LONDON.- PEER in partnership with LUX, presents the image unseen, the image invisible, the image not shown and BL CK B X: belit sağ, two related exhibitions by Dutch-based Turkish-born artist belit sağ in her first solo show in the UK.
belit sağ works with found media images and accessible forms of moving image-making in a personal, and often intimate way, to examine wider political issues. She is interested in the ‘violence of images and images of violence’ and her work often reflects on the impact of the past forty years of Turkey’s political regimes on the country’s contemporary society, including the use of censorship as a tool for State control. The artist persistently questions the role of image-making as a means of recording violence and destruction, and in the expression of protest and grief.
At PEER in the image unseen, the image invisible, the image not shown, sağ presents a new commission and three recent works. what remains (2018) is constructed from images shot and found by sağ during 2015 and 2016 in Cizre, a contested, but primarily Kurdish town on the Turkish-Syrian border; new footage of collective mourning moments from Cizre in 2015; and found footage on the connection between death and image making. The artist sees the work as a way of returning the images back to those who originally gave them, to allow the ghosts to come back, and revisit the images and re-think recent history. In an earlier work also showing at PEER, Sept. - Oct. 2015, Cizre (2015), the artist asks whether there is a right way to produce images in a conflict zone, and looks into the politics of images from these places and the role of the image maker.
my camera seems to recognise people (2015), is a three-screen installation at PEER in which sağ investigates “what it means to look at death and the wounded through the lens of a camera”, reflecting on how built-in face recognition software has the unsettling ability to victimise its subjects, whilst simultaneously regarding the camera as a tool that can recognise, acknowledge and share grief.
In BL CK B X: belit sağ at LUX, the exhibition features other recent works including Ayhan and me (2016), if you say it forty times (2017) and disruption (2016). In Ayhan and me, sağ explicitly addresses her own experience of censorship whilst making a video for an exhibition in Istanbul. A former police officer active in the Kurdish region of Turkey during the 1990s, Ayhan Carkin claimed to have killed thousands of people. Originally the subject of the sağ’s censored video, Ayhan then becomes an alibi for her to contemplate images of war and the politics of image making.
belit sağ has exhibited at a number of major galleries and institutions in the US and Europe.
belit sağ is a video maker and visual artist living in Amsterdam. She studied mathematics in Ankara and audiovisual arts in Amsterdam. Her video background is rooted in video-activist groups in Ankara and Istanbul, where she co-initiated projects such as karahaber.org (2000-2007) and bak.ma (a growing online audiovisual archive of social movements in Turkey). Her recent video work focuses on ‘the violence of representation’ and ‘representation of violence’. She attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam in 2014-2015, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, in 2016. She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide including MOCA, Taipei; Tütün Deposu, Istanbul; Tabakalera Film Seminar, San Sebastian; Toronto/Rotterdam/San Francisco/New York International Film Fest/International Documentary Film Fest. Amsterdam (IDFA); EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Documenta14, Kassel; Marabouparken, Stockholm.
