TEXTILE PRACTICES AS MEMORY MAKING: WEAVING BONDS BETWEEN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ART AND ACTIVISM IN TURKEY (2010s–Present)

This dissertation titled Textile Practices As Memory Making: Weaving Bonds Between The Past, Present And Future In Contemporary Art And Activism In Turkey (2010s-Present) investigates the ways in which contemporary textile- based practices participate in the making of collective memories of violent pasts through an analysis of cases from/linked with Turkey. It focuses on how the material properties and connotations of textiles and textile-based techniques can be mobilized for memory work by curatorial, artistic and activist practices while simultaneously examining the permeabilities and tensions between these. Situated within the intersections of contemporary art and activism, the cases analyzed in-depth in the scope of this dissertation are as follows: (1) Embroideries made by Hripsimeh Sarkissian (b.1908, Dersim, Ottoman Empire – 2000, Istanbul) a woman who survived the Armenian Genocide and the Dersim Massacre, and her granddaughter Anita Toutikian’s (b.1961, Beirut, Lebanon) curatorial work with and reinterpretation of these objects (2) Textile-based works by the visual artist Eşref Yıldırım (b.1978, Bursa, Turkey) for which he rewrote parts from a poem by the deceased poet Arkadaş Z. Özger (b.1948, Bursa – d.1973, Ankara) (3) Örgülü Mücadele, a group collectively knitting blankets as a part of the struggle for justice in the aftermath of the bomb attack that targeted the participants of a peace rally in Ankara on 10 October 2015 All three of the cases are subject to a comprehensive scholarly study for the first time within the scope of this dissertation. This is one of the important contributions of this study. In examining the cases, I explore how creative practices can provide grounds for political, artistic, art historical and activist possibilities other than the representation of past violence. I deploy three notions, also by demonstrating the interactions between them: act of making, materiality and collectivity. I argue that placing the acts of making - understood as bodily labor, procedural and material – as crucial elements in the analysis and data collection enables the identification of collectivities that are not always immediately apparent. Informed by feminist and queer politics and ethics, my proposal is that the abovementioned political, artistic and activist possibilities, which might contribute to both theory and practice, occur within and through these collectivities and processes of making. The individual case analyses exemplify and explicit how this proposal can be implemented. In this respect, this dissertation offers an alternative and applicable analytical and methodological framework that can provide insightful contribution to the studies in art history, critical textile scholarship and memory studies.