Tijen Tunali
I am an art historian, artist and curator currently working as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Cofund Fellow at the University of Rennes 2 with the project "Art, Nature, Technology: Digital Ecoart and Posthumanism for an Endangered Planet (ANTDEPO)." https://www.univ-rennes2.fr/recherche/bienvenue/art-nature-technologie-eco-art-numerique-posthumanisme-pour-planete-menacee.
My academic work focuses on democratizing and decolonizing art, culture and space. I work to develop creative methods and frameworks to interrogate the aesthetic-political question: how can art help us make sense of the world? I analyze art practices that produce resistant and resilient aesthetics, counter-ideologies and subjectivities. My critical thinking and writing derive from Marxist theories of aesthetics and politics, posthumanism, feminism, queer theory, eco-aesthetics, decolonization and intersectional activism.
I am the founder and organizer of the international and interdisciplinary conference series "Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Change", each year in a different city since 2018. https://artandthecity.sciencesconf.org/
I am currently editing "Routledge Companion to Art and the City" with 38 contributors, upcoming in 2025.
My academic work focuses on democratizing and decolonizing art, culture and space. I work to develop creative methods and frameworks to interrogate the aesthetic-political question: how can art help us make sense of the world? I analyze art practices that produce resistant and resilient aesthetics, counter-ideologies and subjectivities. My critical thinking and writing derive from Marxist theories of aesthetics and politics, posthumanism, feminism, queer theory, eco-aesthetics, decolonization and intersectional activism.
I am the founder and organizer of the international and interdisciplinary conference series "Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Change", each year in a different city since 2018. https://artandthecity.sciencesconf.org/
I am currently editing "Routledge Companion to Art and the City" with 38 contributors, upcoming in 2025.
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Books by Tijen Tunali
Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.
Special Issues by Tijen Tunali
The authors analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural, and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for urban commons. They delve into the issue of urban commons and social change both in the role of urban social struggles and creating urban communities. Some questions that the contributors seek answers are: Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming democratic citizenship? What kind of public should artistic creativity in the urban space try to constitute and what kind of public spaces are needed to that effect?
of emancipated subjects. The authors in this issue analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for more just cities.
Perhaps now it is more pressing than ever to acknowledge, examine, and re ect upon both historic and perpetuating inequalities in urban social life. It is imperative to talk about art and its involvement with urban struggles as pertaining to the re-creation rather than the consumption of the city. Therefore, this special issue’s contributors engage in key areas of the socio-political relationships with new urban poetry--what the reconfiguration of di erence, equality, and equity entails at present moment in the urban space for art and artists. . This issue further aims to construct bridges between the contemporary practices of art for the urban public and the critiques of the city generated in disciplines such as urban sociology and human geography, informed by critical theories of urbanism, society, and culture.
The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space. Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics. Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles by Tijen Tunali
The unification of the ‘subjective philosophy of rage’ with Mayan cosmology and worldview makes neo-Zapatismo both aesthetic and political. Zapatistas strategically build their vision of the ‘other politics’ by constructing a visual and aural world, which is hard to articulate in the traditional vocabulary and imagination of revolution as it is a unique encounter between libertarian Marxism and historical indigenous resistance. This has constituted 'a powerful disruption on the original plan, and the opening of unprecedented possibilities around which a new subjectivity started taking shape ' as Deleuze articulated (Deleuze 1994:190). It is thus essential to examine the art of the Zapatista movement that can present an important political conjuncture from which to sustain other sensorial worlds here and now.
Analyzing their community murals and other visual production with a dialectical materialist perspective, this paper theorizes and historicizes the Zapatista aesthetics and shows how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has creatively articulated new forms of social politicity with their unique aesthetic engagements.. Zapatista aesthetics is not only important to recognize that 'another aesthetics' is possible but also enables us to map the visible but disregarded ground of aesthetics in recent social movements.
