Questions of Diversity: Animal Life in Video Art from Turkey

Abstract

This article considers a selection of video work made in the last quarter century by artists from Turkey, working in and beyond its various geographies, that engages significantly with what can be called forms of animal life. It considers work by established and emergent artists, Ayşe Erkmen, Hale Tenger, Şener Özmen, Erkan Özgen, Ali M. Demirel, İnci Eviner, Aykan Safoğlu and Mehmet Ali Boran, in the light of problematics of ecological disaster and damage, in particular to biodiversity, brought about by global warming and agrochemical-dominated farming. Setting this work against the slow development of a National Action Plan and the poor performance of Turkey in relation to the protection of biodiversity, the article argues that the inventiveness and power of this video work also emerges out of an understanding of historic cultural differences and an attentiveness to ethnographical issues that need to be acknowledged in animal studies. It embeds this in relation to work by important scholars in the field, including Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, pointing to a blockage of consideration of issues of ethnographics in their texts, showing how this is key to understanding the range of modes of figuring and citation of animal life in the video work under consideration, as well as its engagement with issues of cultural and biological diversity.