We would like to begin with thanking İpek and Şener for their hospitality. İpek and Şener invited us to a medium they work on and which we are unfamiliar with. Well, it is dicey to trust the guest with the keys and leave, but what we call hospitality obliges exactly this. To open your doors without expecting the other party to reciprocate at the expense of being misunderstood, being exposed to impertinence, the possibility of the conversation getting to unforeseen directions and your words to be twisted, and the prospect of your cutlery and beddings to be shifted.
In March 2015, a small part of the private library of the author and novelist Abd Al-Rahman Munif (1933-2004) was burglarized in his residence in Damascus. The theft has been addressed in many Arabic media platforms with references to the lost books and manuscripts. The estimation of the loss was taking different numbers from an interview to another one.
For a long time I’ve had a document on my desktop called “Photography & Accident.” It contains passages from Walter Benjamin’s “Short History of Photography,” Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon. All of the quotes hover around the idea that accident is the lifeblood of photography.
It's a hundred years since the Yellow Press invented itself in New York; warmongering and xenophobic, it fights for the yellow in your pocket. Cultural cuckold. Raving, betraying, mental.
On condition that my words be freely appreciated, I can announce the evidence and the measures I rely on. The fact that a shadow, too engulfed in an apprehension as dark as rotten flesh to tend to my shortness of breath by kindly caressing my hair as he usually would while I followed him up the steep two-foot stairs of the dark corridor converging upwards, recommended I not be afraid certainly counts as evidence! Buried shadow. Huh. shad. ow. Huh huh shadow. Huh.
This text is an essay that was written as a proposal for KABA HAT within the scope of their guest editorship in Orta Format. I will try to interpret 2 photographs I took on Yuksel Street, in Ankara on March the 8th and June the 21st, 2017 for this issue which KABA HAT edited within the framework of the following concepts.
We pursued photographic images that would salve our disenchantment, and to that end we invited Görkem.
BAÇOY-KOOP (Print, Copy, Distribution Cooperative), in short baçoy, uses duplication technology. It investigates how the organizations and individuals that used to be a part of the leftist movement in Turkey used duplicators in an effort to print and distribute collective and independent publications; and on the basis of this investigation, produces and distributes printed material.
This video is produced on the occasion of Issue #23 by KABA HAT
The playlist of 23th Issue guest editors, KABA HAT.
Delememed, Ege Kanar, Gümüş özdeş, İz Öztat, N., Nazlı Gürlek, O.Utku Akgün&Zeynep Kayan, Selim Birsel, Sevil Tunaboylu, Yasemin Nur