Artist’s films scrutinized in museum

ISTANBUL

Having invited Bengü Karaduman’s video installation “We Are All in The Same Boat” for this year’s program, Istanbul Modern also presents the screening of a larger selection of the artist’s videos.

Istanbul Modern is hosting the Artists’ Film International program, showcasing contemporary video, short film and moving images from across the globe.

Every year, each program partner selects one or more videos, films, or animations from an artist from their country in order to create an international pool of videos. Curatorial works on these videos then materialize in screening programs and exhibitions held at partner institutions. The program starts on Nov. 21 and will continue until Feb. 23, 2014.

Having invited Bengü Karaduman’s video installation “We Are All in The Same Boat” for this year’s program, Istanbul Modern also presents the screening of a larger selection of the artist’s videos.

Eighteen other videos selected by international partners have been grouped in four thematic programs that take their cue from the definitions and concepts in one of Sigmund Freud’s seminal works, “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Moreover, Istanbul Modern is celebrating the program’s fifth year by screening for the first time all four videos from artists from Turkey that participated in the program in previous years. The exhibition is on display at the pop-up exhibition area until Feb. 23, 2014.

Karaduman’s video “We Are All in The Same Boat” consists of two video layers on top of each other. On the top layer, we see a ship representing the current political economic system which is eroding the planet and its creatures, exhausts the globe’s natural resources and uses despair as weapons of mass destruction. The ship carries the products and its production practices of this system. On the bottom layer, one can see horses swimming under water. The theme is based on the real story of the phaeton horses from the Princes’ Islands in Istanbul, who are harnessed to work under poor conditions, and consequently when they die, are thrown into the sea and replaced by new ones. In this sense, the political economy of the present time exploits not only the labor of living beings, but their lives as well.

“We Are All in The Same Boat” is a requiem for not knowing how to face the mechanisms sustaining the present monetary system.

Civilization and its discontents

The “Weakness of the Body” program explores the body’s weakness in the face of life, the limitations of its movements, and human beings control over their own body. Included among topics covered in the videos are human will, which decides on how people use the space they occupy within contemporary society, and their ability to situate their presence while creating areas in which they can move.

Videos of Kaia Hugin, Katarina Zdjelar, Alix Pearlstein, Nasan Tur and Marinella Senatore will be screened.

The “Superior Force of Nature” program will screen videos from Neha Choksi, Murray Hewitt, Jessica Warboys and Morgan Wong. The videos in the program focus on the mode of communication individuals establish with passive forms of being “the other” in urban life, regarded as the pinnacle of civilization.

While offering their cultural and socio-political observations of relations that touch one another in a public space, the videos reflect on the language of communication that is developed during the process.

The “Becoming Neurotic” videos explore the effects on individuals and the transformation into the collective memory of beliefs and behaviors, which, through the spirit of unity, turn into customs during the process by which a small community becomes a society.

Eric and Marc Hurtado and Rahraw Omarzad’s videos will also be screened.