Promotionsvorhaben Hasan Aksaygın
Working title: Hosting an Alter-Ego In the Body of a Visual Artist: Act of (Un-)Becoming Human Through Crafting Alternative Artist Persona as Art-Making
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Astrid Mania, Prof. Antje Majewski
This Ph.D. project aims to investigate the reasons why visual artists urge to infringe seemingly distinct means of real and fiction by crafting alter-egos/heteronyms as vehicles of empowering articulations and how do these motivations differ, if they do at all, according to the hosting bodies of artists in the intersectional spectrum between the marginalized and the marginalizing. Conceptualizing every artist’s social appearance as an art-making parallel to their practice, this project understands crafting an artist-persona as a form of self-portraiture in the performative sense and plans to see the potential of reading this act through the lenses of Queer-feminist theories’ approach on linguistics. This research will be conducted by looking into the history of art for similar artist cases, and also utilizing the input of contemporary artists who function with multiple artist personae. Comparative and ethnographic analysis of the latter cases will be done collectively with the artists themselves. A major goal of the intended project is to bridge the theoretical and data-driven research, obtained by interviews and discussions in the artists-circle, with my studio practice, in order to complete a literary work and a series of paintings with the academically marginalized methodology of auto-ethnography. In short, this project aims to be part of a field that is understudied; the realm of alter-egos of visual artists, and in light of this, to run parallel artistic research with the means of auto-ethnography.
Vita
Natis (officially Hasan Aksaygın, born in 1986 in Nicosia, Cyprus) is a conceptual painter who lives and works in Berlin. His art materializes itself through multiple parallel and distinct research-based practices. He creates, embodies, and instrumentalists different performative artist personae for each of these practices that challenge the social understanding and the role of the artist as a (post-)modern subject formation. These alter-egos deal with various fields like; personal or communal memory and forgetting, speculative storytelling with (non-)linear temporality, gender, post-colonialism, and new materialism. Recently he had a solo show, an artistic-archival project, “Frenk Bey, Fortress and the Thing,” in NIMAC (Nicosia Municipality Art Centre), researching the use of electricity as a matter of power in colonial Cyprus. He holds a scholarship as an Artistic-Scientific researcher by the Claussen-Simon-Stiftung of Hamburg for his Ph.D. project at HFBK.
Contact and Website
natisismyname@gmail.com
https://www.na-tis.com