The body as a dynamic archive: The politics of movement in contemporary art the traces of knowledge-power

The archive contains the records of the past as a structure that organizes and preserves social memory; however, as discussed by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, two of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, the archive is also determined by existing power relations, norms, and cultural structures and reproduces them. In contemporary art practice, it is used as an effective method for drawing attention to social issues, making the repressed visible, and creating new forms of memory against established memory. Since the 1990s, the archive in the field of art has become not only a structure that documents the past but also a model of knowledge production that transforms the present and the future. This thesis approaches the body as a dynamic archive and movement as a form of embodied knowledge production. In this respect, the body is evaluated as a domain that carries historical traces within Foucault's power–subject relations; and movement is examined as a cognitive process and a production of sensory memory through Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the lived body and the neurophenomenological approach of Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. Thus, the body is positioned as an active archive that is both shaped by historical-political forces and continuously reconstructed within sensory-cognitive processes. In the historical references of the thesis, the analysis of bodily movements in the 19th century and the ideological foundations of movement are examined; whereas in contemporary art practices, the focus is on how movement ceases to be a representational form and becomes a critical encounter field in which the individual takes distance from their own archive-body. The artistic practices developed under the title "Abnormal Movements as a Bodily Diary" have been constructed as a bodily diary in which micro-gestures and non-normative movements, often unnoticed in daily life, are recorded. These works make visible the emotion and knowledge carried by bodily movement; they explore the tense relations established with social norms and reveal that movement offers a critical field of knowledge that opens new possibilities of meaning concerning both personal and collective memory. In this respect, the thesis demonstrates that the knowledge produced by the body through movement constitutes a non-static, transformable, and socially interconnected form of archive; and positions the body as an active subject that carries the traces of power yet is also capable of transforming those traces.