Movie
May 31, 2021
The 7th edition of the Festival Ciné-Palestine is taking place in Paris, France, from the 27th May to the 12th of June. Focusing on the topic of Jerusalem for this edition, the festival will be held partly online partly physically with a selection of 30 movies, composed of unreleased, previews, archives and a short movies contest.
« Gaza is not a separate country: we are one people, forcibly separated by the architecture of the Israeli state.» can we read in A letter against apartheid, an online initiative signed by hundred of Palestinian artists, writers and allies from the world of arts. This call for union takes place in a context of a recent peak of tensions between Israel and Palestine during may 2021, a rise of violence leading to the destruction by Israeli bombings of a tower located in Gaza, where the press agency Associated Press and the TV channel Al-Jazira were setteled ; several lynchings in other cities of the territory like Jerusalem, Lydda, Haifa, Jaffa ; persistent ethnic cleansing in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem…
What can appear as a violent callback to reality looking from the news’ perspective is just part of a bigger image, a constant reality that has established itself since 1967. As apartheid gained around, Palestinian territory got divided, shrinked, colonized, evaporated through migration waves – more than 50% of the Palestinian are out of Palestine’s territorry.
This makes the call for unity even more crucial, in order to create an immaterial link around Palestinian individuals when geography seperates them. This immaterial link can be made by art, as said in the Letter Against Apartheid to quote it again. « We, the undersigned Palestinian artists, writers and our listed allies in the arts ask you to join us. Please don’t let this moment pass. If Palestinian voices are silenced again, it may take generations for another chance for freedom and justice to arise. »
It’s in coherence with this context that the Festival Ciné-Palestine (FCP), created in 2015, is being held every year in different venues around the Paris region. Its purpose is to contribute to the promotion of Palestinian cinema. By enabling the broadcast of visual works made by Palestinian or on the topic of Palestine, the festival aims to highlight the quality and diversity of Palestinian cinema, to offer a chance for Palestinian artists to meet their public, create a space for encounters, discussions and debates.
How to make cinema without a state ? Such events like the FCP give rise to concerns like the economic difficulties of Palestinian cinema, the ability or not for a movie director to find his public when the population is spread over many countries. Writing history through film making is necessary to leave a mark, to build a shared memory, to create an archives fund to a people that is in the emergency of stating its existence. The awareness around the importance of cinema and images as a political tool is making its way, not only as a way to promote revolutionary ideas for Palestinian cause, but also as a way to depict their daily life, to give some insight on their existence.
Here is an extract of the movies screened during the festival. For more infos, have a look at the programme of the festival and don’t hesitate to participate in the online screenings. The festival is going on until the 12th of June.
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April 15, 2020Minister, movie by Fide Dayo
To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic Villa Romana in Florence is sharing an artist’s film online every Wednesday, which has been produced in or around Villa Romana in recent years or was shown here.
The weekly screening is the attempt by Villa Romana to preserve closeness and exchange when the survival motto these days is “social distancing“?
Todays screening is Minister by Fide Dayo.
Villa Romana is a place of contemporary artistic production and global exchange in Florence. The award-winning Villa Romana artists have lived and worked at the facility since 1905. During their stay, they network with international guest artists and the regional and Italian art scene.
Fide Dayo, living in Rome, is a Nigerian filmmaker born into the Ekundayo family in Lagos, Nigeria. After his studies in architecture at the Florentine University he switched to film making.
His film “Minister” is a fictional comedy about the assignment of an African immigrant to the immigration minister in Italy. The film shows the power of a woman who’s aim is to change for hope in social issues: in a moment of prejudice, racial discrimination, the difficulties of integration, the complexity of reconciling professional and policy achievement with the family affection, the violence of power, labor rights and the housing emergency. At the same time, however, the film talks about the African culture, with its fashion, textiles and colors, music, dance and food.
In 2017 the movie was screened at the Mahalla Festival in Istanbul in the frame of parallel events of the 15th Istanbul Biennial.
Watch the movie at vimeo!!! [...]
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May 17, 2018“Time appears longer when you cannot see.”
