PUBLIC TALK: “Border Futurities: Countermemory and Speculative Imagination in the Cinema of Displacement" by Nilgun Bayraktar, Associate Professor and Chair of the History of Art and Visual Culture Program at California College of the Arts
ABSTRACT: How can art envision radically different futures for those left outside the dominant narrative of Western progress? How can artists and filmmakers imagine alternative futures for communities affected by displacement, violence, and conflict? This talk will explore recent film and video works that address questions of forced displacement, dispossession, and futurity in geopolitical contexts marked by perpetual crisis and conflict. In such contexts, crisis rhetoric has become a mechanism for authorizing exceptional measures, states of emergency, and practices of criminalization and punishment. This talk will examine how film and art conceptualize and portray refugee imaginaries and engage with refugee experiences amidst bordering practices and temporalities of crisis. Focusing on the European “refugee crisis,” it will explore how cinematic and artistic practices can challenge the crisis framework by envisioning alternative decolonial futures.
SPEAKER BIO: Bayraktar is a film and visual culture scholar specializing in the intersections between cinema, art, and cross-border mobility. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals and edited volumes. She is the co-editor of Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave 2024) and author of Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities, explores speculative imagination, counter-memory, and futurity in contemporary art and film. She received a BA in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a PhD in Performance & Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
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