Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on contemporary aesthetico-political practices and relations. She theorizes collective aesthetics as an integral and radicalizing force in contemporary social movements and anti-capitalist mobilizations both in rural and urban space. She was a 2018-2019 Le Studium/Marie Sklodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and 2017-2018 Université de Tours Postdoctoral Fellow with her project “Art and the City: Urban Space, Art and Social Movements.” This research in visual sociology analyzes interactions between multiple dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine in the urban space of the latest social movements through the lens of her theory of “carnival aesthetics of corporal and dialogical encounters”. She received her BS from Istanbul University in Business Administration/ Economics, BA in Fine Arts at the State University of New York at Binghamton, MA in Visual Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and PhD in Art, History, Theory and Criticism from the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico. Her dissertation is titled “Festivals of Art, Carnivals of Representation: On Contemporary Art and Neoliberalism.” It shows the intertwined set of matrixes in the politics of contemporary art in art institutions and art biennials on the one hand, and on the other hand, it analyzes the coexistence of an alternative praxis and meaning of what is commonly understood as ‘politics of aesthetics’ in the autonomous and semi-autonomous spaces of art. Tunali will be a EUME Fellow and associated with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin.
Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape
This project analyzes art’s changing role in the larger socio-economic context of the neoliberal urbanism to understand how art takes part in urban regeneration projects, but also the ways in which it captures and, in some instances, subverts the experience of the gentrified urban space, reveals the hegemonic and counterhegemonic interactions among different actors of the urban space and empowers the communities in the gentrified neighborhoods. The aim of the project is twofold, namely:(1) to rethink the changing and dialectical roles of the art and artists in an urbanism that put the interests of capital over the interests of ordinary inhabitants, (2) to reveal the potential of aesthetics in the critically reflecting formation of agonistic experience that constitutes democratic political culture in the urban space. It elaborates a critical theory and intersectional methodological framework that examines ‘the right to the city’ while setting up a theoretical and visual analysis of the aesthetic formations that are positive resources for political culture to be visible and to channel subjective dynamics into political participation and empowerment. With this approach, it reinstates a sense of socio-visual justice in mainstream gentrification research. It acknowledges how the spatial and aesthetic urgencies of the capitalist cities have produced exclusionary planning processes through the fragmentation of urban space and how that has influenced contemporary art’s production. Merging humanities perspective with social science method, this project takes this discussion further into analyzing gentrification and urban crises from the perspective of aesthetic resistance.
