Organization

The conference founder and organizer, Tijen Tunali is an art historian, artist and curator. She completed her  BFA in studio arts (State University of New York at Binghamton), MA in visual studies (State University of New York at Buffalo) and Ph.D. contemporary art history, theory and criticism (University of New Mexico, 2015).  Her academic work focuses on democratizing and decolonizing art, culture and space. Her performances, videos, installations and mixed media paintings explore the question of human-nonhuman relationships from the phenomenological, psychoanalytical, decolonial, feminist, and post-anthropocentric perspectives.

Her doctoral research analyzed the dialectical relationship of contemporary art and aesthetics to neoliberal globalization and political mobilizations. Various fellowships supported it from institutions including the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Terra Foundation, Tinker Foundation and Phyllis Muth Foundation in the US, the DAAD Foundation in Germany, and the Latin American Studies Institute at the Univesity of New Mexico.

She completed her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Le Studium postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tours. Later she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund fellow at Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies in Denmark and an Andrew Mellon fellow at CGC Amman/Columbia University. Currently, she is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Bienvenue postdoctoral  fellow at the University of Rennes 2.

She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and 5 special issues on the aesthetics and politics of contemporary art.  She  edited the book Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape (Routledge 2021). With Alla Myzelev she edited the book Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations (2023). With Prof. Brian Winkenweder she edited Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History (Routledge, 2024) and with Josepha Wessels she edited Art and Authoritarianism in Southwest Asia and Africa ( I-B Tauris, 2025).

She also edited special issues on art's relationship to the politics of the urban space published by the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Jornal, Urban Creativity Journal, Street Arts Journal and Public Arts Journal.

CONTACT: tijen.tunali@univ-rennes2.fr .