Nilgun Bayraktar | California College of the Arts (original) (raw)

Nilgun Bayraktar

I am an associate professor of film history, theory & criticism in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Film Program. My work focuses on migrant and diasporic cinema in Europe, transnational cinemas, experimental and avant-garde cinema, contemporary art, and performance. I received a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in Film & Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
In Fall 2019, I was a research fellow at NIAS (The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) in Amsterdam. In Spring 2019, I was a visiting scholar at European Culture and Literature Program at University of Groningen supported by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

My book, Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge 2016, 2018), examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Probing questions of aesthetic experimentation in relation to sociopolitical ones, this book provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

My current book project, titled Border Futurities: Counter-memory and Critical Dystopia in Contemporary Art and Cinema, focuses on the dystopian sci-fi imagination, dark humor, futurity, and counter-memory in contemporary cinema and works of visual art that deal with forced displacement and perpetual crises. My project navigates the emerging fields of postcolonial sci-fi cinema, global memory studies, and critical border studies, and expands the scope of my earlier work beyond Europe to draw attention to the multiplication and diffusion of borderlands that work to divide the world into desirable destinations and undesirable origins.
Before coming to CCA, I was a postdoctoral lecturer in the Humanities Program at Boğaziçi University (2012-2015), where I co-designed and co-taught core courses on literary, philosophical, and cinematic works from Ancient Greece to modernity. I have also been a James R. Gray Postdoctoral Lecturer at UC Berkeley (2011- 2012), where I taught courses on world cinema and auteur theory.
At CCA, I teach courses such as "Dystopian Sci-fi Cinema," "Photography and the Visual Archive," “Introduction to the Arts,” "The City and the Moving Image," "Mobility and Migration in Cinema," "Film Language and Form," "Film Practices and Genres," "Graduate Film History," "Contemporary Art History and Theory."
Supervisors: Prof. Shannon Jackson (Dissertation chair), Prof. Deniz Gokturk, and Prof. Miriam Sas

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Books by Nilgun Bayraktar

Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representatio... more Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.

işte böyle güzelim... kadınların kadınlara anlattıkları cinsellik hikâyelerinden oluşan bir okuma... more işte böyle güzelim... kadınların kadınlara anlattıkları cinsellik hikâyelerinden oluşan bir okuma tiyatrosu. 2002 Şubat’ında biraraya gelerek önce birbirimizle, sonra da başka kadınlarla cinselliklerimizi konuşmaya başladık: Bastırılan, kışkırtılan, metalaşan, küfürleşen, gözlerden ırak yaşanan, gözümüze gözümüze sokulan, haz veren, gizlenen, utanılan, korkulan, susulan, arzulanan, içimizi kıpır kıpır yapan, kâbusa dönüşen, adı olmayan, adını başkalarının koyduğu cinselliklerimiz önce söze döküldü, sonra da yazıya.

Sel Yayıncılık tarafından Mayıs 2008’de yayınlandı

(Hülya Adak, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Esin Düzel, Nilgün Bayraktar)
işte böyle güzelim... İstanbul: Sel, 2008 (3. baskı 2012)