Do contemporary art discourses on globalization and immigration, in fact, conceal the harsher realities of the neoliberal world order by upholding an impasse on the agency of the immigrant? Do the proliferation of exhibitions on immigration and immigrants refer to a particular tendency in the art world’s new fetishization of the Other? Terry Smith proposes the word “worldly” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “planetary” to erase the ontological tension in the terms“global” 'local" and “glocal” but could there be an adequate representation of the psychic, social, economic and political worlds‐within‐the world from the perspective of the art? This paper asks these questions while comparing the recent theoretical and practical developments in the art history discipline and the art world regarding immigration to that of the discourses and exhibitions in the 1990s.
Since the 1980s, art and artists’ roles in gentrification have been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban spaces illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance. And there is a growing need to recognize art’s shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.
The authors analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural, and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for urban commons. They delve into the issue of urban commons and social change both in the role of urban social struggles and creating urban communities. Some questions that the contributors seek answers are: Under what conditions could art become effective in reclaiming democratic citizenship? What kind of public should artistic creativity in the urban space try to constitute and what kind of public spaces are needed to that effect?
of emancipated subjects. The authors in this issue analyze various forms of art within economic, cultural and social urban contexts to shed light on the complexity of modern urban life and struggles for more just cities.
Perhaps now it is more pressing than ever to acknowledge, examine, and re ect upon both historic and perpetuating inequalities in urban social life. It is imperative to talk about art and its involvement with urban struggles as pertaining to the re-creation rather than the consumption of the city. Therefore, this special issue’s contributors engage in key areas of the socio-political relationships with new urban poetry--what the reconfiguration of di erence, equality, and equity entails at present moment in the urban space for art and artists. . This issue further aims to construct bridges between the contemporary practices of art for the urban public and the critiques of the city generated in disciplines such as urban sociology and human geography, informed by critical theories of urbanism, society, and culture.
The issue opens with Philipp Shadner’s discussion of the 1970s punk movement, which not only questioned and provoked aesthetic values but also has had a major influence on the multitude of styles of urban art until the present. Shadner gives us insights into the history of the punk movement, the symbols and slogans punks used and still use not only for tagging urban spaces, but also put temporarily or permanently on their skins and/or their clothes to create a visual struggle against the conformist mainstream society. Arthur Crucq’s article analyses the social and political role of collaboratory art in an urban community in The Hague, Netherlands. Using examples of textile installations, Crucq’s discussion centers on recognizing community art projects as autonomous platforms for the development of political agency in the urban space. Jeni Peake looks at street art activism from the perspective of linguistics. Peake explores English graffiti found in urban spaces in the city of Bordeaux, France. With a large number of graffiti examples adhering to many themes of social struggle, Peake’s article seeks to establish to what extent the use of English could be understood as a political or at least rebellious and creative act. Angelos Evangelidis examines the political posters on the walls of the streets in Athens that worked as both a visual and political platform for the anti-austerity movement in Greece (2010-2015). Furthermore, Evangelinidis’ literature review shows that the dialectical relationship between urban space and visual practice is the key to map the process of art’s role in social struggles.
The unification of the ‘subjective philosophy of rage’ with Mayan cosmology and worldview makes neo-Zapatismo both aesthetic and political. Zapatistas strategically build their vision of the ‘other politics’ by constructing a visual and aural world, which is hard to articulate in the traditional vocabulary and imagination of revolution as it is a unique encounter between libertarian Marxism and historical indigenous resistance. This has constituted 'a powerful disruption on the original plan, and the opening of unprecedented possibilities around which a new subjectivity started taking shape ' as Deleuze articulated (Deleuze 1994:190). It is thus essential to examine the art of the Zapatista movement that can present an important political conjuncture from which to sustain other sensorial worlds here and now.
Analyzing their community murals and other visual production with a dialectical materialist perspective, this paper theorizes and historicizes the Zapatista aesthetics and shows how the Zapatista movement in Chiapas has creatively articulated new forms of social politicity with their unique aesthetic engagements.. Zapatista aesthetics is not only important to recognize that 'another aesthetics' is possible but also enables us to map the visible but disregarded ground of aesthetics in recent social movements.
