Documentary in artistic practice: accented essays from Turkey

Online talk via Teams, 1 December Wednesday, 14:00-15:00 (link)

Documentary and art are seemingly two words in conflict with one another: the former implies a kind of documentation that encloses an objective record of the real world while the latter is defined and evaluated by subjectivity and creativity. Nonetheless – as Grierson’s famous definition of documentary also suggests – subjectivity and creativity are two concepts that inevitably become significant during the documentary filmmaking process as they can produce and/or prevent conventions, possibilities and limitations in a film’s narrative. Moreover, the historical collaboration between documentary filmmakers and visual artists is an indication of the range of forms documentary can take.

As part of the Centre's research seminar series, Elif Akçalı's paper will look at the use of documentary filmmaking in artistic practices in Turkey, especially focusing on those contemporary works that adopt a first-person, subjective viewpoint, made by artists in transition. Akçalı's case studies are Didem Pekün’s Of Dice and Men (2016), Şener Özmen’s How to tell of peace to a living dove? (2015) and Aykan Safoğlu’s Off-white Tulips (2013), which she categorizes as accented essays. Akçalı will analyze the aesthetics of these three works especially in terms of how the subjective viewpoint in their narratives shape our understanding of the social and cultural context, which was largely shaped by the political events during the period in which they were made. The accented first-person address in these works, along with other stylistic choices prone to essayistic documentary filmmaking that they pursue, allow them to enjoy a multiplicity of meanings, raising personal questions that become relevant for collective issues of identity, belonging, culture, history and memory.

Dr. Elif Akçalı completed her PhD in Media Arts in 2014 at Royal Holloway, University of London, and she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Radio, TV and Cinema Department, Kadir Has University (Istanbul, Turkey) since 2015. She teaches the practice of film editing as well as a variety of theoretical courses in screen studies within the undergraduate and graduate programmes at Khas. Her works have appeared in a variety of journals including Critical Arts, Journal of Film and Video and [in]Transition. Her research interests include film style and aesthetics, documentary and essay film, gender and audiovisual production, and videographic film studies. Currently she is leading a two-year research project funded by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) titled “Women on Screen and Behind the Camera: A Contemporary Outlook of Representation and Labor of Women in Film and TV Industries in Turkey (2017-2021).”

Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in Documentary

 Ameliorative Homecomings: Framing the Queer Migrant in A Sinner in Mecca (2015) and Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016) 

published in The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture, Issue 01 ‘Transitory Parerga: Access and Inclusion in Contemporary Art,’ edited by Vlad Strukov (University of Leeds): pp. 245-263. [open access link]

Cüneyt Çakırlar's study critically analyzes the themes of queer migrancy and homecoming in two recent documentaries. Parvez Sharma’s A Sinner in Mecca (2015) documents the filmmaker’s journey from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia for his hajj pilgrimage. Using an essayistic, first-person documentary register, Sharma constructs a tension around his attachments to nation, religion, and sexuality. While the film offers a critique of religion as a punitive state apparatus, Sharma’s pronounced proprietorial relation to a migrant gay Muslim identity functions in progressive counter-valence. Tomer and Barak Heymann’s portrait documentary, Who’s Gonna Love Me Now? (2016), tells the story of Saar, an Israeli gay man who was expelled from his Jewish community in Israel and has emigrated to London. Treating Saar’s HIV diagnosis as the marker of an affective crisis, the film oscillates between two distinct spaces of domesticity: Saar’s family in Israel, and his circle of friends in the U.K. In both films, the conflict between religion, national belonging, and sexual identity is resolved through a normative pull towards home and its affective restructuring of intimacy in the context of queer migrancy. The ameliorative status of homecoming operates as a default resolution in these films. A longing for home is that which both films register as the constitutive attachment of the queer migrant.

 

Keywords: affect, essay film, first-person, intersectionality, LGBTQ documentary, migration, religion, sexuality, transnationalism

To access the open-access journal, visit https://thegaragejournal.org/en/

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art, Museums & Culture is an independent interdisciplinary academic platform that advances critical discussions about contemporary art, culture, and museum practice in the Russian and global contexts. It publishes original empirical, theoretical, and speculative research in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation. Fully peer-reviewed, The Garage Journal provides an open-access source book of ideas for an international audience.

Soufiane Ababri's solo show at The PILL, Istanbul

Following his solo show, Here is a Strange and Bitter Crop, which was on display at the Space in London last year, the French-Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri has recently launched an exhibition of his recent work at the gallery The PILL (Istanbul & Paris) titled Memories of a Solitary Cruise (10 January - 23 February 2019). Through his use of the spectacular scene of traditional Turkish wrestling, Ababri's project intervenes into the racialised and sexualised modes of Orientalism. Exploring male friendship and homoeroticism in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures through the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Ababri's art of appropriation creates a productive friction by depicting Arab or "Oriental" with the aesthetic tools of Western canons/masters of homoerotic arts.

The gallery commissioned Cüneyt Çakırlar to author a piece that introduces Ababri's art practice to the Istanbul audience. The English version of Çakırlar's piece can be accessed from this link. The Turkish translation has recently been published in Manifold.