Please note that limited seats are available and making a reservation is required for this event. Your reservation is only final after confirmation from the Netherlands Institute in Turkey.

Please note that for security reasons, we only allow entrance to registered guests who can show a valid photo ID.

Please send an email to g.gurmen@nit-istanbul.org for reservation.

This illustrated talk will consider the historical and cultural formation of the Mediterranean region in a manner that interrogates its predominantly modern European framing. Arguing that contemporary migration consistently proposes the clandestine histories of the colonial making of the modern Mediterranean, other axes of observation and interpretation, drawn from the Asiatic and African shorelines, will be introduced to argue for a diverse historical, cultural and political alignment.
These proposed reconfigurations will be sustained in particular through considering practices in the visual and auditory arts. It will be suggested that such languages are not merely historical examples or cultural illustrations but, in their errancy and excess, provide us with unsuspected critical dispositions with which to receive and register a different Mediterranean.

The lecture is followed by a Q&A with audience, moderated by Professor Luiza Bialasiewicz (University of Amsterdam)

Iain Chambers teaches Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean studies at the University of Naples, “Orientale”. A graduate of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, he is the author of several publications including Göç, Kültur, Kimlik (2006), Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (2008), and Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorised Modernities (2017).

Image: ​Murat Germen, Muta-morphosis - Thessaloniki #02, 2015
​L​ambda C-print ​ and ​diasec, 180 x 102 cm