A poignant and powerful phrase from the beginning of Kamen Stoyanov’s documentary IN-VISIBLE. The narrator emerges from a railway tunnel into Slovenia much like one of Plato’s chosen cave-dwellers. The perception of time is not the only thing that is about to change.
Part-allegory and part-hero’s journey, the film tacks along the course of darkness, discovery, light, and the role of the guide along the way. The classic narrative structure beautifully compliments the documentary’s own exploration of the invisible/visible as clear parallels to darkness/light.
The grounding in Ljubljana is a reminder that these are not just concepts reserved for mythology. They are happening everywhere as a kind of everyday yin and yang. Where there is visible, there is invisible. And if there is any truth the the concept, the invisible world is equally counterbalancing the visible once – with equal importance. As the title suggests, there is a path inside the visible. Stoyanov takes us in invisible Ljubljana.
We meet two guides in Marko Pogačnik and Taubi in a path of discovery of the hidden Ljubljana. Each a sage in their own way, Stoyanov assumes the role of seeker and transmitter of their wisdom, allowing the two men to speak of an invisible truth. Marko offers a path into a world of metaphysics – dreamlike and symbolic. Taubi, worldly and raw, blends politics and emotions from the deep fringes of urban Ljubljana.
The juxtaposition is evocative and enjoyably open-ended, leaving room for personal choice in a journey. There are always decisions to be made in how to regard newly visible places. Far from preachy or patronizing, the film echoes the words of a third guide and another invisible world:
“I don’t help anyone. I give you only a place.”
-Don Pierino
Despite their differences, Taubi, Pogačnik, Pierino, and Stoyanov echo a similar kind of compassion which creates space for what might be found in invisible worlds. Where there is invisible, there is often neglect and suffering that elicits a strong desire to help. But maybe it is as Don Pierino says – rather than trying to help, maybe we could do more with the act of providing a place.
Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/kamenstoyanov/in-visibletrailer
For more information visit : www.kamenstoyanov.com [...]
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May 1, 2018Beuys in Istanbul
Screening of the documentary Beuys by Andres Veiel at DEPO Istanbul
Saturday May 5th, 7 pm
Watch the trailer:
The first major documentary on the most renowned German artist Joseph Beuys, simply titled Beuys, is finally screening in Istanbul at Depo.
Beuys is a documentary by German filmmaker Andres Veiel. World premiere of it was at the competition of last year’s Berlinale in Berlin.
Shockingly there has not been a major Beuys retrospective in the US since 1979, when the Guggenheim in New York let him take over its building and left some critics and the less adventurous members of the public scratching their heads. No one knew then that he would die just seven years later, at the age of 64, or that his enigmatic approaches would come to be so widely imitated.
In Germany he got famous already in 1964 as participant of the documenta in Kassel. Three times he participated into this international exhibition.
What is impressive about this documentary is that Veiel did not stick to the format of retracing an artist’s career in linear, chronological fashion, replete with talking heads in hideous tweed outfits telling us what it all means. Instead, Veiel dug into the archives, creating a film that is 95% footage of Beuys and 5% talking heads contextualizing what we just saw. The film mostly lets us hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Veiel chose to select the most captivating archival footage that could introduce audiences to some of the key ideas in Beuys’s oeuvre. The film opens on a theoretical note, with Beuys rattling on about his notions of an expanded concept of art — including his much recited aphorism that each person is an artist — and moves on to explore the artist’s major projects and political activism.
Veiel‘s scope was to introduce you to the raw presence of the artist, the timber of his voice, the way his face twists, and the complexities of his mannerisms.
So humor comes in where you do not expect it, namely as a swipe at art critics and journalists. Beuys answers their stupid questions with subtle jokes. This is not only amusing for the viewer, but also illuminates the effect of the artist and man Josef Beuys.
Screening in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut
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December 8, 2016
Istanbul artist in residence by the Federal Chancellery of Austria – Kamen Stoyanov – started to work during his stay ( September – November 2016) on an experimental movie that deals with the construction of the third airport in Istanbul under the title New Istanbul Dream.
Turkey is constructing its third international airport (the world’s largest), tentatively named Istanbul New Airport—a future ultra modern facility capable of handling substantial airline traffic surges through the ancient city, scheduled to open in February 2018. Atatürk Airport will be closed down once the new airport is operational.
This airport under construction is one of Turkey’s most controversial projects in recent times for a number of reasons, from problems with the area’s soil to the airport’s potential environmental impact, as it is located in the Northern Forest Area, which experts say is of huge importance for Istanbul’s ecological sustainability.
Other aspects of concern relate to alleged links between project contractors and President Erdogan. In late 2013, amid a corruption scandal, wiretapped conversations appeared to suggest that Mr Erdogan had put pressure on businessmen behind the IGA (Istanbul Grand Airport company) consortium to acquire a media group formerly run by his son-in-law.
New Istanbul Dream investigates the counstruction side and process of the third Istanbul Airport situated north west of Istanbul, on the black sea. The film shows the changing of the environment through the construction works. It has also an additional performative layer binding the whole movie. This layer opens a space of an imaginary and activist movement and searches literary and metaphorically for a way out. The sound includes records from the construction side and the surrounding, a whole record from an answering of the questionary of the IGA (Istanbul Grand Airport company) by an citizen of the village of Akpinar and records of people from the villages around the airport talking about their dreams and wishes.
Short documentary-experimental movie, ca. 30 min. 2016-2017
Kamen Stoyanov the Bulgarian artist living in Vienna often deals with the questions of identity, migration, historical definition, social and cultural communication in his works by gathering first-hand experiences of the social, artistic and cultural relations of the given country. He uses the urban public places and the architectural environment as exhibition spaces, themes of film and photography and contrasts them with the current or inherited cultural relations, habits. The real participants of cultural life and he himself pose in his provocative and ironic works.
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July 8, 2016The Abounaddara collective whose works were on display on the Venice Biennial last year are now invited by the documenta 2017. Abounaddara is an anonymous collective of volunteer, self-taught artists whose practice is founded on the principle of emergency and an attitude of defiance towards established powers and the culture industry. Since April 2010, Abounaddara has produced self-funded, weekly short films and made them freely available to the public online. These films are anonymous and open-ended. They offer a glimpse of ordinary Syrians without restricting them to political or religious affiliations, while focusing on the details of daily life and evoking horror without ever showing it.
2015 the collective had withdrawn from All the World’s Futures, the 2015 Venice Biennale’s central exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, claiming that their opening short film, “All the Syria’s Futures,” was “censored” by not being screened on May 5. In a letter to the Biennale’s organizers members of the collective expressed concern that their films will be “screened to the public in 30 minutes blocs, scheduled between readings from Marx’s Capital and various musical interludes.” The group is also concerned that they were awarded a “special mention” without their first film being screened.
All the Syria’s Futures by Abounaddara
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May 10, 2016Culture in Exile
World Premiere of the movie In The Dark Times by Sabine Küper-Büsch and Thomas Büsch at Pera Museum Istanbul, June 15, 2016 in cooperation with the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and the Pera Museum.
IndieFest Film Awards, La Jolia, U S A 2016 – Section Documentary Feature, Award of Special Recognition
Full HD, 86 min. 2015/2016
Produced by the Goethe-Institut Istanbul
The documentary describes the life and cultural strategies of artists, actors, musicians and activists with forced migration background living in a host country like Turkey.
Bertolt Brecht defined culture already as an important strategy against oppression in his Svendborger Poems 1937.
This movie compares the life and suffering of todays forced migrants with the experiences of Bertolt Brecht who lived as migrant during the Nazi period in Scandinavia and the US.
It is an authentic document of the efforts of migrants and refugees from Syria to find meaning from suffering. It is about rethinking and rebuilding a culture outside of the native country. The audience will learn about the challenge to transform experiences to meaning and to culture.
Bertolt Brechts quotation – In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times – becomes a reference in how to make experiences of suffering and exile transmittable to others through film, music and writing.
The participants express their needs to develop new sensitivity, new imagination, new theories and new thinking beyond any suffering, beyond any violence and beyond any terror as implemented by governments like the Assad regime today in Syria.
Watch the current trailer of the movie at the StreetWalking Video-Magazine.
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April 28, 2016Global Perspectives on Migration and Flight – A Conference of Goethe Institutes in Istanbul, Munich and Mexico City
Last Saturday the Goethe Institute in Cooperation with ARD alpha and Munich Kammerspiele hold a live conference simultaneously happening in Istanbul, Mexico city and Munich with speakers from the field of democracy development, migration and refugee aid as well as people from the artistic field trying to connect the challenge of migration and flight with artistic strategies and its impact in political and social affairs. A dialogue for exchange, offering new visions, finding structures of solidarity or rather persistence?
Conference at Salt Galata
On the same day, some hours before the conference the ‘Syrian Mobile Films Festival’ took also place in SALT Galata. Short Clips from Smartphones played an important role in the Syrian revolution and thousands of people filmed footage to document the demonstrations and happenings at this time. It became an important tool for freedom of expression and creation under suppression, war and dictatorship. The films at the festival show a lot of individual impressions and reflect the variety of Syrians realities. From scenes of war, young revolutionaries preparing themselves for the routine of fight in Syria, a small boy rebuilding his home city in lovely details with paper, the long way of flight or the struggles to integrate in a new society in Europe with all difficulties, the viewer is directly confronted with the individual incredible stories of the filmmakers.
One film starts with the introduction: ‘My story starts on the road and I think it is reflecting something that it will stay on the road.’ Indeed it is reflecting something. And it is even more reflecting something, that on the conference for Migration and Flight neither in Istanbul nor in Munich any of those ‘refugees’ was represented by him or herself. Is this the idea of how to deal with migration topics, not to give a voice to the persons concerned? In cities where plenty of young talented educated Syrians live?
Syrian Mobile Films Festival
But back to the beginning. What do have Istanbul, Munich and Mexico City in common? They are all part of inhuman political deals between unions and countries which are aiming to keep people away regardless of the consequences as long as they stay away from the USA or the EU. And both Mexico and Turkey are doing the dirty work for the prosperous countries.
The speakers in Munich were Ulrike Guérot, founder and director of the European Democracy Lab, and Philipp Ruch, artistic director of the ‘Center for Political Beauty’. In the beginning of this month Guérot published her book ‘Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss! Eine politische Utopie.’(Why Europe must become a republic! A political utopia). She spoke about how we should deconstruct our ideas of nation states. Everything is fluid in the global world: gas, oil, money, internet; but the idea of living together is still very static. Although passports just exist since 1921, their hierarchy is determining plenty of lives. For the first time more than 60 million people around the world are fleeing, but they fail on the borders. Also Philipp Ruch dealt with borders, but in an artistic way. ‘Erster europäischer Mauerfall’ (First fall of the European wall) was an artistic action for the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin wall, where 100 people drove to the European external borders to break it down in a performative act. Just to name one of the many artistic acts to consult the policy with the consequences of their actions.
Mexico City was represented by Fabienne Venet, director of the research institute on migration INEDIM, and the collective Migrantas, who are doing workshops with refugees and immigrants, to give them a voice in urban spaces by transforming their drawings in pictograms that everybody can understand easily. The collective is working in different cities around the world, but although every city, every participant tells its own story, they encounter many universal moments.
©Migrantas
In Istanbul Pırıl Erçoban, director of Mültici-Der a NGO dealing with refugee aid and migration, Enis Yücel, photographer, and Eda Elif Tibet, documentary filmmaker, who introduced her film ‘Refugee Here I am’, were guests of the conference. The lack of legal status for refugees and their designation as guests although Turkey is with 3 Million people the country with the most refugees, were very present. Especially facing the deal with European Union and the plans for a ‘Safety Zone’ in Syria makes many hopeless, because then it is just of the will of the government. Also the distribution of money Turkey will get within this deal, is not yet figured out and has to be observed very critically.
But sure is that the governments are miserably failing. The aid for refugees and migrants, and this is also connecting those three countries, is mainly carried by the civil society, who assumes responsibilities the government is in charge of. And in case of Turkey the civil society is even incapacitated by its own government.
So. No Limits? Possibility or Utopia? Facing a new deal between Sudan and the EU it seems to be hopeless in near future, although the comment of Ruch, that it was already possible some years ago, is encouraging. And Limits are not beginning with borders of countries, but also with borders and exclusion in cultural institutions and in the societies. It is important to tell the stories of the people that are suffering displacement, war, poverty and the difficulties of immigration, but they don’t need an unequal empowerment, they should have the place to talk for themselves and become a part.
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February 18, 2016Currently around 2.7 Million refugees live in camps in Turkey. Since 2011, when the revolution started in Syria, the people have been fleeing first to Lebanon, then Jordan and Turkey.
Hopes for an imminent end and the chance to return homewere doomed as the civil war turned into an international vast conflict and generated the enormous human tragedy the international community is facing today.
The documentary In the Dark Times features Syrian artists and actors living in Istanbul. One of the protagonists of the movie is bookseller and artist Samer Al Kadri from the Pages Bookstore in Istanbul.
Samer Al Kadri at Pages bookstore Istanbul
Samer expresses his thoughts about Syrians heading to Europe:
If you want me to say something real to Europeans, who know that all these refugees are going to Europe, I would say, in my opinion Europe is receiving the best people we have in Syria. And Syria is losing them. They should know that. They should understand that. It makes me sad for my country, because all the people are going. But of course, they just don’t have any choice.
(Quote from the Documentary In the Dark Times, a film dealing with the subject of refugees and migrants in Istanbul)
Refugees at Istanbul bus terminal
Turkey is overwhelmed by nearly 3 million refugees. Thus, Turkey can’t deal with the crisis aside from the humanitarian emergency. Integration in the society, exchange with the local population, as well as the conferment of the status of political asylum are mostly missing for these forced migrants from Arabic countries currently living in Turkey.
The status of asylum outlined in the Geneva Convention on Refugees from 1951, is only accessible for Europeans in Turkey. Arabic refugees cannot apply for permanent asylum and are not granted work permits. Turkey is only tolerating them as guests, a status which does not exist according to international law. Instead of welcoming and healing experiences in a safe environment, they are partially marginalized and not integrated entirely neither in the education system, nor in labor market, nor in society in general.
Syrians are teaching their children at home in Istanbul
The wish for self-determination and the dissipation of time due to the almost never-ending lack of perspective are the main motives for people from the Arabic diaspora community leaving Turkey and aiming for Europe. Europe is talked up as the Promised Land among refugees who are experiencing this unfortunate mixture of ambiguity of their status and the longing to restart normal life. In fact, these hopes often lead to disappointment.
A Syrian actor and friend of ours, currently residing in Berlin, frames out that there is always this correlated hope for recovery, which is projected on the places one does not know. This made him hazard the dangerous way from Turkey along the Balkan route to Germany, where he found asylum. He’s one of the lucky ones, since he had already arrived in June 2015, and his legal status was cleared rapidly. Still, he is confronted with the reality that safety doesn’t guarantee happiness.
Leaving Istanbul
Racist organizations like PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) or parties like AfD (Alternative for Germany) find fertile soil to spread their right-wing populist slogans and generate supporters by mobilizing against the refugee danger. They base discussion of identity-loss and social clashes on a populist, racist ideology lacking funded or proven arguments. The reactionary fear is causing the conscious departure from political correctness, inflating the distorted picture of the migrant as a mutual enemy.
Aside from the wide range lack of empathy in society, the failure of the political and administrative sector is even more alarming. Unsolved problems in fields of accommodation, registration, staff shortage, and in administration in general have to be approached politically.
The absence of so called “Christian values” like grace of charity regarding refugees is so great that it even mobilized the slow apparatus of the Catholic Church which underlined last week that ‘it is simply necessary to save humans from stark misery.’ (Cardinal Marx)
Cardinal Marx
In the light of this social and political climate for a lot of asylum seekers, it turns out that Europe, in this case Germany, is not matching the refugee’s expectations. It has been an illusion.
Our friend – the Syrian actor – was granted refugee status in Germany. He lives in a flat in Berlin, a city that is well known for its multicultural mixture. But still, he regrets his decision to leave Turkey and to go to Germany. “I was missing Beirut in Istanbul and I am missing Istanbul in Berlin,” he explained. The desire to become a member of a free society in the West proves to be often unfulfilled. Participation in society was what he was looking for in his profession as actor, not to live as a marginalized refugee.