Do contemporary art discourses on globalization and immigration, in fact, conceal the harsher realities of the neoliberal world order by upholding an impasse on the agency of the immigrant? Do the proliferation of exhibitions on immigration and immigrants refer to a particular tendency in the art world’s new fetishization of the Other? Terry Smith proposes the word “worldly” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “planetary” to erase the ontological tension in the terms“global” 'local" and “glocal” but could there be an adequate representation of the psychic, social, economic and political worlds‐within‐the world from the perspective of the art? This paper asks these questions while comparing the recent theoretical and practical developments in the art history discipline and the art world regarding immigration to that of the discourses and exhibitions in the 1990s.
Contributors to this volume encompass a spectrum of roles, including social activists, museum professionals, art historians, and practitioners of collaborative art. Their collective objective revolves around outlining strategies for engaging with art within regions marked by pronounced political divisions. Timely inquiries are posed concerning the capacity of art to orchestrate challenging conversations, establish connections, and devise methodologies conducive to urgent political retorts. Can contemporary art effectively transcend political schisms and progress toward fostering democratic social interaction, openness, and contingency? How might artists contribute to the comprehension of agonistic encounters within urban public spaces? Amidst the escalating influence of regressive forces such as nationalism, racism, and misogyny worldwide, can artworks reciprocate and counterbalance these trends?
As the self-contained realm of art steadily diminishes, artists face the task of crafting new frameworks that enable the articulation of a political aesthetic through democratic dialogue. This collective book delves into the potential for artists to recontextualize their work, thereby establishing platforms wherein a political aesthetic can flourish and contribute to democratic discourse.
"Policing" and "Politics": Clarifying the Rhetoric Surrounding the Relationship of Popular Culture and Art with Activism
The recent controversy surrounding Beyonce’s Super Bowl half-time performance heightened the contradictory and multifaceted relationships among art, popular culture, and activism. Beyonce’s spectacular intervention, with visual tropes such as Black Panther berets and giving the black power salute, was deemed racist and have been attacked by white supremacists leading to protests and boycotts all over the country. On the other hand, it was embraced quickly by mainstream black population (especially women) and some progressive media. Guardian announced the event with the headline “The Superstar Who Brought Black Power to Super Bowl” while New York Times asked “Beyonce in Formation: Entertainer, Activist, Both?” Others pointed out that she was a product of the music industry and was acting as instructed. As a surprise to mainstream analysts, some academics and activists of Black Lives Matter movement voiced their fierce criticism and called the performance “capitalism masked as radical change.” Starting with this popular example, I propose to engage in the discussions that would analyze the paradoxical relationship of art and popular culture to activism and radical critique.
Arguments on Beyoncé’s controversial act are very timely because recently art’s social function as a political activity is also under attack by both the traditional art world professionals and the traditional activists. With what has been described as a “social turn of art,” we have witnessed a shift in art’s engagement with politics, ranging from igniting critical awakening in society to creating communal and egalitarian relations in the public spaces. Hence, the never-ending tension between political activism and artistic representation still persists in the century-old paradox: aestheticization of politics that leads to spectacularization of art to make political ideologies attractive, and politicization of aesthetics that strips art of its autonomy, thus its power to operate as a creative process.
In this paper, with various examples from the art world and popular culture, I will discuss art’s contemporary role in the activist sphere. Deriving from Ranciere’s analysis on the dialectics between “police” and “politics,” between the oppressive forces and oppositional forces, I will analyze different views and perspectives on the social value of art and focus on the question: does art activism tone down the social critique and sanitize political expression by spectacularizing it for popular appeal or does it open up necessary avenues for a radical social critique in the society?
Key Words: Art, Popular Culture, Activism, Social Movements, Social Engagement, Representational Strategies