Force of trauma tries to show how some contemporary art scenes are influenced by recent traumatic events. Case studies will specifically include contemporary art produced in Kosovo and in Diyarbakir. Sezgin Boynik will analyse and compare art produced in these two regions in order to show how some historical circumstances have an effect on transforming traumatic experiences. He will also try to show how some artists from Kosovo, where trauma is relatively in the past, are silencing the effects and memory of their traumatic experiences. He uses the theories of Shoshana Felman to analyse young artist Jakup Ferri from Kosovo and to compare his practice with the artist and writer Sener Ozmen from Diyarbakir.
Sezgin Boynik completed his graduate studies in Mimar Sinan University Sociology Department with a thesis on Situationist International in 2003. He prepared the book "Nationalism and Contemporary Art" with Minna Henriksson and ''History of Punk and Underground Resources in Turkey 1978-1999'' with Tolga Güldallý in 2007. Currently living in Pristina, Kosovo, he lectures at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Pristina.
Regarding One’s Pain: The 100 Shaheed-100 Lives Memorial exhibition is a reflection/updated curatorial statement on the art exhibition 100 Shaheed-100 Lives organised by Adila Laïdi-Hanieh in 2001 in Ramallah, focusing on the first 100 civilians killed by Israel at the start of the second Intifada (2000-2005). The text explains the demarche behind the exhibition, its organisation, the conceptual and curatorial pitfalls and elaborates on the reception of the exhibition.
Adila Laïdi-Hanieh teaches modern Arab intellectual history and Palestinian art at Bir Zeit University, and writes on arts and cultural practice. She ran the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah from its establishment in 1996 to 2005 where she curated among other exhibitions the 100 Shaheed-100 Lives touring exhibition in 2001. She received an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University in the US, and studied painting with Fahr el Nissa Zeid.
So far blogging has primarily been defined as "citizen journalism", thereby portraying the blogger as a would-be journalist whose aim is to be part of the news industry. In contrast, the focus of the media blog software is analysed as "self management tools". Blogs have a unique mix between the private and the public. As mass publication tools of "distributed subjectivity" blogs are an ideal therapeutic instrument for those who see their private "illness" as a public affair. What does it mean when therapy becomes a techno-social arrangement?
Geert Lovink, a media theorist, internet critic and author of various publications including "Dark Fiber", "Uncanny Networks", "My First Recession" and "Zero Comments". He worked on various media projects in Eastern Europe and India and earned his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2003 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. He is co-founder of projects that combine meetings, publications and online debates such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture, Incommunicado, MyCreativity and VideoVortex. In 2004 Lovink founded the Institute of Network Cultures within the Interactive Media School at Amsterdam Polytechnic (HvA) and was appointed Associate Professor at the Media & Culture Department, University of Amsterdam. His blog can be found at http://www.networkcultures.org/geert.
“We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses,” writes Primo Levi, one of the survivors of the Holocaust. According to him, the only true witnesses are the ones who, unlike the survivors, have “touch[ed] bottom”; those who “saw the Gorgon” and “have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute”. What Agamben calls “Levi’s paradox” is the paradox that the survivors are the only ones who can speak for the ones who, as real victims, have been silenced. There is a whole wave of theoretical discourse today describing something like "raw humanity and pure helplessness", or "anonymous corporeality and speechlessness". This is regarded as the only core of what we, as humans, are, claiming to be unrepresentable, and contextualising every witnessing of a victim as falling into the trap of the secondary witness problem. Then, if, as Christian Schneider writes “the position of the secondary witness, [is] that of the initiated, the inducted” and that it is “essentially priestly, shamanistic”, is it all possible to keep the memory of the victims in any system of signs that is related to the field of political and cultural representation?
Stevan Vuković graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. He continued his postgraduate studies at Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht, the Netherlands and Bauhaus Dessau in Germany. He is currently working on a PhD thesis at the Fine Art Academy at the University of Art in Belgrade. He holds teaching positions as a lecturer in Art in Public Space at the Faculty of Fine Art in Osijek, Croatia, and at the Faculty of Architecture, at the Univesity of Belgrade (http://www.publicart-publicspace.org/). He also works as a coordinator for visual art at the SKC Belgrade, editor for digital arts at the O3ONE project space in Belgrade, as well as being editor for culture at the Forum Magazine of the Union of Architects of Serbia.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
