On March 21, Columbia Global Centers | Istanbul hosted Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She spoke about “Women Carrying Memory: Stateless Figures” to an audience crowd of over 150 people at Studio-X Istanbul.
In her talk, Professor Hirsch spoke on two recent memorial projects by feminist diasporic artists, Mirta Kupferminc and Wangechi Muthu, from different parts of the world, responding to the renewed monumentality of memory museums, memorials and commemorative rituals that perpetuate nationalism and ethnocentrism. These projects explored the vicissitudes and vulnerabilities of exile and statelessness. Professor Hirsch suggested that stateless memory can open up the possibility of imagining alternative relationships between contemporary subjects and citizenship, national belonging, and home, as well as alternate temporalities of becoming.
The Q&A was moderated by Ayşe Gül Altınay, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sabancı University and Aylin Vartanyan, Lecturer at Bogazici University. Aylin, in addition, shared her personal experiences, talking about her own expressive arts memory work based on walking in the city and digital storytelling.
Previous collaborations between Professor Hirsch and Associate Professor Altınay have resulted in the book, Women Mobilizing Memory, published by Columbia University Press.
This event was organized in collaboration with Sabancı University Gender and Women's Studies Excellence Center (SU Gender), Hrant Dink Foundation, and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation.
