10 November – 2 December 2023
Friday -Saturday, 15-19h
Exhibition Opening:
Friday 10th November, 19h
"Bakma" (Don’t look!), was a police announcement that echoed through the squares of Ankara and Istanbul during protests from the mid-90s to the uprising in 2013. bak.ma video archiving collective takes its name from this command, but stands in stark opposition to the ongoing state oppression and censorship that ‘don’t look’ demands of us.
bak.ma started following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as the Gezi Uprising, since then the archive collection has expanded to cover political events and movements in Turkey from the 1960s to today. Its collections implicitly reveals what is missing from the archives in Turkey, where audiovisual archival material belonging to the invisible, silenced, and oppressed parties of dissent has otherwise remained unarchivable.
bak.ma has been in residence at AGIT since May 2023. During this period, they reanimated the archive by curating a series of both old collections and digitising new ones, as well as hosting public events that brought together contributors, users, and allies. By collectively sharing knowledge and memories, the residency has served as a space of empowerment to further radicalise the politics of the collection and expand the possibilities of creating a living memory of social movements.
Don’t look! will relocate the online archival footage of bak.ma to the physical space of AGIT to further develop these connections and encounters. The exhibition showcases key aspects from bak.ma’s archive including newly digitised material of video-activists, as well as older footage from the workers movements in Turkey.
PROGRAMME
Exhibition Tour
with bak.ma
Saturday 25th Nov, 16.00h
Come and find out more about the bak.ma archive, social movements in and around Turkey, and their resonance today.
Screening & Talk
ALTYAZI FASİKÜL: FREE CINEMA
Saturday 2nd Dec, 19h
Altyazı Fasikül, an online and offline platform that focuses on freedom of expression in film, is a project of Altyazı Cinema Association, which was founded in 2019.
During the first months of the pandemic, Altyazı Fasikul commissioned videos to a variety of producers from video-journalists to video-activists, academics to artists. Produced under quarantine conditions, the first video series of Fasikül entitled ‘Looking Outside’ created a collective archive of the pandemic period that offered suggestions about formats and materials of filmmaking, while trying to establish a connection with the ‘outside’ at a time when it was not possible to be out on the streets.
The considerable interest in this first series inspired a second one with a new perspective and theme: ‘From Below’. With the second series, the aim was to collectively contemplate on the visibility/invisibility of a ‘recording’ and explore the effects of the politics of the image on social life. How can images produced ‘from below’ respond/interact/fight against surveillance from above?
Both projects also aim to give an autonomous space for video-makers to engage and produce with their own archives.
This special programme will consist of a selection of screenings from the video-series accompanied by a talk by Senem Aytaç who co-founded Altyazı Fasikül and co-curated these series (with Fırat Yücel).
Screening Programme
Remember The March (Güliz Sağlam, 13 min.)
Ghosts of The City (Fatih Pınar, 10 min.)
Gündem (Fatma Çelik, 7 min.)
Center (Deniz Tortum & Esen Tan, 5 min.)
Experiences of Resistance 1: Atlas (Osman Baran Özdemir, 12 min.)
Experiences of Resistance 2: Witness (H. Işık, 7 min.)
Bios
Altyazı Fasikül
A project of Altyazı Cinema Association, Altyazı Fasikül: Free Cinema is an online and offline platform that focuses on freedom of expression in cinema. Altyazı Fasikül’s main purpose is to increase the visibility of the works of filmmakers who face risks of government repression and censorship. It aims to strengthen the role and position of independent cinema as a critical force in the cultural politics of Turkey.
In line with its purpose to provide a space for underrepresented/censored filmmakers, Altyazı Fasikül also organizes screenings of films by directors/collectives under risk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Altyazı Fasikül held online screenings of short films produced exclusively for the Looking Outside programme by independent filmmakers of Turkey.
Since July 2019, five issues of Altyazı Fasikül have been published in print, distributed as a free supplement of Altyazı Cinema Magazine and one issue in PDF format. In May 2020, Altyazı Cinema Magazine started to be published as an e-mag due to the effects of COVID-19 pandemic and since then, Altyazı Fasikül continues as an online media outlet.
https://fasikul.altyazi.net/
Twitter: @altyazifasikul
Instagram: @fasikulaltyazi
Senem Aytaç is a film critic, editor, and curator. She has been a member of the editorial board of the acclaimed independent Turkish film magazine Altyazı since 2004 and served as one of the chief editors for over a decade. In 2019, she co-founded the Altyazı Cinema Association, where she also worked as a project manager for three years and co-funded Altyazı Fasikul. She is still serving on the advisory board of Altyazı Fasikül, a subdivision of the association that primarily focuses on issues related to censorship and the freedom of artistic expression in Turkey. Senem is currently based in Berlin, working as a freelance professional.