Past

Sights and Sounds: Turkey

Dec. 26, 2014 – Jan. 29, 2015

Sights and Sounds: Turkey features new work by Nevin Aladağ, Fatma Bucak, Zeyno Pekünlü, and Aykan Safoğlu, selected by Emre Baykal.

This selection of works from Turkey teases out the way in which moving images incorporate other artistic modes, such as performance and photography, as well as adopting various documentary and narrative styles. The four artists shown here embrace a wide range of media and formats, using their personal artistic tools and strategies in filmic terms.

Aladağ borrows from video playback and theatrical mime techniques for the recorded performance Hochparterre. In this video, a single actor becomes the face of a whole community. Through this work, the artist assigns a collective and anonymous body to its residents. In Blessed Are You Who Come, Bucak also tests the conventions of performance, transforming her male audience into performers themselves.

Pekünlü uses cataloguing, statistical research, repetition, and decontextualizaton to open up a space for critical thinking, reorganizing texts, images, found footage and visual symbols through mechanical means.

Found materials—photographs, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other everyday objects—also star in Safoğlu’s Off-White Tulips, and indeed are its sole actors. They are assembled cinematically to create alternate readings of historic artefacts, queer politics, and cultural confrontations. Defying strict categorization, the work lingers between video, photography, literature, and performance.

Emre Baykal
Curator

Emre Baykal (b. Istanbul, 1965) is the Exhibitions Director and Curator at ARTER, Istanbul. He was previously Director of Exhibitions at santralistanbul (2005–8) and director of the Istanbul Biennial (2000–5). In 2013 Baykal was Curator of the Turkish Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale.

About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video

This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.

Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.

Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.

The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.

Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs

#sightsandsounds

Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.

Exhibition highlights

Nevin Aladağ, still from Hochparterre (Mezzanine), 2009, video, sound, 9 min. Artwork © Nevin Aladağ, provided by the artist, Rampa, Istanbul, and Wentrip, Berlin
Fatma Bucak, still from Blessed Are You Who Come: Conversation on the Turkish–Armenian Border, 2012, HD video, sound, 8 min., 42 sec. Artwork © Fatma Bucak