November 17, Monday, 16:00
Venue: Hrant Dink Foundation Anarad Hığutyun Building
Papa Roncalli St. No: 128 Harbiye, Şişli/İstanbul
*The talk will be in English and there will be no simultaneous translation.
This talk is organized by the cooperation of Hrant Dink Foundation and Beyondrest x Waves.
To register for the event, please fill out the form.
In this talk, David Kazanjian shows how Sarkis’s exhibitions Respiro (Venice Biennale 2015) and 7 Tage, 7 Nächte (Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden 2024) prompt us to rethink the concept of reparation. If the “re-” in “reparation” is the part of the word that promises to do justice to past harm by returning us to how things were before the harm and making us whole again, then removing the re- leaves us with the now obsolete word “paration,” which once referred to a process of making ready from ever-potent place of departure. Sarkis’s two exhibitions imagine just such a place of parts without prior or destined wholes, a place that eschews reparation in the name of perpetual becoming: a tipping point, a threshold.
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David Kazanjian David Kazanjian is Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory as well as Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. During 2025-26 he is a fellow at the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities at the New York Public Library and a Visiting Scholar in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His areas of study are transnational American literary and historical studies through the 19th century, political philosophy, continental philosophy, Latin American studies (especially 17th through 19th-century Mexico), colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. He has written and edited numerous articles and monographs, including The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Duke) and Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California). For full bio please click here: https://www.english.upenn.edu/people/david-kazanjian |
The research group "Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) conceptualizes restitution not as an endpoint to mend loss and dispossession but as a starting point to transform the ways in which we make knowledge on art and heritage. Waves is an independent and interdisciplinary research initiative in İstanbul that brings together scholars, artists, and students for seminars, workshops, and reading groups to create, explore, and discuss a series of vital yet unthought questions regarding the history of the present. BEYONDREST is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661).
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
