In the reflection of postmemory: migration in frame of art: extra vocabulary

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1606756_(Table of contents)

“Postmemory, as a second-generation memory that is belated, secondary, and displaced, a form of cultural memory in tension with personal memory.” Marianne Hirsch. In this study titled “In the Reflection of Postmemory: Migration in the Frame of Art” I intend to explore the experiences of the second and third generation of migrants in the context of “postmemory”. The notion of postmemory, first used by Marianne Hirsch as a second generation memory that concerns first-hand cultural and/or collective trauma testaments, and the relationship of latter generations to such experiences through autobiographical or familial experiences. This research will examine how art addresses postmemory in the frame of various migration stories, between historical reconstruction and the politics of memory. In a country like Turkey, where a large number of people have remarkable backgrounds of migration or displacement, whether within the country or from another land to Turkey, such events connect the past to the present, merging personal memory with collective memory. Ensuring its transmission through a variety of archives and traces; integration, assimilation and identity transformation will provide the framework of this research. In the light of the question “How can memory be transmitted?” the aim of this paper is also to underline the role of postmemory studies in contemporary artistic practices. My works in exhibition titled “Extra Vocabulary” suggest a reading to form a specific, operative archaeology with questions and interrogations by mapping out traces of the past is surrounded by issues of “representation” today of families who migrated from the former Yugoslavia to Turkey. Looking back to the past that you have not lived, but which still belongs to you, is related to experiences (which) have been transmitted so deeply and affectively, Different accounts of the same factual past, and the tension between generations of direct memory and postmemory, shall both come into play.