A New Residency Program at the Intersection of Art and Research by Gate 27

We are launching a new residency program at the intersection of art and knowledge, intuition and research.

The BEYOND 27 program brings together scholars investigating global challenges—such as environment, migration, urbanization, climate crisis, and social transformation—with artists whose practices are inspired by these inquiries. Taking place at our Istanbul campus over six weeks, this unique gathering invites two disciplines to the same table to deepen ideas and make them visible.

In its first edition, Prof. Dr. Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, will join us in Istanbul as a research fellow. She will continue her preparations and research for her forthcoming book, Reparative Democracy, with the support of the Istanbul Policy Center.

Artists collaborating with the scholars will have the opportunity to transform urgent issues into new narrative forms. Supported through Gate 27’s extensive network and production facilities, their works will ultimately become part of the Gate 27 Collection.

This program offers artists not only a space for production but also an intellectual partnership, a new ground for expression, and the chance to be part of a collective transformation. If you would like to join this collaborative residency, we look forward to receiving your application.

Research Fellow’s Focus During the Program:

Reparative Democracy

How does the crisis of fossil-fueled modernity (climate change, species collapse, fouled lands and waters) intersect the crises of constitutional representative democracy (rising authoritarianisms’ supersession by finance capital, exhaustion of the form)? What new practices and principles of democracy might meet both challenges? What new orientations toward the non-human by the human are called for to respond to these intersecting crises? And how might these be appearing in organized uprisings and experiments that themselves might be understood as instances of “reparative democracy”—democracy that both repairs from its own troubled pasts and has a reparative orientation toward the future?    

This project is not an attempt to recuperate or restore liberal democracy but, rather, attempts to theorize a post-liberal democratic form, one that is emerging from the same ash heap of liberalism that neo-fascist regimes are. It places a just political economy and sustainable political ecology at the heart of this post-liberal form. At the same time, it takes seriously that the residuals of fossil modernity are now forever with us, that there is no overleaping or leaving behind this critical epoch of human inhabitation of earth.