IN-PERSON ISTANBUL HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

Apropos Vivienne Jabri’s “intersections and limits” of war, aesthetics, and politics in War and Aesthetics (MIT 2024), I propose to add a fourth category to extend Jabri’s triad into a perceptual quadrant. Viewing segments from Banu Cennetoğlu’s 128-hour installation at the Walker Art Center, USA, between December 12, 2024 and May 25, 2025 after seven 500-mile round trips between Sioux Falls and Minneapolis, I saw a model for signifying spaces that refuse to enclose verbal, visual, and acoustic signs. I am less certain whether the “uncontainability” of such spaces are capable of countering the real ruins of cities in this century than I am of adding Boris Groys’ 1988 monograph on Russian constructivism, The Total Art of Stalinism, to Jabri’s synthesis of Benjamin, Adorno, and Fanon. As category, does technology subsume making war, making art or doing politics? Is Clauswitz’s total war or Groy’s total art more recognizable than totalitarian dimensions in socio-cultural forms? Is totality, not technology, the missing category needed to understand Cennetoğlu’s installation in relation to the journal of Gurbetelli Ersöz, the BAS archive of artists’ books, and The List’s record of casualties of the global diaspora? Neither philology nor philosophy dominate my search for an answer to this question; rather, my goal is a poetics that builds on the mobility of the hand-held camera, film-making’s sporadic fascination with the long take, and acceptance of figural accidents emerging from chance operations in the struggle to refuse containment by totalizing conceptions of form and meaning.