Zoey Lubitz & Aslı Özdoyuran: Center for Experimental Lectures at BAS

As part of a collaboration between artist-run space BAS (Istanbul) and the artists project the Center for Experimental Lectures (New York), Aslı Özdoyuran and Ζoey Lubitz are studying the relationship between archives, exposure, visibility, histories-under-erasure, or, how history is stored, preserved, and performed as knowledge. This research is occasioned by an invitation from BAS —an artist(s)-run non profit space in Istanbul, dedicated to the collection, exhibition, production and distribution of artists’ publications and printed matter— to the Center for Experimental Lectures to commission a series of events to be presented in the space. Through events that play with, resist, and extend the form of the lecture through artistic practice, the Center for Experimental Lectures interrogates the various ways that knowledge is embodied, given form, communicated, and administered. As a collaboration between an American artists project and a Turkish artist-run space, this collaboration also raises issues in terms of transnational exchange and travel, translation, and the international character of the arts as it operates along vectors of import and export of culture.

While the artist commissions to be staged at BAS have yet to occur, in large part due to the political instability and cultural climate following the tragic 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquake, the research has already come to bear in our own practices. For Zoey, a class taught at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Fall 2022, called “Crosshairs: Optical media, hypervisibility, and representation”, included a section entitled “Categorization, colonial capture, and resistance” specifically examining archives and their relation to colonial administration, demography, and knowledge production. For Aslı, who was working on the inventory of BAS, questions around accessibility, representability, and interpretation of an archive became prominent.

Our research:

The English word “lecture” comes from the Latin leer, to read. “To take a book by an author – his autograph manuscript, moreover – out of the dusty pile is to put a stop to the endless circulation of words”, writes Friedrich Kittler in “Discourse Networks”. There is a kind of funny inversion in Kittler, where in the library, unopened, the words circulate endlessly, and the human activity of reading is a seizure, a pause. As a scholarly activity, the lecture might classically be thought as merely reading aloud to an audience as a part of the mimetic reproduction of knowledge, so as to pass a textual unit from one scholar to a student, who commits it to their notes and, hence, to memory. What is articulable, utterable, even thinkable, depends on the methods available for giving voice to thought. The way we communicate with each other determines what can be communicated. Content and form arrive together. What happens when the basic components of the lecture, its rituals and media, become a site of struggle and artistic experimentation?

It is the contention of our research that a critical and experimental engagement with the lecture form can also be brought to bear on “archives”, in particular as a method for contesting the closed, authoritative, and normative impulses associated with archival procedures and structures. Like the lecture, the archive appears to us as a site of struggle. It is an architectural prop and media metaphor for memory, for collecting, and for the institutional and state processes that overdetermine the past. Lecture performance presents an opportunity for finding affiliations, cross-references, and information in the closed, endless circulation of objects and papers in the archive that might not have been originally selected. We propose that archives are only alive through their past and present interpretations. In this vein, our research led us to Akram Zaatari’s work. A throughline in his work includes curating selections of photographs or videos to reveal homosexual and queer forms of identifications. More specifically, we looked at Zaatari’s processing of the archives of the Lebanese studio photographer Hashem el-Madani.

On the other hand, there is the reality of the archive as a tool of erasure, colonial and imperial. In our research, we were also inspired by the work of Gayatri Gopinath. She writes of Saidiya Hartman’s memoir “Lose your Mother”, in which the author searches various material archives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, that “her engagement with the material archive yields nothing but greater historical blankness” *. In both Zaatari and Hartman’s engagements, a form of “critical fabulation” – whether through selection and re-contextualization in the former, or memoiristic imagination in the latter – frames the kinds of archival practice that seem most prescient to us in our work together.

In her lecture in Turkish, titled “How can seeing and knowing be useful in relation to violence, crime, and responsibility?”, Özgür Sevgi Goral questions the emphasis on historical erasure, layering it with its performativity, defining the crime not only through the act of erasure but also through its staging. Instead of the commonly used term “amnesia”, Goral suggests “aphasia” – shifting the focus from the failure to remember to the lack of words to describe historical evidence. Then she points at the arts, and asks: “Can art do anything to further the capacity of human testimony?”**

In our research, we continuously ask where the archive is positioned in relation to the historical crisis of witnessing. Does it perpetuate the impossibility of historical representation or does it actually expand the capacity of evidence? What then, becomes the role of the artist?

In light of these questions, we watched Sanaz Sohrabi’s film “One Image, Two Acts”, which tells the story of oil production in southern Iran through image sources from the official archive of British Petroleum, housed by the UK government. Sohrabi edits, superimposes, and comments on these historic images, relating a different history, one which shows the effects monopolization and natural resource extraction had on the internal political situation. It also shows how, ultimately, the system created to produce and disseminate these images was reclaimed by the developing anti-colonial film movement, the Iranian New Wave.

We keep in mind that archives can only be represented through their quotations – constituents that are plucked from the whole – or through their metadata, as is the first thing one encounters when approaching an archive. We keep coming back at these questions in the continuing archival process of BAS, while indexing each publication that the space holds. We are interested in the questions that archives withhold and see the lecture performance as a fitting medium to extract these questions, once again returning to Goral’s point on knowing and seeing.

* Gayatri Gopinath, “Archive, Affect, and the Everyday” in “Political Emotions”, eds. Janet Staigner, Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds (New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), 164-192.

** Özgür Sevgi Goral, “Şiddet, suç, sorumluluk bahsinde görmek ve bilmek neye yarar?”, YouTube, uploaded by KIRIK, 06.12.2022.