Seite - 93 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Lora Sariaslan | The Art of Migration 93 Turkish experience, whatever that may be in their or our eyes and therefore become examples of the global worldview that is a hallmark of contemporary art. As Mieke Bal and Miguel A. Hernandez-Navarro write, “migration becomes a double movement, a double metaphor: of transport, hence of instability – the first movement; and subsequent productive tensions – the second movement. Every culture has the aesthetics it deserves; contemporary culture, we con- tend, has therefore a ‘migratory aesthetics’.”3 As Frederick N. Bohrer notes, “[Stuart] Hall makes the case for understanding concepts like belonging and homes in the context of migration, statelessness, diaspora and similar fea- tures of a globalized world. Counterintuitive as it may seem, this conception is already with us, rooted in the trajectories of transnational life.”4 As we come to see identity in the interplay of various dynamic forces, it follows that identity itself is not fixed, but fluid – not given but performed. In this context, Hall writes: “Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact… we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”5 In his terms, we see an identity constituted within representation. That is, it is a sense of oneself and others that emerge in the making, not one designed to correspond to some prior, exterior condition. It comes about not through reiterating but rather questioning and recontextualizing inherited cultural practices. As Katherine Pratt Ewing argues, “the concept of hybridity is not a good model for analyz- ing how people caught between cultures actually negotiate identity, because it does not explain how individuals manage inconsistency through a variety of cultural and psychological strategies that generate multiple, contextualized identities.”6 She later states, “that an ideology based on multiculturalism and celebratory hybridity imagines homogeneous collective identities that hamper recognition of the actual heterogeneity”.7 For Turkey, these oscillations are particularly pronounced, no less because its moderniza- tion had always sought the integration with the West. For those Turkish artists who are on the global art stage, a common thread is the many slippages that occur from (non)belonging, or in other words in forms of identification that are “yes...but”.8 The artists and works below have been chosen for the extent to which they exemplify the contemporary and always evolving no- tion of the ‘fluid space’. This is the space where cultural legacy and inheritance is not abjured, but rather exposed for its heterogeneity, and its constructive capacity to shape and re-imagine itself as they destabilize clichés. In order to give an example from possible routes of mobility or 3 Mieke Bal and Miguel A. Hernandez-Navarro, Art and Visibility in Migratory Cultures, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 11. 4 Frederick N. Bohred, ‘Borders (and Boarders) of Art: Notes from a Foreign Land’, in Belonging and Globalization: Critical Essays in Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by Ed. Kamal Boullata (London: Saqi Books, 2008), 29. 5 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora,’ in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 392. 6 K. P.Ewing, ‘Between Cinema and Social Work: Diasporic Turkish Women and the (Dis)Pleasures of Hybridity’, Cultural Anthropology, 21 2006: 265-294. doi:10.1525/can.2006.21.2.265, here 266. 7 Ibid., 285. 8 See Lora Sariaslan, ‘They are all Turks, but very very nice”: Re-placing contemporary artists of Turkish origin’, European Journal of Futures Research 2016 4, 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309-016-0084-2