Masculinity, Scatology, Mooning and the Queer/able Art of Gilbert & George: On the Visual Discourse of Male Ejaculation and Anal Penetration

The aim of this essay is to investigate the intersections between masculinity, shame, art, anality, the abject and embodiment by focusing on a particular period of the British art duo Gilbert & George's work in the 1990s. In their series The Naked Shit Pictures (1994), The Fundamental Pictures (1996) and The Rudimentary Pictures (1999), the duo's artistic self-performance opens a scatological narrative territory where the male body encounters its own abject fluids strategically magnified. Situating itself within the boundary between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the phallus and the abject, this essay argues that Gilbert & George's art-works mentioned above could be regarded as visual commentaries on and queer interventions into bodily anxieties of normative masculinities. It thus reads the artists’ visual discourse of performative hypervisibility as a queer/ing one where the conventional male masculinity confronts simultaneously its ejaculatory bliss and its fear of anal penetration

Catalogue Note on Taner Ceylan's 1879 (2011)

In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan engages with the questions of history and Orientalism by creating yet another visual allegory. The mischievous gaze of the smoking Ottoman boy in 1881 and the homoerotic farewell scene in 1923 are followed this time by an ingenious montage of Pascal Sébah's photograph from the 1880s and Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866). In this intricately crafted oil painting, Ceylan juxtaposes different yet related histories of artistic style and connoisseurship to trigger a rethinking of Orientalism, femininity, the veil and the gaze. Recovering and drawing together forgotten legacies and silenced voices in a brilliantly imagined new setting, Ceylan invites the viewer to look behind the veil of Orientalism and the politics of representation. Rather than offering a corrective, the artist amalgamates irony, playfulness and realism to recast Orientalism as heterogeneous and susceptible to negotiation, contestation and even subversion

Queer Art of Sodomitical Sabotage, Queer Ethics of Surfaces: Embodying Militarism and Masculinity in Erinç Seymen’s Portrait of a Pasha (2009)

In his art-work Portrait of a Pasha (2009), Turkish artist Erinç Seymen exploits the non-evidential rumour about the conversation between Turkey’s 1980 coup d’état leader, the general Kenan Evren, and the respectable Turkish music icon Zeki Müren, a singer of ambiguous sexuality, also known as ‘the Pasha of Art’ and famous for his extravagant costumes and manners on stage. So the story goes, in the late 1980s, the general asks Müren why he had been given the title pasha which has the historical reference to high-ranking Ottoman military members. Müren answers: "this nation was so angry about what you did during the military coup but they couldn’t be very open with their anger. They thus called me pasha". In Portrait of a Pasha, Seymen draws a portrait of Zeki Müren on a white wooden panel and a marksman shoots the panel from a distance by following the artist’s portraying lines. The final art-work contains only the bullet holes out of which Müren’s face appears. This article examines the aesthetic discourse of embodiment in Seymen’s art-practice by focusing on the ways in which his art-work refers to and critiques the hegemonic intersectionalities between militarism, nationalism, heteronormativity and masculinity in Turkey. Though sceptical of an unproblematically performed de-contextualization of queer theories from its western referent, my reading of Seymen's artistic performance will investigate the possible strategies of translating and transposing queer aesthetics into a practice that insists on a local political context and acts as a methodological object in its potential to reciprocate the geopolitics of critical theory

Curating folk horror: anti-canonisation, critical transnationalism, and crossover festival programming

An output of the British Academy project titled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics [https://folkhorrorproject.uk], this article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnational horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of recent curatorial attempts to frame the “folk horror revival” in transnational settings (including Severin Films’ All The Haunts Be Hours: A Compendium of Folk Horror [2021] and Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror [2021]), this study focuses on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which the author curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folklore-through-horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary to historically significant examples of folk horror that fall outside its Anglo-American canon. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, the author also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinemas through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article provides a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror and its reception in international festival settings

Vicdanen, Tersten: Erinç Seymen'in Çileci Sanatı

Bu çalışma Erinç Seymen’in eserlerinden oluşan bir seçkiyi derinlemesine incelemeyi hedefliyor. Seymen’in sanat pratiğinin sadece çağdaş sanatın küreselleşen değerlerinin analizini değil, aynı zamanda queer kuramının ve siyasetinin uluslararası seyahatinin beraberinde getirdiği, bilgi üretimine içkin jeopolitik gerginlikleri de kapsayan bir eleştirel sahada hareket etmeyi mümkün kıldığını düşünüyorum. Dolayısıyla, bu yazının temel amacı, Seymen’in sanatındaki haz, cinsellik ve tecessüm [embodiment] söyleminin estetik dinamiğini ele almak ve sanatçının eserlerinin, çağdaş Türkiye bağlamında militarizm, milliyetçilik, heteronormativite ve erkekliğe dair hakim söylemlerin birbirleriyle kesiştiği hegemonik alanlar üzerine ürettiği eleştirel söylemi tartışmaya açmak olacak. Queer kuramının ve siyasetinin, ortaya çıktığı Batılı bağlamın söylemsel etkilerini sorunsallaştırmaksızın, başka yerel bağlamlara uygulanışının veya uyarlanışının olası zorluklarını ve risklerini her zaman hatırlamak gerekiyor. Bununla birlikte, kültürel kuramın araçsallaştırdığı (veya “uygulandığı”) nesnenin de aktif bir ilişkilenme potansiyeline sahip olabileceği ve kuramsal pratiğin içerdiği kavramsal ve metodolojik varsayımları sarsıp dönüştürebileceğini unutmamalıyız. Dolayısıyla, Seymen’in sanatına ilişkin olan bu kapsamlı okuma, “queer estetik” mefhumunu sadece yerel politik bağlam üzerine radikal bir eleştiriyi içerecek ve sadece üretildiği toprakların bir alegorisi olarak değerlendirilebilecek bir sanat pratiğine uyarlama kaygısı taşımıyor. Queer söylemini, kültürel kuramın ve küreselleşen çağdaş sanat pazarının jeopolitiğine de atıfta bulunma potansiyeline sahip, kendi uluslararası dolaşımının farkında, kuramsal/metodolojik bir nesne olarak işlev görebilen, maruz kaldığı eleştirel bilgi üretim odaklarını da dönüştürme potansiyeline sahip bir sanat pratiğiyle buluşturuyor

