SANAT TARİHİNİ SAKATLAMAK: CRIP ESTETİK/SANAT

Abstract

This study examines crip art practices and disability art creations emerging alongside the disability rights movement, utilizing a cripistemological method grounded in disability experience. Its primary objective is to examine the notably limited presence of the crip art movement within Turkish art historiography, despite its growing international visibility and institutional recognition, and to respond to a significant theoretical gap in the field.

Grounded in critical disability studies, this research critically examines the normative construction of the modern subject and the representational regimes through which non-normative bodyminds are framed. It explores how ableism, cure-oriented thinking, and normative body politics are reproduced within artistic production and everyday cultural representation, while foregrounding crip strategies of resistance emerging from lived disability experience.

Furthermore, the study analyzes how crip art practices have transformed alongside the historical trajectory of disability culture and academic debates. It evaluates the creative possibilities, political imaginaries, tensions, and crises of representation opened up by crip bodyminds in performance, public space, and aesthetic production. After discussing canonical examples from the Global North and key debates, the study turns to performative movements at the intersection of disability and art in Türkiye, critically addressing their discursive contradictions and limitations from a cripistemological position.

Ultimately, the research aims to render visible the artistic labor, experiences, and knowledge production of disabled subjects long excluded from Turkish art historical inquiry; frequently positioned as objects of therapy or pity rather than equal research subjects. Through specific case studies, the study discusses processes of invisibilization, paternalistic pressures, tokenism, and internalized ableism, revealing them as urgent problems for art historiography, education, and curatorial practice. Bringing the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary disability studies and crip methodology into the Turkish context, the thesis demonstrates the profound epistemological and aesthetic significance of embodied crip knowledge for artistic production, curatorial practice, and art history.