May 18th – Küçük Sinemalar! Experimental Cinema from Turkey

Experimental Response Cinema and AMOA-Arthouse are proud to present this screening featuring a number of vital and contemporary works from Turkey! Hot off the heels from a showing at Albuquerque’s Experiments in Cinema, this program was curated by ERC’s Ekrem Serdar who will be present for the screening.

Küçük Sinemalar formed as an informal group in İstanbul as an avenue to share and encourage moving image works that do not fit within strict boundaries conceptions of either video art or traditional cinema. Since coming together in 2008, they have shown work at the Pera Museum (Istanbul), Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), GalataPerform (Istanbul), and the Experiments in Cinema  The Küçük Sinemalar screenings work to provide a small survey of experimental practice from, about, and of a continent-straddling nation. The films and videos in this program tackle a wide array of subjects and concerns, including cell phone video abstractions, untrustworthy narratives, and a 16mm essay film on that quintessential middle-class activity of seaside vacations. Featuring work by Zeynep Dadak & Merve Kayan, Can Eskinazi, Eytan İpeker, Yoel Meranda, Jonathan Schwartz, Deniz Tortum, and Mustafa Uzuner.

Event Details
Saturday, May 18th, 2013
7pm
AMOA-Arthouse at the Jones Center (map)
Free!

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This program is generously supported by the Moon and Stars Project of the American-Turkish Society.

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AMOA-Arthouse provides rich environments for a wide range of audiences to investigate and experience excellence in contemporary art. The museum accomplishes this through innovative programs and direct access to the creative process. Laguna Gloria, the museum’s ancestral home, which includes the restored, 1916 Italianate-style Driscoll villa has been declared a national treasure and is listed on City of Austin, State of Texas and national registries of historic places. The 12-acre site perfectly complements the museum’s award-winning and architecturally-significant downtown space, the Jones Center. A renowned example of adaptive reuse, the recently renovated facility, designed by architects Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, was once an early-1900s movie palace and later a department store before becoming the museum’s downtown site.

Program

Republic Day by Can Eskinazi
4.25min / digital / sound / 2010

A Preface to Red by Jonathan Schwartz
6min / 16mm / sound / 2010
A single recording, recorded in a tunnel that one passes through after exiting a boat taking you from one continent to another, where people are selling bright colored toys and bright white sneakers. for the brief variations in the movement on the periphery—Jonathan Schwartz

océanéant by Yoel Meranda
2.25min / digital / silent / 2009
“Yoel Meranda indulges a fascination with color in his extraordinary abstraction océanéant : fields of translucent reds gather upon themselves until they seem to congeal into something with mass, weight, and texture.” – Fred Camper

Peeling by Eytan İpeker
6min / digital / silent / 2011

Neyse Halin… by Mustafa Uzuner
5.43min / digital / sound / 2007

diagonal by Yoel Meranda
0.56min / digital / silent / 2009

Moscow Diaries, Part 2 – Statues by Can Eskinazi
2.46min / digital / sound / 2011
A mystery thriller featuring a rather unusual Russian cabdriver.

Oğlun Burada (Your Son is Here) by Deniz Tortum
3.26min / digital / sound / 2012
My parents’ wedding anniversary in Istanbul seen through my room in Brooklyn.

Material Ghost by Mustafa Uzuner
2.31min / digital / silent / 2010
Shot on an old SONY HDV camera usıng a macro lens converter.

Highway Screening by Yoel Meranda
2.07min / digital / silent / 2010
Silent video shot in İzmir while travelling from Urla to downtown (and back, at night) by car. Thanks goes to Can and the Eskinazi family for the wonderful hospitality. Do not watch this if you have photosensitive epilepsy.

Siamese by Eytan İpeker
4.37min / digital / silent / 2011
A video that winks back at its audience – Eytan Ipeker

Bu Sahilde (On this Coast) by Zeynep Dadak & Merve Kayan
21.47min / 16mm / sound / 2010
Bu Sahilde (On the Coast) is a short essay film on the ephemeral feeling of summer, observed in Erikli, a small coastal town on the Aegean Sea in Turkey. The film reflects on the nature of vacation, as it is a transformed version of reality, the fantastical counterpart to winter.

Bios

Born in 1978 in Balıkesir, Zeynep Dadak has received her undergraduate degree in Film-TV from Marmara University and her graduate degree from Istanbul Bilgi University. Making short films and documentaries since 2001, she is also a writer and an editorial board member of Altyazı Film Magazine. Dadak teaches film classes at various universities, and is currently a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University.

Can Eskinazi graduated from Bard College. His writings and reviews have appeared in Altyazi Magazine, and his film The Phantom Behind screened in Anthology Film Archives. He lives in Istanbul.

Eytan Ipeker was born in 1981 in Istanbul and graduated from New York University’s Film & TV Production Program. His experimental and narrative shorts were screened at numerous international festivals around the world, including the Abstracta Film Festival in Italy and the Toronto Film Festival. In 2010, he won the best experimental video award at 30th IFSAK National Short Film and Documentary Festival. He is currently working on a documentary project on the acclaimed Turkish pianist Idil Biret.

Born in 1981, Merve Kayan grew up in Uzunköprü. After graduating from the Cinema Department at Denison University, she has worked as an editor and director of photography for various film directors in New York and Istanbul. She received her MFA in Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego and also taught film classes here. She has been making shorts and documentaries since 1999, which have been screened at many national and international film festivals.

Yoel Meranda lived in Chicago between 2000-2004 and worked at The Film-Makers’ Cooperative between 2004-2006. Since 2006, he’s back in Istanbul. Yoel’s experimental videos have screened in Toronto, Edinburgh and Thessaloniki International Film Festivals. In 2011, five videos of his got a collective Honorable Mention at Onion City. Yoel’s website is waysofseeing.org.

Jonathan Schwartz makes short films that circulate primarily in an experimental film context. He continues to work in 16mm film, producing films that are in conversation with travel, history, poetry, and sound. Recent completed works include ‘Between Gold’ and ‘A Preface to Red’ – portraits of dividing lines, gesture, rhythm, and light via riding boats back and forth on the Bosphorus, as well as an on-going series of short works that comprise an album of films entitled, the 33 1/3 series. His films have screened in the US and abroad in venues that include the New York Film Festival, London Film Festival, Intl Film Festival Rotterdam, Toronto Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Wexner Center for the Arts, Institute of Contemporary Art -Boston, Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia, Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, and others. Two of his films are in the permanent collection at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna.
Since 2009 Jonathan Schwartz has been an assistant professor at Keene State College, coming from Boston where he taught at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Massachusetts College of Art previously. Additionally, he has worked in freelance post-production with John Rubin Productions and others, and was employed by Emerson College as their film post-production manager. He holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art + Design.

Born in 1989, Deniz Tortum grew up in Istanbul. He studied film at Bard College, NY. His experimental shorts, Tebbet and Infitar, have been screened in festivals in Turkey and the US. His first feature Zayiat has been selected for SXSW and !F Istanbul Fim Festival. He is currently living in New York.

Mustafa Uzuner was born 1981 in Amasya. He studied Electronics Engineering in Istanbul and received a master’s degree from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. He currently lives and works in Montreal.