Claudia Costa Pederson and Nicholas Adrian Knouf are PhD candidates in Art History and Information Science at Cornell University respectively. Here they broach the subjects of education, representation, and organized networks through a review of works by Arzu Ozkal and My Piece of Chennai.


Persistent Iteration by Arzu Ozkal is a two-channel video from a series of video works exploring identity in relation to the artist’s body. The two juxtaposed video feeds, the first of which shows a close-up shot of Ozkal’s hands and a school notebook on which she repeatedly writes türküm (Turkish); while the second image consists of a recording at an elementary school classroom attended by Ozkal in her childhood. In the latter, a stationary image of saluting Turkish soldiers is superimposed to the left of students engaged in their morning pledge to the Republic of Turkey. The soundtrack is of the students’ voices reciting in unison lead by a senior student. Ozkal is a Turkish-born artist of Turkish and Bosnian descent. The work was generated shortly after the artist’s completion of a MFA in Computer Art at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), and was subsequently shown at various national and international venues.

Meena Natarajan is an interaction researcher and design specialist trained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She joined the project My Piece of Chennai as lead coordinator upon return to her native India in 2008. My Piece of Chennai is a open-source, online project developed by a volunteer network of Chennai- and North American-based designers, artists, entrepreneurs, and community organizers in collaboration with Chennai residents. The project’s website describes the aim of the initiative as an attempt at creating, “a place and medium of collaboration for local communities in monitoring civic amenities in their area, taking joint ownership of their piece of Chennai.” My Piece of Chennai follows on the heels of a number of independently run projects situated in large urban areas of India, such as Sarai, a well known collective in New Delhi, and Pukar in Mumbai, led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. These collectives are established as spaces and networks dedicated to research, practice, and conversation on topics related to urbanism.

Common to Ozkal’s and Natarajan’s projects is an examination of questions regarding subject formation, representation, and community. The points of intersection in these projects pertain to models of organization, an issue pertinent to both artists and activists. This essay examines the relationship between art and design practices conceived from an interventionist standpoint via generative modes of research and the development of autonomous networks.

Arzu Ozkal’s video, Persistent Iteration, evokes a paradigm of population management performed as educational ritual. Students’ bodies and psyches are brought to order through repetitive writing and vocal exercises. Persistent Iteration allows us to witness present-day, ritualized subjection to a vision of community established in Ozkal’s native Republic of Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). This designing of modern Turkish subjectivity on the model of the European nation-state has its roots in an Enlightenment ideology that valorized principles of individualism, self-interest, and utilitarianism, and extolled governance by Law, linear logic, and rationality. In practice, Atatürk had set out to design the institutional apparatus of Turkey in a series of cultural, political, social, and economic reforms upholding nationalism, modernization, democracy, and secularization guided by educational and scientific progress. This became known in Turkey as Kemalism.


Arzu Ozkal,Persistent Iteration, digital video, 2008

Following the arguments of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish on the disciplinary function of teaching handwriting and military drills in schools, Ozkal represents the classroom as an extension of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, i.e., in its new forms of punishment. The militaristic ritual of the morning drill in Ozkal’s school also recalls Atatürk’s own training as a military officer. The liberal values of honesty and hard work (indicated both in speech and in writing in the video) foreground transparency, as a political principle, and efficiency, as an economic aim, two key characteristics of Atatürk’s program of economic, political, and cultural reform.

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