Academic Studies Series Session: 12
Performance and Social Imaginaries
25 April 2026 | 14:00–16:00
Location: Vacilando Café, Istanbul
İzel Karaca | Speaker
Eylem Ejder | Speaker
The twelfth session of the Academic Studies series, organized under the umbrella of Performistanbul Live Art Research Space, focused on the relationship between performance and social imaginaries through diverse artistic and theoretical approaches. Bringing together İzel Karaca and Eylem Ejder, the session explored the worlds made possible through art and performance, inviting discussion on alternative forms of coexistence and future-making.
In her presentation, İzel Karaca expanded discussions opened by postcolonial theory through the lens of performance, focusing on aesthetic and political forms of expression shaped by body, identity, geography, and affect. Conceived as a redistribution of “the sensible,” these practices highlighted art not only as a representational medium but also as a space capable of constituting the social itself. Through examples from Türkiye, the presentation explored how the embodied and relational nature of performance can build bridges between individual experience and collective memory, opening plural imaginaries in which different narratives may coexist.
Eylem Ejder approached the session through a question emerging from her doctoral research: What forms of knowledge emerge through walking, writing, and performing in urban spaces shaped by displacement, destruction, and loss? Drawing on her performance project do,laş,mak and place-based research in Samatya, Ejder proposed an open-ended and relational understanding of dramaturgy that embraces entanglement and hybridity as both methodology and dramaturgical principle. Bringing body, memory, and lived experience into process, her presentation framed “return” as a transformative site of encounter where the repressed and unfinished re-enter circulation.
Through performative aesthetics and dramaturgies of return, the session invited reflection on how art might generate alternative relationalities and future imaginaries in response to today’s polarized and often retaliatory discourses.