Papers by Nilgun Bayraktar

Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2012

ABSTRACT

Orienting Istanbul, 2010

Introduction Deniz Gokturk, Ipek Tureli and Levent Soysal Part 1: Paths to Globalization 1. Istan... more Introduction Deniz Gokturk, Ipek Tureli and Levent Soysal Part 1: Paths to Globalization 1. Istanbul into the Twenty-First Century Caglar Keyder 2. The Soul of a City: Huzun, Keyif, Longing Engin Isin Part 2: Heritage and Regeneration Debates 3. Challenging the Neoliberal Urban Regime: Regeneration and Resistance in Basibuyuk and Tarlabasi Ozlem Unsal and Tuna Kuyucu 4. Contestations over a Living Heritage Site: The Case of Buyuk Valide Han Aysegul Baykan, Zerrin Iren Boynudelik, Belkis Uluoglu and Burak Sevingen 5. Practices of Neo-Ottomanism: Making Space and Place Virtuous in Istanbul Jeremy F. Walton 6. Modelling Citizenship in Turkey's Miniature Park Ipek Tureli Part 3: The Mediatized City 7. The Spectator in the Making: Modernity and Cinema in Istanbul 1896-1928 Nezih Erdogan 8. Istanbul through Migrants' Eyes Ipek Tureli 9. Istanbul Convertible: A Magic Carpet Ride through Genres Deniz Bayrakdar and Elif Akcali 10. Projecting Polyphony: Moving Images, Travelling Sounds Deniz Gokturk Part 4: Art in the City 11. Optimism Reconsidered: Curator Hou Hanru interviewed by Nilgun Bayraktar 12. Art in Istanbul: Contemporary Spectacles and History Revisited Jale Erzen 13. The Politics of Urban Arts Events: A Comparison of Istanbul and Berlin Banu Karaca Part 5: A European Capital? 14. The European Capital of Culture Programme and Istanbul 2010 Carola Hein 15. Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture: Towards a Participatory Culture? Oguz Oner 16. Counting as European: Jews and the Politics of Presence in Istanbul Marcy Brink-Danan 18. Future(s) of the City Levent Soysal Epilogue: Cultural Politics in the Kaleidoscope Michael Herzfeld

Negotiations of Migration

Journal of European Studies

This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Medi... more This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Mediterranean Sea. In the last few decades, the Mediterranean has been transformed into a fatal space for those attempting to cross the sea without documents. The dominant Eurocentric perspective reductively views these refugee and migrant crossings as violations of European borders. Such limited frameworks feed into the category of ‘crisis’, which demands immediate intervention and top-down governmental solutions, such as the militarization of borders. In this article, I explore essay films that counter and disrupt the ‘crisis’ framework and the sense of urgency and tragedy it evokes: Havarie (2016), a slow-form documentary by Philip Scheffner, and The Leopard (2007), a dance film by Isaac Julien. Drawing on recent theories of multi-directional memory, I investigate the ways in which these films establish mnemonic connections across diverse experiences of displacement, including those prod...

This dissertation investigates the historical and contemporary tensions around mobility and ident... more This dissertation investigates the historical and contemporary tensions around mobility and identity in Europe since WWII, with particular emphasis on their contemporary configurations. Drawing on recent theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving image art, and mobility studies, I provide close and historically situated readings of films, videos, and installations within a larger historical and geographical scope of European migration that encompasses the Middle East and Africa. The films and videos I study establish a non-Western countergeography of Europe that has produced multiple "others" in its constant efforts to recompose its borders and identity. They address psychological and sociological processes of integration and cultural syncretism as well as discrimination and racism against minorities and migrants. Although the geopolitical focus of my dissertation is Europe, the works I analyze challenge territorially bounded conceptions of identity and culture. They extend representation to socially disenfranchised groups such as undocumented migrants by narrating multiple, and often times perilous, forms of travel and border-crossing from migrants' perspective. With attention not only to the shifting political and geographic borders of Europe but also to the shifting institutional and aesthetic borders of cinema, these works likewise invoke a powerful cinematiccountergeography that investigates the changing terrains of cinema and contemporary art. The first chapter, on The Edge of Heaven (2007) by Fatih Akın and Countess Sophia Hatun (1997) by Ayşe Polat, focuses on second-generation Turkish German labor migrants and analyzes the cinematic production of heterogeneous diasporic spaces and subjects that transcend binaries of host-home or migrant-citizen. My second chapter, on Hidden (2005) by Michael Haneke and Exiles (2004) by Tony Gatlif, discusses the second-generation North African migrants in France and the violent history of French colonization of Algeria in relation to contemporary (postcolonial) French society. The third chapter, on the site-specific video installation Küba (2004) by Kutluğ Ataman, focuses on the counter-stereotypical representation of migration in relation to the multichannel installation format as well as traditional forms of political cinema. The fourth and fifth chapters, on the video essay Sudeuropa (2005-7) by Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio and the video installation Sahara Chronicle (2006-9) by Ursula Biemann, respectively, examine the relationship between "illegal" migration and the creation of new borderlands in Southern Europe and North, West, and sub-Saharan Africa.

