Since colonialism’s outset as a modern political project, images have been central to extractivism, a racial practice that reduces parts of the Earth and its inhabitants to exploitable and marketable resources. How does this centrality operate in a context where visual culture itself has become an extractive industry with images as its raw material, many of them documenting extractivist violence?

 

The question is nowhere more salient today than in Turkey’s Kurdistan where both conventional resource extraction and the extractive industrialization of visual culture have continued apace and loomed large during the rapid shift in 2015-16 from peace talks to all-out war. In this talk (and his forthcoming book of the same title), Eray Çaylı discusses visual culture’s role in waging, making sense of, and contesting environmental violence. Informed by collaboration-driven research, he analyses images produced and circulated across contemporary art, photojournalism, and social media, charting the visual ecologies involved in this production and circulation.

 

About the Speaker:
Eray Çaylı, PhD (University College London, 2015), is Professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene at University of Hamburg. His work interweaves geography, anthropology, and material/visual culture. At University of Hamburg, he teaches on topics he previously taught for more than a decade at UK universities such as UCL and LSE: urban histories and theories of disaster and conflict, violence’s visualities, and material and embodied politics of racism and racialization. His ongoing research explores the ways histories of political violence bear upon discourses and practices of climate change mitigation, disaster preparedness and environmental resilience in Turkey and Kurdistan, and their environs and diasporas. His publications include the monograph Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey and the anthology Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Visual Culture.

 

Details:

October 27th, 12:30 pm
A404 Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street