Art and Politics: Sketching a Post-Ottoman Cartography

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The research explores ways in which to narrate the convergence of art and the politics of difference and belonging in post-Ottoman spaces. The post-Ottoman is a recent historiographic label for societies in the Near and Middle East, characterised by legacies of hyper-ethnic and multi-confessional life, which underwent brutal homogenisation in the course of nationalisation. The fieldwork will involve collaborating with artists and curators in Athens, Istanbul, and Nicosia, in order to see how these legacies feature in artworks and performances, how difference is negotiated in art praxis, and on what register these claims for recognition manifest. A question this research seeks to address is how to deal with political art in the post-Ottoman sphere and whether to group it with other contexts tout court. Recently, especialanthropological attention has been payed to Bourriaud's 'relational aesthetics' in participatory performance art and how these practices are both informed by politics and themselves constitute political acts. However, this dissertation, will opt to keep intact the medium specificity of art and politics and to preserve the specificity of the post-Ottoman sphere. This would mean to work within the anthropological tradition of dealing with the materiality of artworks and mobilise this reading to incorporate the political. The result will be an affective cartography befitting the material specificity of art objects, the historical legacies and political passions.