... Full text not available from this repository. Item Type: Book. Subjects: H Social Sciences &a... more ... Full text not available from this repository. Item Type: Book. Subjects: H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General). ID Code: 11856. Deposited By: Hülya Adak. Deposited On: 31 Aug 2009 09:21. Last Modified: 26 May 2010 15:02. Repository Staff Only: item control page. ...

Journal of European Studies, 2019

This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Medi... more This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Mediterranean Sea. In the last few decades, the Mediterranean has been transformed into a fatal space for those attempting to cross the sea without documents. The dominant Eurocentric perspective reductively views these refugee and migrant crossings as violations of European borders. Such limited frameworks feed into the category of 'crisis', which demands immediate intervention and top-down governmental solutions, such as the militarization of borders. In this article, I explore essay films that counter and disrupt the 'crisis' framework and the sense of urgency and tragedy it evokes: Havarie (2016), a slow-form documentary by Philip Scheffner, and The Leopard (2007), a dance film by Isaac Julien. Drawing on recent theories of multi-directional memory, I investigate the ways in which these films establish mnemonic connections across diverse experiences of displacement, including those produced by European colonialism, transatlantic slavery and postcolonial conflict.

Keywords: borders, essay film, Europe, multi-directional/palimpsestic memory, refugee crossings

The Screen City Biennial Journal , 2017

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Mar 2013

This article examines the documentary video essay Sudeuropa (2005–2007) by Raphaël Cuomo and Mari... more This article examines the documentary video essay Sudeuropa (2005–2007) by Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio, which focuses on undocumented migration in Southern Europe, in particular the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. Since the late 1990s, the touristic island of Lampedusa has become a major crossroad in transnational migratory routes across the Mediterranean, where the material effects of border securitization and militarization are heavily felt. Sudeuropa underscores the interdependency of seemingly unrelated mobilities: undocumented migration, tourism and journalism. It reveals the significant role of migrant labour in the development and maintenance of tourism by focusing on migrant workers involved in the hospitality industry. In this article, Sudeuropa is analysed in relation to theories of essay film. The genre of essay film, which has been recognized as a distinct form of film-making since the 1960s, provides a highly productive and politically revealing understanding of the dynamic between migrancy and visuality. Essay film has been described as a genre in between documentary and fiction, suggesting the fluidity and indeterminacy of its aesthetic and political qualities. Sudeuropa calls for a reconsideration of the genre, because it plays with fact and fiction, poses problems without answers and is profoundly self-reflexive.

TURKISH GERMAN CINEMA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, Oct 2012

Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe, Jun 2010

KEBİKEÇ, 2009

Kontes Sophia Hatun [Gräfin Sophia Hatun] (1997) etrafı ağaçlarla çevrili bir gölün adeta bir man... more Kontes Sophia Hatun [Gräfin Sophia Hatun] (1997) etrafı ağaçlarla çevrili bir gölün adeta bir manzara resmini andıran görüntüsüyle açılır. Kamera yavaşca sola doğru çevrinmeye başladığında, yaşlı bir adamın türkü söyleyen sesi duyulur. Kamera, gölün kenarına çökmüş türkü söyleyen adamı çerçevenin merkezine yerleştirinceye değin hareket eder. Kar taneleriyle süslenen görüntüde, siyahlar içindeki adam Haydar Haydar türküsünü söylemektedir (altyazıda türkünün çevirisine yer verilmez): "Kah çıkarım gökyüzüne seyderim alemi / Kah inerim yeryüzüne seyreder âlem beni. / Haydar Haydar, seyreder âlem beni. / Seyreder âlem beni." Türkünün ortasında ekran kararır ve açılış jeneriği görünür. Adam arka planda türküye devam etmektedir: "Ben yitirdim ben ararım / o yar benim, kime ne?" Sonraki sahne uzaktan adama doğru yaklaşan bir atlıyla açılır. Adam devam eder: "Kah giderim öz bağıma gül dererim, kime ne?" At yaklaştıkca, at binenin 18. yüzyıla ait üst sınıf kıyafetleri giyen bir kadın olduğu ortaya çıkar. Kendine arkadan yaklaşan atlıyı duyan adam türküsünü yarıda keser ve yüzünde endişeli bir ifadeyle hızla ayağa kalkar. Adam arkasını döndüğünde gelenin efendisi Kontes Sophia olduğunu görür. Aralarındaki bir anlık bir bakışmadan sonra, Kontes elindeki kamçıyı yere düşürür. Adam kamçıyı kontese verirken bu karşılaşmanın her ikisini de rahatsız ettiği belli olur. İlk başta, kamçıyı alıp almamakta kararsız görünen Kontes, kamçıyı alır almaz sert bir haraketle geriye döner. Kontes hızla atını sürmeye başladığında, genellikle üst sınıf "entrikalarını" ve "ihtiraslarını" anlatan kostüme film (costume drama) türüne Haydar Haydar türküsünden çok daha fazla uyan bir klasik müzik parçası (öykü dünyasına ait olmayan / non-diegetic) girer. Adam biraz bekledikten sonra Kontes'in peşinden gider. Kamera uzaklaşan karakterleri izlemek yerine manzara görüntüsune odaklı kalır.

