Note To Self: Psychosexual Films Of Nazli Di̇nçel
NOTE TO SELF: PSYCHOSEXUAL FILMS OF NAZLI DİNÇEL
Saturday December 2 | 7pm – 9pm | Artist in attendance!
Forest City Gallery – 258 Richmond Street | Admission by donation – suggestion of 3$ – 5$ (no one is turned away)
An evening of visceral and provocative handmade films that explore bodies, acts of the solitary, text, language, visual information and personal exposure. Nazlı Dinçel’s work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire in juxtaposition with the medium’s material: texture, color and the passing of emulsion. Her use of text as image, language and sound attempts the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society.
Program Notes:
Reframe
16mm, 4min, Color, Silent, 24fps, 2009
8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. The slides were found at a thrift store, of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer. To reclaim his touristic gaze, photographs are fragmented into new frames, reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.
Leafless
16mm, 8min, Color, Silent, 24fps, 2011
Leafless is an expansion of collections, a hand processed love poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.
Her Silent Seaming
16mm, 10min, Color, Super 16 Image-Sound, 24fps, 2014
A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011) and motifs of the “feminine”. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Direct sound of cuts and hand processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation.
Sharing Orgasm: Communicating Your Sexual Responses (Found Film)
16mm, 12 min, Color, optical sound, 24fps, 1977
Solitary Acts #4
16mm, 8min, Color, Optical Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, Typewriter
The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. She learns how to read.
Solitary Acts #5
16mm, 5min, Color, Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, Fishing Line, Sewing Machine
The filmmaker films herself practice kissing with a mirror. She recalls teenage memories of overconsumption, confusing oral fixations that are both sexual (kissing) and bodily (eating). She ends up eating the carrot she is masturbating with, and she feels a sense of cannibalism.
Solitary Acts #6
16mm, 11min, Color, Optical Sound, 24fps, 2015 Exacto Knife, 1.5mm Letter Punches, Hammer, Leather Puncher
The filmmaker films her subject in a private act, complicating what could be considered a solitary act. This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. It is not the male child’s desire to have sexual relations with the mother. It is the mother’s desire to be sexually attracted to child-like men. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. If she had the child, he would have turned six in 2015. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover.
VOID (4.INABILITY)
16mm, 4min, Color, Silent, 18fps, 2016
Inability is the first film in the series about human failure. The filmmaker destroys and re-creates a film she was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed at the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with her husband. Film was destroyed in ocean water.
Shape of a Surface
16mm, 9min, Color, Sound, 24fps, 2017
The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.
Total Duration: 71 minutes
Note: Explicit Imagery
Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at the age of 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited in numerous venues around the world including Tiger Shorts competition at IFFR, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Dallas Contemporary. She recently won the Marian McMahon Akimbo award at the 2017 Images Festival with Untitled (2016) and was also awarded Best Experimental Film at the 2015 Chicago Underground Film Festival with Her Silent Seaming (2014).
In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.
Forest City Gallery (FCG) is an artist-run centre founded on artistic autonomy with a commitment to excellence in programming exhibitions and events that reflect and address recent developments in cultural production. FCG serves to foster and support contemporary art, promoting dialogue amongst local, regional, and international arts communities. FCG represents artists of all disciplines and career levels with a focus on emergent artists and practices.
LOMAA is an emerging, enthusiastic and devoted non-profit artist-run collective that fosters collaboration, investigation and innovation by tapping into the talent and serving the needs of media artists in the London region.
LOMAA would like to thank the London Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council for their continued support.