When: Thursday, 29th of February 2024 at 6pm

Where: M416, Marylebone Campus, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS

“Since colonialism’s outset as a modern political project, images have been central to extractivism, a racial practice that reduces parts of the Earth and its inhabitants to exploitable and marketable resources. How does this centrality operate in a context where visual culture itself has become an extractive industry with images as its raw material, many of them documenting extractivist violence? The question is nowhere more salient today than in Turkey’s Kurdistan where both conventional resource extraction and the extractive industrialization of visual culture have continued apace and loomed large during the rapid shift in 2015-16 from peace talks to all-out war. In this talk (and his forthcoming book of the same title), Eray Çaylı discusses visual culture’s role in waging, making sense of, and contesting environmental violence. Informed by collaboration-driven research, he analyses images produced and circulated across contemporary art, photojournalism, and social media, charting the visual ecologies involved in this production and circulation.”

Prof Dr Eray Çaylı is a Professor of Human Geography with a focus on violence and security in the Anthropocene at the University of Hamburg, Germany.