Gurur Ertem

Born 1976 in Istanbul/Turkey.

Gurur Ertem is the founding co-director of iDANS International Contemporary Dance and Performance Festival (Istanbul) where she has been responsible for curatorial research, programming, and publications since 2006. Ertem earned her Ph. D. in sociology from The New School for Social Research (New York) in 2016 with the thesis titled EUropean Dance: The Emergence and Transformation of a Contemporary Dance Art World (1989–2013). She specializes in the sociology of culture and arts; the body and social theory; and critical theory. Additionally, being immersed in the contemporary dance culture for (almost) two decades as dancer, dramaturge, programmer, and scholar, Ertem edited several books on the topic such as Dance on Time (2010); Solo? in Contemporary Dance (2008), and Yirminci Yüzyılda Dans Sanatı (2007).

Her most recent publications include the co-edited volume Bodies of Evidence: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Movement (Passagen Verlag, 2018)  and the article »Gezi Uprising: Performative Democracy and Politics of the Body in an Extended Space of Appearance« in Media Practices, Social Movements, and Performativity (Routledge, 2017).

Currently, Ertem is engaged in further research and writing on the politics of/with the body and the affective and aesthetic dimensions of the »political« with a focus on recent social movements; contentious performances; and social psychology. As an Akademie Schloss Solitude fellow in the Humanities (2018) she is also working on the project tentatively titled The Lived Body Under (Neo) Authoritarianism.
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http://www.gururertem.info