Claudia Costa Pederson and Nicholas Adrian Knouf are PhD candidates in Art History and Information Science at Cornell University respectively. Here they broach the subjects of education, representation, and organized networks through a review of works by Arzu Ozkal and My Piece of Chennai.


Persistent Iteration by Arzu Ozkal is a two-channel video from a series of video works exploring identity in relation to the artist’s body. The two juxtaposed video feeds, the first of which shows a close-up shot of Ozkal’s hands and a school notebook on which she repeatedly writes türküm (Turkish); while the second image consists of a recording at an elementary school classroom attended by Ozkal in her childhood. In the latter, a stationary image of saluting Turkish soldiers is superimposed to the left of students engaged in their morning pledge to the Republic of Turkey. The soundtrack is of the students’ voices reciting in unison lead by a senior student. Ozkal is a Turkish-born artist of Turkish and Bosnian descent. The work was generated shortly after the artist’s completion of a MFA in Computer Art at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), and was subsequently shown at various national and international venues.

Meena Natarajan is an interaction researcher and design specialist trained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She joined the project My Piece of Chennai as lead coordinator upon return to her native India in 2008. My Piece of Chennai is a open-source, online project developed by a volunteer network of Chennai- and North American-based designers, artists, entrepreneurs, and community organizers in collaboration with Chennai residents. The project’s website describes the aim of the initiative as an attempt at creating, “a place and medium of collaboration for local communities in monitoring civic amenities in their area, taking joint ownership of their piece of Chennai.” My Piece of Chennai follows on the heels of a number of independently run projects situated in large urban areas of India, such as Sarai, a well known collective in New Delhi, and Pukar in Mumbai, led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. These collectives are established as spaces and networks dedicated to research, practice, and conversation on topics related to urbanism.

Common to Ozkal’s and Natarajan’s projects is an examination of questions regarding subject formation, representation, and community. The points of intersection in these projects pertain to models of organization, an issue pertinent to both artists and activists. This essay examines the relationship between art and design practices conceived from an interventionist standpoint via generative modes of research and the development of autonomous networks.

Arzu Ozkal’s video, Persistent Iteration, evokes a paradigm of population management performed as educational ritual. Students’ bodies and psyches are brought to order through repetitive writing and vocal exercises. Persistent Iteration allows us to witness present-day, ritualized subjection to a vision of community established in Ozkal’s native Republic of Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). This designing of modern Turkish subjectivity on the model of the European nation-state has its roots in an Enlightenment ideology that valorized principles of individualism, self-interest, and utilitarianism, and extolled governance by Law, linear logic, and rationality. In practice, Atatürk had set out to design the institutional apparatus of Turkey in a series of cultural, political, social, and economic reforms upholding nationalism, modernization, democracy, and secularization guided by educational and scientific progress. This became known in Turkey as Kemalism.


Arzu Ozkal,Persistent Iteration, digital video, 2008

Following the arguments of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish on the disciplinary function of teaching handwriting and military drills in schools, Ozkal represents the classroom as an extension of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, i.e., in its new forms of punishment. The militaristic ritual of the morning drill in Ozkal’s school also recalls Atatürk’s own training as a military officer. The liberal values of honesty and hard work (indicated both in speech and in writing in the video) foreground transparency, as a political principle, and efficiency, as an economic aim, two key characteristics of Atatürk’s program of economic, political, and cultural reform.

Artists mentioned in the text
Reinigungsgesellschaft
Katarina Zdjelar
Ana Hušman
Yevgenyj Fiks
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev
Franck Leibovici
Demokratisk Innovation

Communist Party USA Commemorative Stamps - Yevgeniy Fiks, 2008


Last year, I was invited to curate a show as part of the series “Curators from Central and Eastern Europe” in Berlin. (http://www.artlaboratory-berlin.org) The organizers, aware of recent developments in critical art and very much in touch with the art coming out of the different countries of Central and Eastern Europe, did not insist on a traditional approach, such as to invite artists from the European “East,” to discuss updates in the “post-communist condition,” the so-called transition, or EU accession. Nor did they wish to organize the exhibition around an “Eastern” theme. I was given absolute carte blanche. However, I was still asking myself what exactly “curator from EE” could mean today. Could I simply say “nothing in particular” and do a curatorial project unrelated to any kind of “East,” ironically implying that my Russian origin guarantees “Eastern-ness” in whatever I do? Since the 1990s, the East/West problematic in the European art discourses has passed several stages, from mutual “discovery” through “general presentations” of the East to the West, to the method of regarding some “western” issues through an “eastern” lens, none of which makes sense today.

With this heritage in mind, a thematic approach can be very misleading. I decided to come up with a knot of notions, in my mind interesting for their own sake, but still charged with a specific, local, historical context. For example: event-as-rupture versus ritual, or ritual as a socially magnetic event reinforcing a sense of collectivity versus stereotyped formality. Without heavily theorizing the artworks selected, I simply described them from a specific angle, highlighting those elements that create a number of cross-references so that the viewer familiar with East/West discussions could easily decipher those links. As such, nothing is assigned as having the “Eastern touch,” instead, the works twist in thematic threads, each dealing with and acknowledging multiple historical lenses.

In everyday language, an event is a notion that embraces two different meanings—a happening that violates limits or, conversely, invigorates them. One is destructive, the other restrictive; one is closer to the chaos of a revolution, the other to a meticulously performed ceremony with a set of rules. These works I chose deal explicitly with the second meaning: they comment on contemporary rituals with pronounced interests in social codes that often re-emerge in times of crisis and insecurity. Some of the works gathered here reflect on today’s ritualistic behavior when so-called “flexible personalities” engage in a performance of specific and mainly self-imposed rules. (On the notion of flexible personality see http://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html)

if you had to represent the Mediterranean sea from a political point of view, how would you represent it ? welcoming ceremony of the arrival of the heads of state in the mediterranean sea by president of the french republic.

The rules of correct behaviour found in books of etiquette present themselves as aiding communiction and helping people understand each other. They also claim to help us engage socially with greater ease and self confidence.

An environment that is intended to be spiritual merges with the behavior of the staff and visitors of a middle European leisure facility. The result is
a culture of simulation that causes the disappearance of borders between different forms of culture.

Since it is forbidden to film in airports, they had to hide the camera and the takes capture not only the quotidian airport ritual of body search, but also reveal the condition of making this particular film. The camera targets the desirable shot, but can't hold it long and needs to turn away, because someone might have looked at the artists at that moment.