Screening of Araf + Talk with Didem Pekün

Screening of Araf + Talk with Didem Pekün
Moderation: Övül Durmuşoğlu

7 July 2020 @ 6pm screening / 7pm talk
Online Film Screening: Araf
43 minutes, 2018, Turkey / Greece / Bosnia & Herzegovina
start at 6pm: via Fakultät Null website
https://fakultaetnull.org/

Araf is an essayistic road movie and diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who travels between Srebrenica and Sarajevo to Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war and returns for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. The film is guided by her diary notes of the journey, which merge with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus – Icarus being the name given to the winner of a bridge diving competition in her home country. The story of Icarus and Daedalus, a myth symbolic of man’s over-ambition and inevitable failure, is woven throughout the film as a way to think about exorcizing the vicious cycle of such events happening in the future and of a possible reconciliation. Nayia also thinks of Icarus from a different perspective, that of seeing the optimism of such a leap, his braveness of taking a leap into the unknown in this era of radical instability, that perhaps, Icarus wanted to write a different narrative. Araf thus traces these paradoxes through Nayia’s displacement and her return to her home country post-war – that of a constant terror and a permanent standstill, and the friction between displacement and permanence.

In her work Didem Pekün combines research and practice. In her essay films, she addresses how violence and displacement define and destroy life. Her documentaries and video installations have been shown internationally and have received various awards. She is a founding member of the Center for Spatial Justice (MAD). She holds a BA in Music from SOAS, an MA in Documentary from Goldsmiths, and a practice-based PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. After being a faculty member at Koç University, a Research Fellow at Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, a Joint Fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies & Visual Studies Platform at CEU, Budapest, she is currently a fellow at Graduate School / Berlin Center for the Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences @ Universität der Künste Berlin.

Övül Ö. Durmusoglu is a curator, writer and educator living in Berlin. Her interests lie in the intersection of contemporary art, politics, critical and gender theory and popular culture.She is since October 2019 visiting professor at the Graduate Schoo at the BAS of Berlin University of the Arts as a visiting professor.