Familiarly Strange/Strangely Familiar: Humor and Contemporary Artists from Turkey

Focusing on a selection of contemporary European-Turkish visual artists, this contribution will query how their humorous and, at times, ironic artistic gaze can provide critical insight into identity negotiations through defamiliarization. By creating art that incorporates humor, these artists reject dominant preconceptions and presuppositions of what their identity is supposed to be determined by, transforming it into forms of artistic and, hence, political transgression. The artists transform the public space into a place of dissent and defiantly exemplify that “making strange” is essential to art because it is inherently human and in the everyday. By looking at how mobility and transnational encounters shape humorous artistic production, this chapter will present how, in turn, such transnational and intercultural works can shed new light on the making of contemporary European identities “beyond borders,” enriching the global artistic discourse.