Screening: Eye on Art – Remembering Otherwise
Previously seen at Eye in the 2016 group exhibition Close-Up, belit sag’s practice involves critical analysis of visual media that touches on the visual representations of labour, gender, Kurdish identity, and contemporary life in and between Turkey. Remembering Otherwise, the subject of the exhibition and centrepiece of the evening, addresses the memories of a 1978 labour dispute in Veghel, North Brabant, led by migrant women workers from Turkey. To conclude the evening, belit sağ will be in conversation with Julian Ross (Head of Programming, Eye). This programme is co-presented with Framer Framed where the exhibition is on show until11 November 2025.
Programmepast forward | 2011, 30”
We witness the first Kurdish women MP, Leyla Zana, struggling to give her parliamentary oat due to verbal attacks because she wears a badge with the colors that symbolise the Kurdish nation and ends her oat in Kurdish dedicating it to Turkish and Kurdish people. Shared with public with twenty years’ delay, the video footage is revisited through the photographed moments.
‘thank you’ | 2011, 2’
We witness parts of a filming session of a video-message where Indonesian garment worker Yanti is constantly repeating the same sentence in different pronunciations and tones to do it in the ‘correct’ way.
Sevil | 2024, 7’
Sevil Tunaboylu, a contemporary artist in Istanbul, recounts her experiences of censorship and self-censorship following an attack on her painting featuring a Kurdish guerrilla in 2016. The act of retelling and revisiting surfaces the isolating and far-too-familiar experience that artists go through when silenced. The video is the first in a series where featuring artists propose the next artist to feature in the next video.
disruption (aksama)| 2016, 5’
A first-person footage as belit sağ walks from one building to another with a superimposed mosaic of images from television news from coup d’etat attempt of 2016 in Turkey, combined with popular films and clips that gradually interact with each other.
what remains (geriye kalanlar)| 2018, 7’
Constructed from images belit sağ shot in 2015 and 2016 in Cizre (Northern Kurdistan, Turkey) as well as found footage she gathered in the same period after a series of attacks by Turkish military forces in the region, video accompanies collective mourning practices. While accompanied by images of the dead used in these practices, sağ continuously searches for a way of making work that is philosophically, emotionally and theoretically rigorous and morally and ethically compassionate.
if you say it forty times | 2017, 5’
The video investigates political amnesia by looking at media images, mainly of public figures from mafia, the state and their collaborators, in Turkey in the last forty years. Some should not know what they know; others claim to be mentally absent in critical moments, while there are people who claim to not forget any detail. History is squeezed in these moments of remembering and forgetting.
cut-out | 2017, 4’
The video examines the police file photo of the victims of National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany, a Neo-nazi group that killed ten people over the course of eight years. How does a police file photo of the victims – most circulated image of the case – share this racist murders with the viewer?
Remembering Otherwise | 2025, 10’
A performative visual reading.
Layers of a Dispute | 2025, 15’
How do the former women workers of 1978 Veghel labour dispute remember the times they worked in the factory? By revisiting archived materials with participants of the archived events, the video centres lived experiences as historical knowledge. The embodied and the sensory take the central stage. It proposes nonlinear forms, re-narrating the imposed fragmentation into celebratory layered moving image collages.
This event a collaboration between Eye Filmmuseum and Framer Framed, and is part of the Eye on Art programming, on the intersection between film and other arts.
