The forms of oppression targeting queer life in Turkey are restricting the conditions for organizing, gathering, and reaching one another. In this seminar, Alper Turan will discuss ways of becoming visible, hiding, and staying together under conditions of repression, drawing on exhibitions he has organized since 2018. Approaching exhibitions as public stages where images, narratives, forms of dissent, and political conflicts come into encounter, Turan looks to these encounters for possibilities of living together and building counterpublics.
Tracing the movements between body, image, and text, the seminar will focus on the tension between the political promises of visibility and the risks of exposure, surveillance, and targeting. Throughout the seminar, one question will reverberate: How can we remain public without surrendering ourselves to the gaze of power, to a single image and a single narrative prepared for us, and without giving up on one another?
Alper Turan is a curator and writer based between Berlin, Toronto, and Istanbul, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. His doctoral research focuses on the politics of queer image-making in Turkey. His work examines how images and bodies become visible through movements between disclosure and withdrawal, legibility and opacity, appearance and disappearance.
He previously served as a Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and as a General Idea Fellow at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and worked as a curator at Protocinema. His projects have been presented at Images Festival (Toronto); Iniva (London); Wallach Art Gallery and ArteEast (New York); Wiener Festwochen (Vienna); Queer Museum and Volkskundemuseum (Vienna); A Tale of A Tub (Rotterdam); and the 13th Sharjah Biennial. His writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, Metropolis M, C Magazine, Artnet and OnCurating.
