Overview
Lara’s work considers contemporary art as a site of the sublime and spectral reverberations of national, ideological, violent, and traumatic histories. Particularly her work focuses on contemporary art from Turkey produced between 1990-2015 and its source materials in the long 20th century. Drawing from heterodox art historians such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin and in dialogue with theories of aesthetics and representation, psychoanalytic theories, and memory studies, her project engages contemporary art in its mediation of socio-political and historical processes.
She comes from an interdisciplinary background with an MA in Comparative Literature and a BA in Cultural Studies, and has also worked in the field of contemporary art as an independent researcher, writer, and curator before coming to Cornell.
Her writing has appeared in journals such as Afterall, Art in America, and Art Review as well as in exhibition catalogs and online publications. She is interested in violence, history, and strategies of representation in contemporary art, photography, and visual culture.