THE SKINNY
Video Activism Art
Videomaker, visual artist and activist belit sağ discusses the inexorable link between image-making and violence Interview: Jessica McGoff
September 2021 — Feature
Image: courtesy of the artist
“W
hat is the role, what is the function of the image?” In conversation with video maker and visual artist belit sağ, she describes this question as one that sustains, or perhaps incites, her practice. It’s the same question that I was struck by when I watched a retrospective of her work at Alchemy Film and Media Arts Festival online this year — the work itself poses it. sağ has been working with images for decades – her roots are in video activist groups in her home country of Turkey. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she co-initiated projects such as VideA, Karahaber and bak.ma. Alchemy’s programme of sağ’s work was a retrospective characterised by not only its vitality and endurance, but its urgency. sağ’s work reckons with images of violence and the violence of image-making, and I wanted to discuss with her how we can make sense of, and perhaps even find spaces for activism in, our current violent and image-based world. I speak to sağ over a video call from her studio in Amsterdam. We talk immediately about the thread that runs throughout her work: the affirmation that violence does not happen separate from image-making. “Images are an extension of the violence that is practised on certain communities,” she tells me, “at least in Turkey and the communities I’m talking about in the videos I’ve made.” sağ’s work about Turkey does indeed assert that these political conflicts are so often inexorably linked to images. In her video Ayhan and me, sağ holds up a photograph of Ayhan Çarkın, a member of the Special Operations police in Turkey who claimed to have killed thousands of Kurdish people as part of an underground military wing of the state. In the video, sağ continuously places her hand over the image in a gesture of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. In voiceover, she muses on this peek-a-boo routine: “A little like how history is written, I guess.” In our conversation, sağ also emphasises the very literal role that images can play in violence. “Why would you document and distribute someone’s torture? Or that body taken into the streets? There is a certain way of remembering that it creates. Once you think about this person, that becomes the first image in the memory. It also
Still from cut-out, belit sağ
gives a message to the larger community that the person is part of, saying: if you do that, this is how you’ll end up. If you speak up, if you say anything, that’s what will happen to you. It’s a scare tactic… not just that, it’s a threat. It no longer only happened to that person, it’s now a threat to the whole community.” So, what do we do with images of violence? What can be done with them? sağ’s practice utilises these images for different means. She describes how she approaches these images, which she emphasises comes from her need to find an “inevitably small, and inevitably subjective,” way into these huge issues. She often emphasises the personal encounter with the image in her work, which informs the re-appropriation of the image. “What I’m doing is constantly contextualising images, taking them out of their context and then questioning that context, because that context is also created. It could be images that were produced at the same time, or images with 30 years between them, but certain things repeat, and certain types of images are used in that repetition. I’m trying to understand this relationship – what kind of repetitions happen?” — 36 —
Questioning the order, the context and the repetition of images is a potent tactic in sağ’s work. In her video cut-out, she presents the police file photos of the Nationalist Socialist Underground’s victims: ten people, mostly of Turkish and Kurdish backgrounds who were killed by the far-right terrorist organisation in Germany between 2000 and 2007. Already, the institutional context weighs heavy: the police treated these cases like individual assaults, ignoring the pattern of terrorism behind these targeted murders. sağ takes each photograph individually, speculating on the circumstances of each – did the person choose their photo’s background, was it taken at a photo studio, or cut out from a holiday snapshot? She then questions their arrangement, noting that the tenth victim appears fifth in this version of the file photo. In voiceover, sağ asks, “Was she supposed to be killed or remembered earlier?” By disrupting the context of these images, sağ exposes it, and reminds us that our encounters with images are so often already determined by political parameters.
