February 1, 2024 - January 31, 2025
“Museum-City” Proposal: Cappadocia Geopark and Philadelphia Museum District
Gonca Tunçbilek Dinçer is a Tübitak Research Fellow joining the Department of Art History for the academic year 2024-2025. In September 2019, she graduated with a doctorate from the Middle East Technical University (METU/ODTU). Her fields of interests in research are curatorial studies, museum architecture, museology, pavilion design, and exhibition/exposition design. She focused on the famous Serpentine Galleries in London while working on the architecture of temporary exhibitions. Afterwards, she concentrated on the Belgian museum as a spatial encyclopedia, as proposed by Paul Otlet.
As part of her research at Penn, she explores the concept of “museum-city” to reflect on the agency of representation in architectural narrative, a dynamic of great importance in the display of museums and, on a larger scale, the cities. “City as museum” is a visionary project that attempts to re-think the broader definition/concept of “museum”, contesting how the geo-physical context and the historical content together form increasingly hybridized collective memory of the city highlighting the agency of museums. She also focuses on the representations from the larger context of the city down to the museum itself. Working directly with archives and other collective materials, she plans to concentrate on classifying, archiving, and displaying works for temporary and permanent exhibitions that will enhance her curatorial experience.
Her research aims to liberate the museum, which is one of the forms of architectural representation and exhibition, from merely the building scale, to examine it as a constituent of the network with other exhibition spaces in the city, and to analyze its representations as a whole through the implicit parts of this network. Within this scope of her research, she intends to discuss and evaluate museum as exhibition spaces through architectural representations and alternative or critical curatorial methods. Thus, by focusing on the possibilities of both architectural representation and exhibition methods, her main objective is to develop a curatorial concept of architecture that establishes a dialectical relationship between museum activities and architecture from a more critical and broad perspective.
With a comparative perspective implicit in this research, she explores the unrealized potential of Cappadocia, Turkey as museum-city on an urban scale. Addressing its key problems, she comparatively analyzes Cappadocia in relation to "Philadelphia: Museum Mile," which successfully exhibits itself at the urban scale. As a museum district, this area contributes to exhibitions in the city by forming an interactive exhibition network in the region. In her study, the curatorial methods and information/documents to be obtained from museum institutions and archives will be used to reveal the reasons why Cappadocia cannot be exhibited as a museum city at the moment and how it can be in the future. Thus, based on the example of Philadelphia, which continues to exist as a museum city, this research aims to critically evaluate the representation of Cappadocia as a museum city at different scales from a critical perspective to provide curatorial suggestions for its exhibition as a museum city. The main goal of her research is to overcome the lack of literary and methodological originality in a city's inability to be exhibited as a museum-city. Her “museum-city” project questions whether it is possible to have a museum as a whole city that does not completely replace the representation of natural-cultural heritage and social memory with history and experience.