DEATH/FAST SCREENING

RAINEY AUDITORIUM
​PENN MUSEUM

OCT 17 3:30 PM

Death/Fast is a 52-minute experimental video documentary about the 2,286-day mass hunger strike (2000-2007) undertaken by political prisoners contesting the regime of isolation in Turkey's newly instituted F-type, high-security prisons. Anchored in in-person interviews with survivors, the documentary recovers the experience of hunger strikers which serves as the disavowed condition of possibility for the retroactive self-authorization on the part of political organizations. Juxtaposing rehearsed narratives about their transformations in relation to time, to others, to truth—and to death—with imagery taken from everyday life in public locations across contemporary Istanbul, the documentary probes the (non)relation between the distinct temporality of the hunger strike and the heterogeneous temporalities of urban life immersed in daily activity/inactivity, between the violence of the prison and the violence hidden in everyday life.

Produced by Brian Karl and Özge Serin and first screened in 2017, Death/Fast uses ensembles of visual and audio techniques, including image flashes of extremely short duration, emulating the scar effects of long-term starvation on memory; extreme cropping within the larger frames of moving images, representing isolation outside prison; and the use of faint image-traces of speaking subjects, creating ghostly figures to suggest the ephemerality and tentativeness of any single subject position. Together, the combined effect of excerpts from interviews and formal choices in representation within the audio and video of the documentary challenge and loosen the conventional links between the experience of dying and those grammars that purport to represent and politicize it.

​Özge Serin
WHITMAN COLLEGE

Özge Serin received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and Anthropology at Whitman College. Her research and writing are principally concerned with formations of violence, carceral regimes, and corporeal forms of resistance with a particular focus on the practice of hunger striking, its temporal structure, modes of strategic functioning, communicative force, and ethical vicissitudes. She has published articles and chapters in boundary 2, Kampfplatz, and Re-enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory. Her book manuscript, Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast in Turkey, explores the divide between the incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked space-times of death and politics, and poses the question of the mediality of the hunger strike

BRIAN KARL
UC Berkeley 

Brian Karl has worked as a curator, producer and director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art­in­General, Creative Time, and the Kitchen, along with serving as editor for Tellus, the Audio Art Magazine. His art criticism has been published in Artforum, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Hyperallergic and Yishu, among others. He has also produced multiple experimental documentaries screened at the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals, among other venues. He has taught courses widely in art, music, and cultural anthropology, including at the New School, Fordham University, Colby College, the University of Michigan, the California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute.