grain | belit sağ

belit sağ:

In grain [...] I dived into the archive of a left-wing, underground, armed group from Turkey, whose archive was smuggled to ISSG [International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam]. There were hunger strikes in 1999 and 2000 against the law of the isolation prison system for political prisoners all over the country. I was looking at the images made by this left-wing, sectarian, and hierarchical group. They made a propaganda video with the images of the burned bodies of their militants after a military attack on the imprisoned hunger strikers all over the country in December 2000. grain contemplates the politics, poetics, and ethics of the image: how does one use images of others, and what does one do with them in the case they can not consent to this usage, because they are no longer alive? What are the consequences of the choices taken with these images? How such imagery use creates a culture of what is acceptable. My research and works have been insisting on finding a language to talk about these violences. How can we talk about these images without perpetuating further violence, and at the same time, by insistently talking about them? 

*

grain | Video Essay | belit sağ | 2016 | 5'

belit sağ's Vimeo account