c:o/re Fellow 10/26 – 09/27
Tijen Tunali is an art historian, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher whose work examines the intersections of art, knowledge, politics, and social and ecological transformation. Her research brings together art history, visual culture, urban studies, environmental humanities, and critical theories of knowledge, with a particular interest in artistic practices as forms of inquiry and knowledge production. Her scholarship explores how art engages political and social struggles, produces alternative forms of knowledge, and makes perceptible transformations that exceed established frameworks of representation and interpretation. Her research interests include political aesthetics, public art and urban space, artistic activism, technology in art in the Urbanocene, and the relationship between aesthetic practices, knowledge, and collective life.
Tunali has held research fellowships at Leuphana University, University of Rennes, Columbia University, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, the University of Tours, and Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is the editor to the upcoming Routledge Companion to Art and the City and founder and organizer of the international Art and the City conference series since 2018. She is currently preparing the special issue “Urban Artscapes, Ecosophy and the Urbanocene.”
When Environmental Knowledge Is Not Actionable: The Epistemic Limits of Art and Science
Environmental science has produced an increasingly robust body of knowledge about climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological degradation, and planetary instability. Yet the accumulation of knowledge has not generated commensurate political action, institutional transformation, or collective ethical orientation. This project asks what happens when environmental knowledge is scientifically established but remains politically and ethically unassimilated.
Rather than understanding contemporary eco-art primarily as a means of communicating scientific facts, visualizing data, or advocating environmental policies, the project approaches artistic practices as distinct forms of epistemic inquiry. It examines how artists take up scientific concepts, technology, data, and models while transforming them through aesthetic strategies such as duration, repetition, opacity, suspension, and refusal. These practices do not necessarily seek to resolve ecological problems or translate scientific knowledge into action; instead, they make perceptible what remains unresolved when scientific explanation reaches its limits.
The project investigates how environmental knowledge is re-situated across different cultural, geopolitical, and institutional contexts. It develops the concept of the “epistemic remainder” to describe the ethical, affective, and temporal dimensions of environmental knowledge that persist beyond scientific explanation and policy frameworks. The project ultimately proposes contemporary eco-art as a research culture in its own right: a mode of knowledge production that neither competes with nor simply supplements science, but offers alternative ways of attending to ecological crisis when knowing more does not necessarily enable action.
Publications (selection)
Tunali, T. (Ed.). (2027). Routledge Companion to Art and the City. Routledge.
Tunali, T. (Ed.). (2026). Special Issue: “Urban Artscapes, Ecosophy and the Urbanocene.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 13(2).
Tunali, T. (2026). Istanbul Biennials and the Contested Cultural Sphere in Turkey. In P. Kompatsiaris (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Art Biennials (pp. 67-83). Routledge.
Tunali, T. & Winkenweder, B. (Eds.). (2025). Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History. Routledge.
Tunali, T. (Ed.). (2023). Street Art and Political Aesthetics in Contested Urban Contexts. Street Art & Urban Creativity Journal, 9(3), 1–95.