Ameliorative homecomings: framing the queer migrant in A sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s gonna love me now? (2016)

This study critically analyzes representations of the queer migrant subject in two documentaries, A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016). Both films construct a drama of conflicting intersections between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity, which is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrant subjectivity. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the queer migrant’s constitutive attachment. These documentaries’ (re)domestication of the queer subject seems to promote a neoliberal identity politics of sexual humanitarianism, in which collective struggles are occluded by individual, heroic testimonials of homecoming

Catalogue Note on Taner Ceylan's Cage of Flesh (2012)

Cage of Flesh (Ten Kafesi), the most recent piece by the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan, engages with the politics of and the erotics within representation in Orientalist painting by confronting the viewer with a re-imagined figure of an odalisque. Following his highly acclaimed Lost Painting Series that featured Fake World (2011), 1640 (2011), 1879 (2011), 1923 (2010) and 1881 (2010), Cage of Flesh uses an ingenious amalgam of allusions to both Orientalist eroticisation of female flesh and the Sufi tradition of imagining the flesh as a cage of worldly desires. Referring to the infatuation of the Orientalist male gaze with Oriental female carnality, Ceylan envisages the flesh as a cage in which the odalisque is incarcerated. The reduction of "Oriental" woman to a silenced, oppressed and submissive body codified as beautiful, smooth and sensual flesh to invite and satisfy the Western male gaze deprives the odalisque of her individuality and renders her flesh a cage in which she is merely a body that cannot speak its name

Van Giffen's Dogs:Cranial Osteometry of Iron Age to Medieval Period Dogs from the Northern Netherlands

This paper presents biometric data from a collection of 488 dogs skulls originating from 58 (archaeological) sites in the northern Netherlands dating from the Iron Age to the Medieval Period. The crania were originally collected and documented in the early 20th century by Prof. Albert Egges van Giffen, one of the pioneers of Dutch archaeology and archaeozoology. The ‘De honden van Van Giffen’ project has transcribed, translated and digitized the original handwritten records and tables, supplementing the information with new photographs of a selection of the specimens, and made the dataset openly accessible for researchers worldwide on easy.dans.knaw.nl. This dataset is an unparalleled treasure trove of canid osteometric data with sustainable reuse potential for research into dog domestication, the evolution of dog breeds, and cranial variability in canids.   Funding statement: Making the data digitally available in an open access environment was funded by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) via Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS) as a Kleine Data Projecten (KDP) grant. The original data and facilities for carrying out the project were provided by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology of the University of Groningen

Ancient goat genomes reveal mosaic domestication in the Fertile Crescent

Current genetic data are equivocal as to whether goat domestication occurred multiple times or was a singular process. We generated genomic data from 83 ancient goats (51 with genome-wide coverage) from Paleolithic to Medieval contexts throughout the Near East. Our findings demonstrate that multiple divergent ancient wild goat sources were domesticated in a dispersed process that resulted in genetically and geographically distinct Neolithic goat populations, echoing contemporaneous human divergence across the region. These early goat populations contributed differently to modern goats in Asia, Africa, and Europe. We also detect early selection for pigmentation, stature, reproduction, milking, and response to dietary change, providing 8000-year-old evidence for human agency in molding genome variation within a partner species

Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes's Cinema of Queer Pastiche

Drawing on the emergence of a new attitude among gay and lesbian filmmakers on the 1990s American festival circuit, the film critic Ruby Rich, while defining New Queer Cinema (NQC), implies that a narrative shift of political emphases took place in gay and lesbian cinema from an affirmative minority identity politics to a much more skeptical critique of shame and stigma ‘unit[ing] discrete communities of outsiders under the commonality of perversion’. This article focuses on one of the founding figures in queer film aesthetics, Todd Haynes, who has also been regarded as the key auteur director of NQC. Departing from Rich's identification of a situationist aesthetics via pastiche, this paper investigates Todd Haynes’s film aesthetics in unpacking the aspects of his queer critique in cinematic representation, which reiterates the impossible political-ontological claim of post-AIDS New Queer Cinema: a critical but cinephilic play with the canonic trends of visual representation in film via strategic perturbations of the identificatory markers of gender and sexuality. Concentrating on his films Poison (1991), Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), [Safe] (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002), the discussion aims at questioning the critical relationship of Haynes's films with gender, sexuality, genre, and the canons of film aesthetics. From the performative use of Jean Genet haunting the sadomasochistic ascesis in the fragmented inter-genre pastiche Poison to the visual re-appropriation of the Freudian phantasmatic of beating in Dottie; from the de-gayed allegorization of AIDS in [Safe] to the camp aesthetics of ambiguity in the Sirkian melodrama Far From Heaven, Haynes's practice operates here as methodological object that appears to reciprocate contemporary queer theory and its engagement with history, memory, culture, body, and subjectivity