Walter Benjamin in Konya

Joanna Rajkowska’s project deals with questions about tradition and modernity arising from the birth of the modern Turkish Republic, and what they may mean in terms of its relationship to its roots.  In what the artist sees as the ‘hot, huge, hard and dreamy’ city of Konya, she touches on the  implications of the cultural revolution which marked the early days of the Republic in the 1920s and ‘30s – implications with a European bearing. Her work explores a text about translation and meaning by Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in the medium of Ottoman Turkish script. Benjamin’s arch-modernist idea of the fragmentary is projected onto a city compounded of traditions and teachings – illuminating the overlapping histories of Europe and Turkey.