Can Memiş
Can Memiş is an interdisciplinary researcher and writer who works in law, sociology, art, and philosophy. He is involved in academic and artistic productions on social memory, justice, human rights, and urban studies.
Born in 1993 in Istanbul, Memiş graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Department of Sociology in 2018. Afterward, he started his second undergraduate law education at MEF University Faculty of Law in 2023. In the same period, he completed his master's degree in Philosophy and Social Thought program at Istanbul Bilgi University and completed the program in 2023. He continues his academic career at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, continuing the PhD program in General Sociology and Methodology. Working in curatorial politics, Memiş participated in the 4th Contemporary Art and Curatorship Program organized by Akbank Sanat and Open Dialogue Istanbul.
Memiş, who combines his legal and academic career, has worked as a legal advisor since 2018. Since 2023, he has worked as an art critic and editor at Sanatatak, writing about art criticism, cultural analysis, and curatorial studies. He is among the directors of the short film "Walls" (Duvarlar"), which is part of the series" Görünür Görünmez: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship" series produced by Altyazı Fasikül.
Impossible Justice
Instead of accepting justice as a completed end, a final goal, the exhibition invites us to address it around the broken pieces of the dismantled structures.
The concept of justice is among the most controversial issues in different coexistence situations. What is justice, how is it achieved, and where can it be sought and found? The concept, which is at the center of attention of political systems, disciplines, and social movements, often becomes a knot that is difficult to resolve even though various approaches are developed.
The concept, which has become more prominent on our agenda and in our language due to the accumulation of energy caused by social injustices, continues to reveal tensions. Reducing the issue of access to justice to only legal norms, laws, and judicial decisions further increases the tension. However, the existence of these tools says very little about justice. The belief that access to justice is possible in all cases or that justice can be realized is a product of the normative episteme produced by modernity. This belief creates a comfort zone that prevents those who doubt justice from taking ethical-political responsibilities toward the world.
The French thinker Jacques Derrida, who transformed the approach to justice, accepts deconstruction as a possibility of justice and thus opens the door to bending the established view of justice and inviting different possibilities. According to Derrida, deconstruction requires going outside the structure and looking at the structure from the opposite side. This perspective will bring to light what the structure renders invisible, what it suppresses, and what will offer language beings the possibility to speak and act. However, the institutions that promise to deliver justice prevent justice precisely because they radically turn their backs on the potential and possibilities of justice.
Impossible justice points to the limitations of justice and deals with otherness that can be considered a kind of invitation to justice: other worlds, other possibilities, other voices, other searches. The exhibition aims to intervene in the inviolability of the institutions and tools with which the concept of justice is discussed, to highlight the search of others to create a new language, and to get closer to the problem of justice by opening a meeting-speaking ground for those who have lost hope in speech and expression.
Instead of accepting justice as a completed end, a final goal, the exhibition invites us to address it around the broken pieces of the dismantled structures. It focuses on the justice of the irreparable, the unmournable, the one that will never return. Accepting the struggles, the words spoken, and sometimes what is left in the void as the possibility of justice makes us think about the difference in understanding justice. Instead of the passivity of waiting for justice from normative structures, the exhibition underlines that discovering the impossibility of justice provides an opportunity for collective action.