‘SOUSVEILLANCE’
Project Space Festival 2024
Screening and Talk
Sunday, June 30, 2024
3:00 - 9:00 PM
Screening Slots
15:00
16:15
17:30
Ayhan and Me (belit sağ, 2015, 14 min.)
Forensickness (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2020, 40 min.)
March 8, 2020: A Memoir (Fırat Yücel - Image Acts Collective), 2023, 15 min.)
Talk
19:00
Senem Aytaç in conversation with belit sağ, Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Image Acts Collective
The Watch invites film curator and critic Senem Aytaç to present three essay films and a discussion with the directors/artists and the audience, inspired by the physical and conceptual space of the former GDR watchtower at Schlesischer Busch.
This one-day event aims to gather people in the Watchtower to watch the films inside the tower while reflecting on the nature of 'watching'.
The theme of the program, "Sousveillance," means the opposite of "surveillance," which is more commonly used when considering the technologies and methods of control through watching. Sousveillance means “bringing the means of observation down to the human level, either physically or hierarchically".
Chloé Galibert-Laîné’s Forensickness along with ImageActs Collective’s March 8, 2020: A Memoir and belit sağ's Ayhan and Me will be shown in a loop inside the tower during the day starting at 15:00 on the 30th June, followed by the open discussion with the directors at 19:00. Curator Senem Aytaç will wander around questions such as: in today's world flooded with images, how do we process these images and look back at the systems that try to control us through their gaze?
Ayhan and Me
belit sağ, 2015, 14 min.
The film tells the story of Ayhan Çarkın, a leading member of a death squad responsible for the murder of at least 1,000 Kurds in the 1990s. Before the film was finished, the script was censored in Turkey so belit sağ decided to make a film about the background. sağ weaves the history of censorship together with images of war and poses questions about the visibility and hierarchy of images.
belit sağ is a video artist living in Amsterdam. She studied mathematics in Ankara. Her video-artistic background can be traced to collaborations with video-activist collectives in Turkey, where she co-founded the art space Karahaber and the archival project bak.ma. In 2014 and 2015, she completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam; in 2016 and 2019, she was in residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. Her works have been presented at international film festivals in Toronto, Rotterdam and New York, in the EYE film museum in Amsterdam, at the MOCA in Taipei and at the Tabakalera Film Seminar in San Sebastián.
Forensickness
Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2020, 40 min.
In an attempt to analyse Chris Kennedy's 'Watching the Detectives', a researcher dives into a massive archive of media produced after the Boston attacks. Their online wanderings offer a performative exploration of the history of critical thinking and the ruthless politics of truth production.
Chloé Galibert-Laîné is a researcher and filmmaker, currently working as tenured Assistant Professor in Film Studies at the American University of Paris. Their research and artistic work explores the intersections between cinema and online media, with a particular interest for questions of embodied spectatorship, gestures of appropriation, gender performances, processes of knowledge production and mediated memory. Their video essays and desktop documentaries have received support from institutions such as the CNC, CNAP, Eurimages and the Sundance Institute, and have been screened at festivals that include IFFRotterdam, IDFA, FIDMarseille, Berlin Critic's Week, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Ars Electronica.
March 8, 2020: A Memoir
Fırat Yücel (Image Acts Collective), 2023, 15 min.
We are on Taksim Square watching the aftermath of this last mass demonstration in the city, before the COVID-19 pandemic. Two voices reflect on what they see on the screen. March 8, 2020: A Memoir is a multi-voiced desktop documentary attempting to find the blind spots of "touristic cameras." A memoir of the Feminist Night March, the last demonstration in Istanbul before the pandemic.
Image Acts Collective
Fırat Yucel is a film critic and a filmmaker. He co-founded Altyazı Monthly Cinema Magazine in 2001. He is currently a fellow at BAK Fellowship For Situated Practice 2023/2024. Aylin Kuryel is an Assistant Professor at the Literary and Cultural Analysis department at the University of Amsterdam. Her research areas are nationalism, image politics, aesthetics/resistance, and politics of emotions. Yücel and Kuryel produce films with their artistic duo collective called Image Acts. They co-directed the mid-length documentary Heads and Tails in 2019 and the feature documentary Translating Ulysses in 2023.
