Workshop
The Violent Ecology of Photography
Loading
Kurdistan
Zoom workshop
October 23 2020

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Loading is a not-for-profit and artist-run space with charity status that contemporary artists Erkan Özgen and Cengiz Tekin co-founded in 2017 and continue to run in Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkey’s Kurdistan, where their art practice has been based over the past two decades. It aims to offer a non-commercial and independent platform that fosters participatory, experimental, processual and dialogic initiatives, exchanges, events, and exhibitions on contemporary art. Loading is geared particularly towards Diyarbakir’s young and emerging artists. It is an open space for those who wish to produce, experience, exhibit and debate their artistic works.

The “Violence and the Ecology of Photography” moderated by Eray Çaylı, comprises a trilogy of workshops leading to an online group exhibition and a web archive. It focuses on the potentials and limitations of photography produced in the context of contemporary art for thinking the social and environmental impact of violence—in other words, violence’s ecologies. The project seeks to reconsider the prominence that photography has gained over the recent years in the violence Diyarbakir and the surrounding region has witnessed. It aims to foster a critical and self-reflexive practice that attends to the techniques, gazes, perspectives and circulation mechanisms involved in photography and the ways in which these might be reproducing the very violent ecologies being photographed (rather than taking for granted the evidentiary potential of photography in documenting violence and its ecological impact) but also how they might be employed to challenge this reproduction. The workshops we are organizing as part of this series will be attended free-of-charge by young and emerging artists from the region, whom we have selected through an open call.

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