Mine Kaplangı talks to Ebru Yetişkin
As a sociologist and an independent curator based in Istanbul, how did you start curating media-art-related events?
In fact, my curatorial practice emerged from an urgent need to critically engage with the reality of the mainstream contemporary art and theory that has been produced in Turkey since the 2000s. I work on exploring and conceptualising how the obscured dynamics of power, control and exploitation are updated within contemporary capitalist societies.
Since the mid-1990s, Turkey has been integrating into a global netwar with the rise of centralised political authority, neo-orientalist nationalism, ecological destruction, bigotry, theoretical orthodoxy and debt. In these years, the dominating exploitation of glocal power networks was accompanied by the hegemonic exploitation of global power networks. While profit-oriented collaborations among big corporations, foundations and governmental agencies were increasing, the commercialisation of their profit for the interest of transnational industry giants (i.e. especially for the construction, energy, pharmaceutical and warfare industries) formed a double-helix pressure.
(…)