Nermin Saybaşılı is a Professor in the Department of Art History at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She received her PhD in Visual Culture from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh (Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2004–2005) and at Columbia University’s School of the Arts as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. Her research focuses on contemporary art practices and critical theory, with particular emphasis on visibilities and invisibilities within regimes of vision; sound and voice in installation and video art; Contemporary art in Turkey in relation to magical politics, in contrast to contemporary forms of myth-making; mobility and counter-geographies; and urban space and migration in networked culture. Her work has been published internationally in journals, books, exhibition catalogues, and magazines.

In our current political moment, it is increasingly clear that we live not under true democratic conditions but within the illusion—the fiction—of democracy. Deception and concealment, now branded as “perception management,” have become the defining strategies of contemporary political life. We are living in what Bülent Diken calls a world of “legitimized despotism”. Diken incisively writes, “we are not only deprived of the real—ours is not merely a ‘post-truth’ age—but also of the fiction”¹. According to him despotism functions like a magic trick—one that reinvents itself while leaving no trace². “Its magic”, so to speak, lies in its ability to continually recast itself—to produce variation within repetition, masking continuity under the guise of novelty.

Then the question arises: How can we articulate the public nature of art? To put it differently, how might art function as a key category for imagining an alternative “political imaginary”—one in which relational, historically situated struggles open up different temporalities and spatialities beyond the impasses of neoliberalism and geopolitical relations? In a time where authoritarian regimes manipulate visibility, obscure truth, and manufacture consent through overwhelming visual control, I strongly believe that the magical—as a conceptual and aesthetic strategy—offers powerful tools for subversion, invention, and resistance.

In the modern world, visual media and spectacle operate in the same way as the dominance and sovereignty of linguistic activities (speech, writing, textuality and reading). The illusionist world on which “a culture of presences” is based upon, which has become corporeal through the hegemony of the visible, does not merely conceal the critical potential of the art object that is truly prone to magic and alchemy, but also ignores it. If we are talking about intellectual and academic activity today, it is necessary to emphasize that meaning should not be confined to linguistic or visual representations. I believe that magic operates as a critical and experimental practice, as well as a visionary mode of thinking and making. Like magic, art alters not just what we see, but how we see. It operates as a transformative field, producing new experiences and reorganizing the frameworks through which meaning emerges. Magic works through relations and transformations, through imagination, intuition, and sensory disruption. It does not reduce reality; it recomposes it. It engages the poetic, the spiritual, and the speculative—opening portals across all possible worlds of the senses and the sensible.