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian intellectual, writer, and winner of the Prince Claus Award in 2012, currently lives in exile in Istanbul, declared that culture is the way out of the misery. He sees it as a tool to overcome recent tragedy and create a future including as many of the possible parts of the society.
Yassin Al Haj Saleh during a demonstration in Istanbul
Our culture could — our culture should be rebuilt on these experiences, and through culture we can rebuild our identity, our roles, and in a way our imagination, and our society.
We need a dialogue between ourselves to meet and rebuild our society. Society is composed of these interactions between people. The regime was built on isolation, and preventing people from meeting, and in the end they were successful.
(Quote from Armed Words, an interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the role of culture in Syria’s struggle in The New Inquiry by Kathryn Hamilton)
What Yassin Al Haj Saleh described in this interview as solitude inside Syrian society forced by the Assad Regime, should not be replicated in European societies. Avoiding the development of feared parallel societies, requires an active exchange between migrants and the local population, in European countries as well as in Turkey.
Above that, an open society is dependent on examination of the foreign. Revitalization is the outcome of exploration of the new and unknown. Seeing the foreign as a chance, in part of the concept of an open society, which Europeans claim to live in.
All images from the movie In the Dark Times produced by the Goethe-Institut Istanbul
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July 7, 2015Crisis, debts and credits are the issues nowadays permanentely related to Greece. In a capitalistic system completely focussed on money, the public discourse tends to forget about the people behind the bank accounts – especially in Greece, where poorness spread widely and suicide rate quadrupled during the past years. A group of young media artists and arts managers feared people’s stories getting lost while being annihilated amongst world politics. Four years ago they launched „The Caravan Project“ in order to save them.
He is sitting in a small tent, a cat tampering the dried up rests of his food in a pot. He paints blue pictures and writes down jokes sometimes, when he has some time left for it. Massimo is a homeless from Ethopia living in a neighbourhood in Athens, sometimes happily, sometimes angrily. In the evening hours he stands next to a busy highway, his eyes fascinatedly aligned to the sky and tells the camera „Look how beautiful it is! Look at it!“.
His portrait is just one of the stories Stratis Vogiatzis and his around 15 colleagues have been collecting so far while travelling Greece. In an old camper and equipped with two circuit Mongolian yurt tents they visit cities and villages. The team of the Caravan Project holds screenings on squares, in schools and prisons all over the country. They show exhibitions of the material they have collected before and offer community actions related to important local issues in every area.
But above all, the young Greeks make their countrymen talk. They encourage school kids to elaborate their thoughts and ideas, they ask the old boatbuilder for his experiences and zoom into a Social Conservatory in Athens where volunteers teach interested people in playing instruments for free. By only using the stimulus „Tell me a story“ the Caravaners create short films and documenting photo series which they are publishing in a digital story bank.
Like this the „Caravan Project“ develops a unique possibility to gain insights in a society that is being reduced to numbers and amounts of money in Western media lately. To the initiators of the project stories are brigdes, „designed to help us overcome our isolation and to reunite with the world and our fellow human beings“. Stories in their sense can be told by everyone, by your son, by your neighbours and by the ones living on the edges of a society. Their aim is to visualise what the other’s life is like and to foster understanding between members of a crisis-shaken society.
The Caravan Project suggests – just like other social ideas as for example a spanish village putting social economy into practice – that the solution of major problems can be hidden in very small structures sometimes. Their undertaking is an approach to strenghten mutual solidarity and civic integration by focussing on individuals and the things they have to tell. The „Caravan Project“ is empowering Greeks here and now to stay together during hard times and to pay attention to the ones living besides them, always sticking to their slogan „Another world is here“.
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June 14, 2015Anatolian Carpets, Armenian craftsmen and Cultural Memory: the Berlin based artist Maja Weyermann displays her expirences of 6 month Istanbul in a video installation at DEPO, Istanbul until July 16.
Just one month after the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide 100 years ago, the exhibition by Maja Weyermann at DEPO Istanbul is dedicated to the role of Armenians in Turkey before 1915. Berlin based artist Maja Weyermann focussed on carpet production and the expropriation of Armenian foundations during her stay in Istanbul in 2014.
