2022-12-03 –, Room 112
Özge Çelikaslan engages in several archive initiatives in Turkey and Europe. In her talk, she will discuss her collective practices regarding activist archiving, digital technologies and accessibility, archival care and affect, obsolete media, and political nostalgia. Çelikaslan is a PhD candidate at the Braunschweig University of Art. She was a member of several film and video collectives. Her works were shown in biennials and festivals, recently at the 17th Istanbul Biennial. She is co-founder of the digital media archive of social movements bak.ma.
bak.ma (means "don’t look" in Turkish)* digital media archive of social movements appeared following the massive urban protests in 2013 known as Gezi Park Resistance. By collectivizing knowledge and memory and operating as a space of empowerment bak.ma radicalizes the politics of the archive and indicates possibilities for creating a living memory of the social movements. bak.ma consists of voluminous video collections beginning from the 1960s until today covering political incidents and movements in Turkey’s history. As a constantly growing archive with a participatory approach, the users generate the content by bringing the video activist footage in, which leads to turning it into a collaborative archive. Starting from 2018 users from other countries started uploading their video recordings, texts, photographs, and sound recordings.
- “.ma” is an URL extension signifying ‘media archive’, which is originally the nation URL extension in Morocco.
In presence
Özge Çelikaslan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Studies program at Braunschweig University of Arts. Her research focuses on collaborative, activist archival networks, and digital commoning practices. She was the former artistic director of KozaVisual (Istanbul, Ankara 2007-2014) a platform for collective video research methodologies, visual ethnography of local and urban transformation, political conflicts in border zones, and autonomous trans-media. In the past, she was the co-founder and a member of art/activist/archive collectives: Artıkişler, Videoccupy, and vidyokolektif. She participated in Video Vortex #10, 2014; Istanbul Biennial, 2015; Transmediale 2016, The Whole Life Academy (HKW Berlin, 2019-2022) among a wide range of art and academic projects, exhibitions, panels, and festivals as a scholar, artist, and curator. Co-edited the books; 'Surplus of Istanbul’ (2014, free pub.) and ‘Autonomous Archiving’ (2016 epub, 2020 book, dpr-barcelona) and has contributed to publications on film, video, activism, and archiving. She is co-founder of the digital media archive of social movements https://bak.ma