Ipek Duben's earlier work WHAT IS A TURK? explored Westerners’ impressions about Turkish identity and culture, positing ‘Turks’ as Westerners’ Other. THEY/ONLAR sets out to investigate the Other within Turkish society highlighting how prescribed identities marginalize people within their own ‘victimhood’, breed prejudice, violence and deny the right to be oneself. Duben asks, “in such a divided situation [in Turkey], how can ‘togetherness’ be realised?”

Drawing on the historic relationship between Turkey and Europe, social tensions in Northern Ireland and the personal experiences of exiles and refugees, four speakers explore Otherness in its various forms and the possibilities for Togetherness:

Exhibiting artist Ipek Duben. Duben’s training in political science, sociology and art informs all of her work which involves identity issues, and political and social criticism. Since 1994 she has been making Artists' Books focused on identity, domestic violence and migration and which have been exhibited variously as light, sound and video installations.

One of the UK’s foremost experts in Islamic art, Venetia Porter is Assistant Keeper (Curator), Islamic and contemporary Middle East, and lead curator on the British Museum’s major new gallery the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World.

Louise Purbrick, art historian based at University of Brighton. Her research is devoted to understanding materiality and visuality and focuses upon sites of conflict and imprisonment, the spaces of industrial exploitation and exhibition, the art of political struggle and the attachments to domestic possessions in everyday life. She has undertaken several research projects concerning Northern Ireland.

Journalist Umit Ozturk who has lived in the UK since 1992. Ozturk has worked as a human rights reporter, editor and broadcaster, book publisher and is the founder and coordinator of the Brighton-based community support charity Euro-Mediterranean Resources Network. He chaired Amnesty International’s international journalists’ network for 12 years and was a co-founder of the first UK chapter of Reporters Without Borders.

This event marks the culmination, and publication launch of Understanding Territoriality: Identity, Place and Possession, a two year Creative Europe-funded partnership project produced by four cultural organsations, that has sought to understand how tensions between the personal, the local and the general are threatening the sustainability of our nation states and the European Union.

www.understandingterritoriality.wordpress.com