Maja has been living and working in Istanbul for six months in 2014. Her residency was granted by the Berlin Senate Chancellery, Cultural Affairs Department, and accompanied by Diyalog Derneği. “Letters from Abroad” displays the results of this residency, just like a current exhibition on gas masks by Ruben Aubrecht and Maria Anwander does in Bludenz, Austria.
When Maja came to Istanbul in March 2014 she at first planned to realize a digital art work about Anatolian carpets, its rich cultural heritage and referring to its meaning as a part of cultural memory. During her stay she did a lot of interviews with carpet dealers, workers at the bazar and Turkish historians. She discovered as well the abandond old buildings of the Armenian community in the center of Istanbul. Many of Armenians had left Turkey in the 50 years after the pogroms and the buildings stand often empty until today because the ownership is unclear.
Soon after starting her research many contradictions and inconsistent information appeared, which Weyermann could not classify until she learned about the key role of Armenian craftsmen and carpet dealers in Turkey before 1915. Weyermann continued her studies focussing on this fact and based her studies on the interviews with carpet experts, dealers, restorers and on special literature.
Another observation Maja made was the link between vacant real estate and restitution procedures in Istanbul. At this moment she came across the 2012 Declaration of the Hrant Dink Foundation. This declaration documents the confiscation of properties belonging to Armenian foundations by the Turkish state. Weyermann visited several objects in question and filmed them.
In the video installation exclusively produced for DEPO, Maja confronts the expropriation of material inherit – the seized properties – and the erasement of cultural inherit – the forgotten key role of Armenian craftsmen and carpet dealers. Like that she describes two aspects of the Armenian life in a very personal way.
Opening of Letters from Abroad at DEPO, June 12, introduction by Sabine Küper-Büsch and Thomas Büsch, Foto: Sven Flechsenhar
In “Letters from Abroad” Weyermann combines real HD video footage with 3D animations. The latter are used to create experiences of space impossibly producible with video recordings such as memories or imaginations. At the same time the video recordings may serve as pictures of “the real”. Their audio track include narrations, sounds and music, which leads to the creation of an independent soundscape. Additionally the installation contains an interview with Armenian Halı Ustası, who was born in 1936.
Maja Weyermann’s video installation interweaves both, observations and researches of the artist. It works like an experimental documentary that contributes with artistic means to the discussion on how to deal with the past.
Letters from Abroad
Maja Weyermann
DEPO-Istanbul (Tütün Deposu, Lüleci Hendek Caddesi No.12, Tophane/İstanbul)
13 June – 16 July 2015
Opening: 12th of June 2015
Supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department
2015 Exhibition Program of DEPO is being realized in cooperation with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
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May 9, 2015The Jury of the 56th International Venice Biennial has also decided to assign a special mention to the Abounaddara collective from Syria who are showing their videos at the Exhibition All the World’s Futures by curated by Okwui Enwezor.
The Syrian film collective Abounaddara (meaning “man with glasses” in Arabic) is an anonymous group of self-taught filmmakers. Since the onset of the Syrian revolution in 2011, Abounaddara has been creating and posting very short documentary videos, what they term “bullet films,” on Vimeo every Friday. The group calls their work “emergency cinema” to emphasize the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis in Syria. Abounaddara is driven by a critical sense of urgency to show the global implications of the Syrian War and the commitment to creating an alternative to sensationalistic national and international media coverage.
They employ an aesthetic of do-it-yourself and disorientation, self-producing their films and distributing them online to avoid political censorship and the formatting dictates of the media and entertainment industries. Since its founding in 2010, Abounaddara has released a series of short documentaries celebrating the daily life of ordinary Syrians.
Charif Kiwan, the Collective’s spokesperson, said that the group is committed to making a short film every week as a contribution to the revolution. “But we didn’t film our revolution in the way that you might see it on YouTube through unbearable chaotic images. Rather we sought to understand it through the stories of individuals who are on the other side of the news. For us it is a question of making an immediate cinema without succumbing to the tyranny of the news, of making a political cinema without succumbing to facile denunciation.”
To see all their videos, check out the group’s site here or their Vimeo channel here. [...]
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