Overview
Asli Menevse’s primary area of investigation is European visual culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis on radical print culture.
Asli arrived in the discipline of Art History from an interdisciplinary background: a B.A. in Political Sciences and Sociology, and a M.A. in History with a concentration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman print culture. She then stepped into visual studies attending the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University where she received her second M.A. in Art History in 2013. Her methodology is informed by her interdisciplinary background, drawing from political theory, history, and philosophy, and the intersections of visual art with literature and politics.
Asli’s current research aims to complicate the idea of monumentality through investigating the disparate moments and modalities of interplay between art and memory, and explores the visual culture of radicalisms in fin-de-siècle Europe and America. Her project is concerned with the ways in which art and visual culture are employed in the mobilization of memories of past political struggles in the service of new historical imaginations. By extension, she is invested in the material and psychological operations of the aesthetic that allow it to function as a realm where past and future can interact.
Asli’s related interests include the appropriation and adaptation of ‘fine arts’ into popular mediums, political caricatures, and representations of labor movements in mass culture.