In January 2023, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, the cinema project by bi’bak, re-opens its doors at a newly renovated space in Berlin-Wedding. A physical hub that brings together film and video culture, arts, education, conversation and community, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA explores transnational society through screenings, symposia and exhibitions.
Over the years, bi’bak has built up an archive of books, magazines, ephemera and films (analog and digital), a collection that will now become part of KIRAATHANE. A term with Arabic/Persian origins meaning “house of reading” that in modern Turkish more commonly refers to tea houses, KIRAATHANE extends the SİNEMA foyer, aiming to be a welcoming, publicly accessible place where people can access knowledge, read, watch and exchange.
SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA now calls on filmmakers, cineastes, archivists, students, artists, locals and scholars to take part in the first KIRAATHANE workshop, a collective interrogation of archival practices and politics in relation to film and moving image.
Over the course of the first weekend in February, four invited experts - Nnenna Onuoha, Dominique Hurth, Şirin Fulya Erensoy and Mohammad Shawky Hassan - will host a series of short sessions giving an insight into their own work with archives. Alongside selected open call participants, through various modes of exchange we will come together to ask:
What is archived, how, and for whom? What tactics can be employed to ensure that KIRAATHANE, and archives in general, reflect the transnational societies to which they belong? How can archives serve the communities within which they are embedded?
Day One, Saturday 4th February
12:00 - 12:30: Introduction to the KIRAATHANE project
12:30 - 13:30: Archival Tactics #1 - Nnenna Onuoha, Ghosts, Silences and Hidden Things
13:30 -14:30: Lunch
14:30 - 16:00: Archival Tactics #2 - Dominique Hurth, Grain, Noise, Streaks and Hazes –
amplifying the gaps amidst (the infrastructures and taxonomies of) archival material
16:00 - 17:00: Film Screening
Day Two, Sunday 5th February
12:00: Archival Tactics #3 - Şirin Fulya Erensoy, (Re)Making History and (Re)imagining the Present through Archival Practices
13:30 - 14:30: Lunch
14:30 - 16:00: Archival Tactics #4 - Mohammad Shawky Hassan,
16:00 - 17:00: Conclusion
Catering will be provided - there is a €20 fee to cover costs.
Workshop will be held in English.
Apply to the open call here: https://forms.gle/CdAtPWk8top18xhKA
If you have additional questions please contact beth(at)sinematranstopia.de
Funded by Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis
Dominique Hurth is a visual artist working with installations, sculptures and editions. The starting point for new works is often a narrative present in localities or images. Even though her installations are often concentrated on the form, a long and detailed research is strongly embedded in the development of this same form. It is by ways of archival research, journalistic investigation, writing and material experiments that the works develop, and it is by way of editing that the installation operates in the exhibition space. Her work was exhibited in several museums, galleries and institutions internationally (i.a. Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; Memorial of Ravensbrück, Fürstenberg/Havel; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart) and is part of several collections. She is the recipient of several awards and residencies such as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016-17) and Prize of the Berliner Senate / Governing Mayor of Berlin at ISCP, New York (2014). Her latest book entitled “Stutters”, published and commissioned by Printed Matter (NYC) was launched in July 2021. It focuses on several years of archival research in the photography collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.. Dominique is the recipient of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant in 2022-23, during which she focuses on the textile history and cultural appropriation of the female guard uniform (of the former concentration camp of Ravensbrück).
Şirin Fulya Erensoy is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral fellow at Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. Her current research project focuses on the video production conducted by audio-visual practitioners in the new wave migration from Turkey to Germany. Her previous academic work concentrates on video activism as an alternative media practice, censorship in documentary film practice in Turkey and gender in genre cinema. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics and Cinej Cinema Journal as well as in books by Palgrave Macmillan and De Gruyter. Şirin has worked as a lecturer in Film and Television at various institutions in Turkey. She was the host of independent news outlet Medyascope TV’s English news bulletin This Week in Turkey from 2019-2021. She also has practical work experience in documentary film as a director, producer and editor.
Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian moving image artist and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. Her research explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States. At its core, her work asks: How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? Centering Afrodiasporic voices, her films revolves around processes of collective re-membering: putting the past together limb by limb. A second strand of her work focuses on archiving Black experience in the present to understand how, amidst all of this, we practice care and repair for each other. She has exhibited at alpha nova & galerie futura and the Brucke-museum, KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Galerie im Turm. Nnenna is currently a doctoral student in Media Anthropology at Harvard University, and Global History at Universität Potsdam.
Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an Egyptian filmmaker, writer and video artist living and working in Berlin since 2019. His video “And on a Different Note” was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of its permanent collection in 2016, and his last film "Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?" premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2022. He is currently a visiting lecturer at Humboldt University’s Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies.