Pelin Tan Read Bio Collapse
Pelin Tan is a Turkish art historian and sociologist based in Turkey. She is a researcher and writer working on methodology and in the fields of critical spatial practices, alternative pedagogies, and the commons. Currently, she is a professor and head of the film department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Batman University, a senior research fellow at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Boston, and a research fellow at the Architecture Faculty, University of Thessaly.
She was a postdoc fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011), DAAD Art History, Humboldt University of Berlin (2006), The Japan Foundation (2011), and Hong Kong Design Trust (2016). Tan is the lead author of the report “Urban Society” by ipsp (Cambridge Univ.Press 2018) and has contributed to several publications, including Climates: Architecture and The Planetary Imaginary (Columbia University, 2017), Refugee Heritage (Art & Theory, 2021), Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), Autonomous Archiving (dpr, 2017), The Silent University: Toward-Transversal Pedagogy (Sternberg Press, 2016), Designing Modernity: Architecure in the Arab World (Jovis, 2021), and From Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023).
Benefit screening for earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria
# 131
Collective learning and the creation of decolonial methodologies against slow violence, extraction, and forced eviction/migration leads to pedagogies of the commons. Following an okra plant through narratives, infrastructures, forgotten languages, and entangled exiles is not a metaphor.
# 118
Joana Hadjithomas films from her plane landing in İzmir to show a clear aerial image of its urban spaces and its seashore, a reflection of the imaginary cartography of the place shown to her as a child. The camera often returns to the sea and waves that connect Etel’s living room to Joana’s first visit to the city. The gaze panning the horizon and the seashore reflects the catastrophe that prompted their estrangement from the place. ISMYRNA often depicts the landscape of İzmir as well as several old and current maps. As film subjects, the mountains, the sea, the seashore, and even the urbanization of İzmir seem like such innocent bystanders.
Liam Gillick, Pelin Tan
e-flux lectures: “The Infrastructure as Symptom,” Keller Easterling and Pelin Tan
Challenging our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.”
