Tijen Tunali
Fellow 2025-2026
Tijen Tunali‘s work specializes in contemporary art, urban studies, and ecocriticism. Her research focuses on the intersection of art, ecology, and urban space, exploring how artistic practices challenge neoliberal urbanism and human exceptionalism. It integrates post humanist and new materialist approaches to examine how art fosters ecological awareness and political engagement in the urban environment. Tunali has curated interdisciplinary research on art’s role in social and environmental activism, particularly in contested urban spaces. She is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Art and the City (forthcoming 2026) and the founder of the annual International Art and the City Conference.
Abstract
Art, Nonhumans, and the City
This research explores the potential of art to reframe human-nonhuman relationships in urban environments. It analyses the capacity of art to offer novel perspectives for the urgent reconsideration of socio-political dynamics among art, nonhuman entities, and urban environments. It further expands the discourse on human-nonhuman interconnection from bio-geophysical and philosophical concerns to artistic practice. This entails an exploration of ecocritical arts that prioritise raising awareness and inspiring behavioural changes in our interactions with nonhumans in the urban space. The goal of the research is to comprehend how the interplay among humans, nature, and art can function as an aesthetic and sensorial channel, fostering a mindful reconnection with our environment.
In addressing the overarching interdisciplinary question of how art can contribute to a departure from paradigms rooted in human exceptionalism and environmental violence, the study adopts a methodological bricolage that integrates post humanist and new materialist ecocriticism to social engaged art history. This aims at answering the difficulty of how to ontologically acknowledge nonhuman subjectivity and materiality while considering historically specific material and social conditions that they are developed and used. By establishing a productive dialogue between art practice and theory, the research endeavours to provide insights into transformative possibilities for both conceptual and practical shifts in our understanding of and engagement with the environment.
Education
2017 PhD, Art History, Theory, and Criticism, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, United States
2006 MA Art History and Visual Studies, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, United States
2004 BA, Fine Arts, Binghamton University State, University of New York, United States
2002 BFA Fine Art studies, University of Florence, Italy
Most Recent Academic Position
Andrew Mellon Research Fellow, Columbia University, New York, United States
Most Recent Publications
with Winkenweder, B., eds. Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History. London: Routledge, 2024.
with Wessels, J., eds. Art Against Authoritarianism in Southwest Asia and North Africa. London: I.B. Tauris-Bloomsbury, 2025.
with Myzalev, Alla, eds. Contemporary Art Across Political Divides: Difficult Conversations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2023.