Important Dates

The Third Distinguished Okwui Enwezor Lecture 2023

Lecture:

Kültürhane: Hope in the Age of Compost

This year’s Distinguished Okwui Enwezor Lecture will be held by the makers of Kültürhane, a space for thoughts and expressions, and a hub for ways to be in solidarity, in Mersin/Turkey. It is our pleasure to welcome Ulaş Bayraktar and Bediz Yilmaz representing the collective of Kültürhane as lecturers for this year. Ulaş Bayraktar will present the lecture “Hope in the Age of Compost”, discussing the role of rituals in cultural work as community building, the relation of places to regards to ritual, and both place and ritual as sources of hope, by drawing on experiences with the cultural space of Kültürhane in the recent years. Bediz Yilmaz will be present in Bayreuth to engage in conversations with the communities gathered here.

As every year, the lecture will be held online on zoom. It will be simultaneously presented in spoken English, international Sign Language. This year, we present the lecture in spoken French as well.

The lecture is embedded in a reception at Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth. Kindly RSVP for attending in person to iwalewa@uni-bayreuth.de, re: Okwui Enwezor Lecture.

About the lecture

The Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture annually features prominent artist, curator, or scholars, individuals or collectives, who will engage with groundbreaking contributions to the rethinking of the role of arts and culture in a global perspective and celebrate the legacy of curator, historian, an poet Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019). Lecturers in 2021 and 2022 have been Prof Chika Okeke-Agulu, as well as the curatorial duo Nantume Violet and the late Ijeoma Uche-Okeke, represented by Asele Institute.

The Lecture is organised by the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple, Iwalewahaus and BayFinK.

More info about the lecture: katharina.fink@uni-bayreuth.de

This Year’s Lecturer:

Ulaş Bayraktar

Ulaş Bayraktar was an associate professor of political science until he was expelled from university with hundreds of colleagues for being among the petitioners of a call for peace. He has then founded a cafe-library (Kültürhane) with other expelled scholars in Mersin, Turkey. Since then they organise talks, meetings and social events to sustain their relationship with the public and continue to read, reflect, write and publish for the public good.

Bediz Yilmaz

Bediz Yilmaz received her PhD degree from the French Institute of Urban Studies (University of Paris VIII) with a dissertation on the social exclusion of forced migrants in a slum neighbourhood of Istanbul. After working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Mersin University for more than 10 years, she has been dismissed for having signed the Peace Petition (January 2016). Between February 2017-October 2018 she was Philipp Schwartz Fellow at the University of Osnabrück. Since then she lives in Mersin, practices farming and continues academic work as independent researcher. She is also the coordinator of the Online Encyclopedia of Turkey project entitled “100 Years in 100 Objects”.

Kültürhane

Kültürhane was founded in Mersin by a group of scholars expelled from their academic posts for being among the petitioners for peace in 2017. It is a café-library offering a study space with more than 10,000 books and periodicals and hosting public events. Since its foundation, hundreds of talks, concerts, video-projections, expositions and workshops took place. Gradually, a large community of fellow-citizens from different backgrounds and profiles has flourished through encounters during these events. They call themselves the Kültürhane Constellation. The Kültürhane Association was founded in 2020.

From the first day after the earthquake disaster in early 2023, the community got mobilized as Mersin was miraculously untouched despite its closeness to the disaster area. With this proximity, Mersin became a strategic location for identifying realistic needs and destinations as well as rapidly transferring them. The priority was to find and transfer urgent needs of the disaster area. Using their own resources, the Constellation managed to provide dozens of tents, blankets, generators, drills, search & rescue equipment as well as food and clothes. Without an open call for funding and support, people all around the globe contacted Kültürhane and offered their support and assistance. As the aid to the area from other places reached to a certain level albeit still in a quasi-chaos, the Constellation shifted their efforts to the urgent needs of the survivors who have taken refuge in Mersin. Since the disastrous earthquake, Kültürhane has thus become a hub of solidarity and disaster-relief despite its spatial limits: a whole reading room and half of the library has been transformed to storeroom while students kept studying in the same place despite all the traffic and noise of the aid organization.

• Kindly RSVP for attending in person to iwalewa@uni-bayreuth.de, re: Okwui Enwezor Lecture.

• In order to attend via Zoom please visit: https://uni-bayreuth.zoom.us/j/62963234941?pwd=dlRNTmhHZWFpTTF5VjVsV3pES2p4Zz09 Meeting-ID: 629 6323 4941 / Kenncode: 854807