Sel Yayıncılık tarafından Mayıs 2008’de yayınlandı

(Hülya Adak, Ayşe Gül Altınay, Esin Düzel, Nilgün Bayraktar)
işte böyle güzelim... İstanbul: Sel, 2008 (3. baskı 2012)

Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2012

ABSTRACT

Orienting Istanbul, 2010

Negotiations of Migration

Journal of European Studies

Journal of European Studies, 2019

This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Medi... more This article examines contemporary essay films that concern refugee im/mobilities across the Mediterranean Sea. In the last few decades, the Mediterranean has been transformed into a fatal space for those attempting to cross the sea without documents. The dominant Eurocentric perspective reductively views these refugee and migrant crossings as violations of European borders. Such limited frameworks feed into the category of 'crisis', which demands immediate intervention and top-down governmental solutions, such as the militarization of borders. In this article, I explore essay films that counter and disrupt the 'crisis' framework and the sense of urgency and tragedy it evokes: Havarie (2016), a slow-form documentary by Philip Scheffner, and The Leopard (2007), a dance film by Isaac Julien. Drawing on recent theories of multi-directional memory, I investigate the ways in which these films establish mnemonic connections across diverse experiences of displacement, including those produced by European colonialism, transatlantic slavery and postcolonial conflict.

Keywords: borders, essay film, Europe, multi-directional/palimpsestic memory, refugee crossings

The Screen City Biennial Journal , 2017

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Mar 2013

TURKISH GERMAN CINEMA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM: Sites, Sounds, and Screens, Oct 2012

Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe, Jun 2010

KEBİKEÇ, 2009

The Turkish Studies Association bulletin, 2004

This paper investigates the post-1980s literature in terms of the traumatic memories of Turkey’s ... more This paper investigates the post-1980s literature in terms of the traumatic memories of Turkey’s recent history resulting from military oppressions and political terrorism. The (1960 and 1980) development of a radical Leftist movement received a violent response in the form of two military coups: 12 March 1971, 12 September 1980. These historical traumas are represented in the ‘coup d’état novel genre’ in Turkish literature. 1970s novels were mostly realistic representations of historical atrocities, written with an urgent need to document the realities of human violations under the military regime. However, the post-1980 coup d’état novels differ from previous literary texts in the sense that aesthetic concerns became much more significant than a transparent representation of those disastrous events. In that manner, Latife Tekin’s third novel Gece Dersleri [Night Lessons] (1986) and Murat Uyurkulak’s first novel Tol [Revolution] (2002) create a new space of narrative, recognizable at the intersection of aesthetic, political, and social experience. Regarding the relation of trauma to memory and narrative, this paper explores ‘trauma discourse’ as a useful paradigm for issues of representation and the difficulties of representing ‘excessive’ events in literature. These frames of contextualization reveal how trauma as a category applies more to post-1980 narratives in terms of divergence from the demands of realism, which had dominated the aesthetic dimension of literary production and criticism of the Turkish literary scene. This paper closes by exploring the literary enactment of trauma in terms of both the structures and the subject matters of Gece Dersleri and Tol, in order to provide a way of conceptualizing distortions and silences in memory as well as its relationship to narrative in the aftermath of traumatic events.

