Philosophy Seminars - “Thinking with Paintings”
Ali Avni Çelebi’s Masked Ball Painting: An Allegory of Turkish Modernism
Time: 18.30 - 20.00
Speaker: Elif Dastarlı
Moderator: Emre Şan
Fredric Jameson’s approach, which defines modernity as a new historical condition, modernization as the process that brings about this condition, and modernism as the aesthetic, philosophical and ideological reaction to this condition and process, offers an important theoretical ground for understanding non-Western experiences of modernization. As a subject in the imaginary of Turkey’s early Republican period, the “ball” is staged as one of the principal public scenes in which the official modernization project makes visible its secular, civilized and happy human type. Ali Avni Çelebi’s 1928 work Masked Ball, however, departs radically from this idealized narrative. With its interlocking planes, masks, totemic forms, card-reading fortune telling and uncanny figures, the painting turns a conventional scene of entertainment into carnivalesque chaos. In light of the mechanism of “double exclusion” that Hans Belting points to when positioning non-Western art, and of the endless structure of Turkish modernization shaped by the fiction of “being like,” Masked Ball is not a passive imitation of the West but an aesthetic and philosophical response to the social experience of modernization. In this presentation, centring Çelebi’s work on the ideas of Jameson and Belting, we will offer a reading of the fragmentation of space, masking and the crisis of representation in the painting. In this way, we will open up for discussion the tension between aesthetic modernism and social modernization, while also searching for a definition of “modern Turkish art.”
Elif Dastarlı is an associate professor of art history and an art critic working on modern and contemporary art. She received her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Istanbul University and her master’s degree in Western Art and Contemporary Art from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She has worked as an editor at various magazines and publishing houses and translated art books from English into Turkish. For her academic work she lived for a time in Lisbon and Strasbourg. She carried out her post-doctoral academic work at the University of Manchester in the UK with a TÜBİTAK scholarship. Her book Yan Kapıdan Girenler: Modern Türk Resminin Analizi (Those Who Enter from the Side Door: An Analysis of Modern Turkish Painting) was published by Hayalperest Yayınevi in 2021, and Feminist Art in Resistance: Aesthetics, Methods and Politics of Art in Turkey, which she co-authored, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. She currently works as a faculty member in the Department of Art and Culture Management at Yıldız Technical University. She is a member of AICA Türkiye (International Association of Art Critics).
* The seminar will be held in Turkish. To attend this seminar, you can create your registration by using the "Register" button on the page and receive your free event invitation. Registrations will open 1 week before the event date (29.04.2027, at 18:30) and the "Register" button will become visible. Participation is limited to a quota of 70 people.
* Participants who have completed the event registration and received their invitation are kindly requested to be at the venue at least 15 minutes before the event. The doors will be closed at the event starting time.