OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts Presents

Set Off [Gitmek] by Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun

Set Off [Gitmek] (2019, 60 min.) is a documentary film by Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun with testimony on how to deal with recording the present in the aftermath of the Suruç bombing which took the life of 33 and injured 103 socialist students who were about to set off to bring humanitarian aid to Rojava in the summer of 2015. The screening will also include selections from Material Aesthetic Research Collective’s Media Artifacts of Public Truth project, based on the video archive created by the music producer Şanar Yurdatapan.

This event is part of Archival Collective Counter–Imagination, a two-part series curated by art historian and current CHRA Fellow Lara Fresko Madra. The series brings together two collective endeavors —The Rojava Film Commune and the Material Aesthetic Research Collective — to think through not only who archives belong to, but how they generate a sense of belonging. In engaging the moving image as a site of negotiation and building collectivity, these endeavors are concerned with how such media can create and re-create past and future community. Brushing the archive against the grain, is it possible to listen to its absences? This program explores the two group’s modes of social organization around the moving image that cross and, at times, defy the horizon of the nation-state. 

Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun is an artist and filmmaker living and working between Karlsruhe and Istanbul. He is currently an artist in residence at Jan Van Eyck Academy. A member of Material Aesthetic Research Collective and an archival curator at the Open Resource Center at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Büyükcoşkun works with film, photography, sculpture, and performance to think through the agency and the truth-making potentiality of media infrastructures, particularly, political soundscapes. 

Material Aesthetic Research Collective [Maddi Estetik Araştirma Kolektifi] focuses their attention on recovering and redistributing the documentary archives of the 1990s, a moment in Turkey when new moving image technologies were levied against state violence. 

Lara Fresko Madra is an art historian, writer, and curator with a PhD in Art History from Cornell University. Her research focuses on contemporary artistic practices from Turkey and the Middle East that challenge official history and offer alternative ways of relating to the past. She is currently a teaching and research fellow at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. 

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For more information, call 917-370-5279, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://chra.bard.edu/event/set-off/.

Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema

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