Session 12 – Memory Revisited 4

Hlynur Helgason
Resisting the Effacement of Culture. Rememory in the Work of Palestinian Artist Emily Jacir

In 2005 we witness an important change in the work Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, when her focus turns to the general historical and cultural relationships between Palestine, the Mediterranean at large, and the rest of the world—towards resisting the systematic modern effacement of more than two millennia of historical and cultural relations between her own culture and the west. A focal point in this change is her work Material for a film, which she began in 2005. At its centre is an attempt, via archival material, to understand and re-member the brutal assassination of Palestine author Wael Zuaiter in Rome in 1972, one of many assassinations of Palestine intellectuals by Israeli agents worldwide in 1972. Another work of import is her recent Notes for a cannon, a work whose central tenet was a bell and a pile of stones intended to commemorate the clock tower that stood by the Jaffa gate into old Jerusalem and that was demolished by the British occupation forces in 1922, in Jacir’s words: “to make the city match the British imaginary of what biblical Jerusalem should look like.”
My aim is to elucidate how Jacir takes on important issues of cultural effacement, through a charged process of re-memory establishing a density of historical meaning and emotion. This process I find apt to compare to the way W.G. Sebald re-creates the subjective ‘volume’ of histories and meaning in his works.

Dr. Hlynur Helgason (born 1961) works as an artist and art theorist in Reykjavík, Iceland. He has a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School. He is Lector in Art History at the University of Iceland and was Chair of NORDIK—Nordic Association of Art History from 2015–2018. His research focuses on a historical critique of 20th century Icelandic and Scandincavian art and an analysis of politically motivated contemporary artists, such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Emily Jacir, and Christoph Büchel. In 2013 he published Beyond within: post-cinematic possibilities of play and action with Atropos Press.

Beril Cakir
Identity and Memory: Counter-Hegemonic Implications of Saturday Mothers in Turkey and Artistic Representations of Resistance

Since 1995, mothers whose children disappeared under police custody are holding weekly vigils at one of the busiest spots in Istanbul. Although they had to take a ten-year break due to harsh police intervention, they resumed their protest in 2009, and marked the longest lasting act of civil disobedience in Turkey. Enforced disappearances, targeting especially leftist and Kurdish opposition, had become a reality by the mid-1990s. Saturday Mothers have been asking the whereabouts of the victims, and demanding accountability since then, yet their requests have never been met by the state officials. While challenging the traditional ideologies of womanhood, the mothers of the disappeared reconstructed motherhood as an unprecedented form of political agency in Turkey. The constitution of their new subjectivities as social and political actors in the public sphere aligned with their claim over social memory. Through performative repertories of action, Saturday Mothers displayed alternative patterns of remembering. Their act revealed forms of counter-memory on state ideology, social justice and citizenship by challenging hegemonic norms on what is to be remembered and forgotten. Their long-winded protest has been a landmark in human rights movement in Turkey, and its impact has been generated through arts and literature to a great extent. This paper aims at exploring the ways in which the cause of the movement is represented through music, poetry, drama and literary prose, and questions the significance of arts and literature in the empowerment of a political struggle.

After completing her undergraduate studies at Boston Emmanuel College in Political Science, Beril Cakir received her Master’s degree in Conflict and Peace Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Cakir is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, and her research deals with socio-political analysis of the Kurdish social movement in Turkey, with a focus on spatial dynamics of contention. Her research interests include nationalism, social movements, sociology of space, and the Kurdish question in Turkey.