Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Bassam El Baroni

Thesis: Ontology as Reverse Engineering: Understanding Practices of the Self through Contamination, Abstraction and Precarity

June 2018

Abstract

This thesis stands as a proposal for a form of critical practice based on social intervention and political transformation within a pluralistic tradition rather than as a singular practice. By unpacking what I will refer to as a ‘conceptual geometry’ through a discussion of precarity, contamination and abstraction, a kind of speculative imaginary located within artistic practice will begin to emerge. This imaginary will then be figured as a tool to access self-creation in spite of the standardising force of neoliberalism. Yet rather than being developed as antithetical to this standardising force, this thesis will instead acknowledge the potential present in contamination through a geometrical interconnectedness.

Author: Baha Görkem Yalim