16 August 2024
Duration: 1:30 hrs, Online
Webinar ID: 836 5653 9687 (via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/s/83656539687 ). No registration required. Open to non-members.
Time: Turkey 8:00 PM (UTC +3), Palestine: 8:00 PM (UTC +3), California: 10.00 AM (Pasific Time, PT), France: 07.00 PM (UTC +2)
Speakers: Judith Butler, Adania Shibli
Moderator: Esra Yıldız
AICA (L'Association internationale des critiques d'art/International Association of Art Critics) Turkey is organizing an online event titled "In the Ruins: Rethinking Artistic Creation and Freedom in Times of Destruction" on Friday, August 16.
Two leading intellectuals, American philosopher Judith Butler and Palestinian writer Adania Shibli, will talk about the role of art and artists, intellectuals, and the function of artistic freedom and its lack in times of destruction, the importance of speaking truth against the power, and the possibility of creating support networks in this atmosphere.
Focusing on the destruction of Palestinian cultural institutions and attacking artists as part of the decades-long war on Palestine, as well as the exclusion from institutions of those who take sides on Palestine, they will discuss artistic engagement and expression under the conditions of destruction and ongoing war.
This event is organized by as part of “Learning from Each Other: Building a Solidarity Network in the Art and Cultural Sector in Times of Disasters,” a series of talks supported by AICA International.
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley where they have taught in Critical Theory and Comparative Literature for several years. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books, including Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?(2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Who Sings the Nation-State? (2008) with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political co-authored with Athena Athanasiou (2013), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Vulnerability in Resistance (co-authored with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 2016), The Force of Non-Violence, (2020), and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). They were from 2015-2020 a principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation Grant that initiated the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs on whose board they now serve as co-chair. Butler is active in several human rights organizations, having served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and presently on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. In 2024, they published Who’s Afraid of Gender? with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Adania Shibli has written novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays. She has twice been awarded with the Qattan Young Writer's Award-Palestine in 2001 on her novel Masaas (Al-Adab, 2002; translated as Touch, Clockroot, 2009), and in 2003 on her novel Kulluna Ba’id bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub (Al-Adab, 2004; translated as We Are All Equally Far from Love, Clockroot, 2012). Her latest is the novel Tafsil Thanawi (Al-Adab, 2017, translated as Minor Detail,Fitzcarraldo Edition/UK, and New Directions/USA, 2020), which was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2020, and in 2021 it was nominated for the International Booker Prize. Shibli is also engaged in academic research and teaching in different universities across Europe, as well as at Birzeit University, Palestine (2012-2018).
Esra Yıldız is an Associate Professor and the director of the Cultural Management MA Program at Istanbul Bilgi University, the president of the AICA Turkey. She studied Sociology and Environmental Engineering, and received her PhD (ITU) degree in Art History, She continued her postdoctoral studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and EHESS (Paris). Her academic studies and articles published in journals such as Critical Arts, African Arts, and International Journal of Arts Management and in books by publishing houses such as Routledge, Intellect, Istanbul Bilgi University Publications, İletişim. She worked in the organization of exhibitions and film screenings such as Hartmut Bitomsky Film screening, Modern and Beyond, Yüksel Arslan Retrospective, Korda's Che from Revolution to Icon (İstanbul). She is also a film director, and her latest film, Stateless (2021), has been recently screened at CINEMAMED, Brussels.