkut is currently a Trustee for Political Studies Association. He has a forthcoming monograph co-authored with Hande Eslen-Ziya, entitled Politics and Gender Identity in Turkey: Centralised Islam for Socio-Economic Control, published by Routledge.

• Dr Aidan McGarry

  Dr Aidan McGarry is a Principal Lecturer in Politics and the Subject Leader for Politics in the School of Applied Social Science. Since joining the University of Brighton (UoB) in 2008, he has been awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2010, a University Research Sabbatical in 2012 and a 'Rising Star' award in 2014. In 2011, he conducted research at the European Centre for Minority Issues and in 2013 he spent his sabbatical at Columbia University, New York at the Department of Government as a Visiting Scholar. He chairs the UoB's Social Movement Network which convenes monthly research seminars and is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC funded project 'The Aesthetics of Protest: Visual Culture and Communication in Turkey.

• Professor Catherine Moriarty

  Professor Catherine Moriarty is Curatorial Director of the University of Brighton Design Archives. Her work engages with issues that lie at the heart of current research in the humanities – cultural memory, inter-textuality, visual and material culture, particularly sculpture, and the research potential of digital content. Moriarty has directed a variety of projects, most recently Exploring British Design in 2014/15, an AHRC-funded collaboration with the Archives Hub. She has written on the history of the Design Council’s photographic holdings, and on the relationship between sculpture and design. In 2007 she curated an exhibition on the work of the designer and sculptor Bernard Schottlander with the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and, in 2013, an exhibition about Barbara Jones with the Whitechapel Art Gallery.