Sayı: 28, Dosya: Sinema ve Tarih II, 2009 ISSN:1300-2864 İÇİNDEKİLER Ahmet Gürata; “Sunuş”, No:... more Sayı: 28, Dosya: Sinema ve Tarih II, 2009 ISSN:1300-2864

İÇİNDEKİLER

Ahmet Gürata; “Sunuş”, No: 28/2009, ss: 5.
DOSYA: SİNEMA VE TARİH

Tarihçiler Sinemaya Bakıyor

“Sinema Sevgisinden Tarihe… Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’la Sohbet”, (rop.: Kudret Emiroğlu-Ergi Deniz Özsoy), No: 28/2009, ss: 7-24.
Sinema, Tarih ve Kesişmeler

Cemal Kafadar; “Asiler, Azizler, Âşıklar”, No: 28/2009, ss: 25-33.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel; “İç İçe Geçmiş Tarihler/Occident Adlı Yarış Atı ve Fotoğraf Teknolojilerinin Gelişiminde Kritik Kesişmeler”, (çev.: Ahmet Gürata), No: 28/2009, ss: 35-43.
Andreas Treske; “Son Adam ve ‘Zincirlerinden Boşanmış Kamera'”, (çev.: Yasemin Gümüş-Ahmet Gürata), No: 28/2009, ss: 45-52.
Nilgün Bayraktar; “Avrupa ‘Miras’ Sinemasına Eleştirel Bir Bakış: Grâfın Sophia Hatun”, No: 28/2009, ss: 53-68.
Elif Rongen Kaynakçı; “Sessiz Sinema ve Film Arşivleri”, No: 28/2009, ss: 69-76.
Gül Yaşartürk; “Sinemada Biyografik Öyküler: iris, Frida, Sylvia, Fur. An Imaginary Portrait of DianaArbusYe Fa Vie En Rose”, No: 28/2009, ss: 77-88.
ARŞİV

Ahmet Gürata; “Editörün Notu”, No: 28/2009, ss: 89-90.
Eugene M. Hmkle; “Modern Türkiye’de Sinema”, No: 28/2009, ss: 91-102.
Rakım Çalapala; “Türkiye’de Filmcilik”, No: 28/2009, ss: 103-112.
Nurullah Tılgen; “Bugüne Kadar Filmciliğimiz”, No: 28/2009, ss: 113-133.
Nusret Kemal; ‘”Söz Bir Allah Bir'”, No: 28/2009, ss: 135-136.
Bilge Emiroğlu; “Batı Sinemasından Yeşilçam Uyarlamaları”, No: 28/2009, ss: 137-141
SİNEMA MEKANLARI VE TANIKLIKLAR

Hakan Erkılıç; “Düş Şatolarından Çoklu Salonlara Değişen Seyir Kültürü ve Sinema”, No: 28/2009, ss: 143-162.
Gülseren Mungan Yavuztürk; “Ankara’da Bir ‘Büyük Sinema’ Vardı”, No: 28/2009, ss: 163-168.
“Bulancak’ta Sinema: Şemsi Emecan’la Konuşma”, (rop.: Güzin Emecan), No: 28/2009, ss: 169-176.
Cantürk Coşkun; “Mustafa Usta’nın ‘Kader Sineması'”, No: 28/2009, ss: 177-185.
DEĞİNİ

Özlem Öz; “Milattan Bir Milyon Yıl Önce: ‘Tarih Öncesi’ Filmler”, No: 28/2009, ss: 187-191.
İştar Gözaydın; “Londra’nın tarihini Sinemayla Yazmak”, No: 28/2009, ss: 193-203.
Murat Meriç; “Türkiye’de Sınema-Müzık İlişkilerine Bir Bakış”, No: 28/2009, ss: 205-213.
KİTABİYAT

M. Bülent Varlık; ‘”Türkiye’de Sinema ve Tesirleri’ Üzerine Notlar”, No: 28/2009, ss: 215-222.