The Art of Story Telling: In the End We Will All Become Stories

2000 Words4 Pages

Over the last three decades, narrative and storytelling have played a substantial role in the development of both cinematic and contemporary video-art practices. Along with an increasing interest in documentary forms, as testified by the dominance of video and screens at international exhibitions and biennials, moving image served this major tendency towards narration as allowing for a deeper understanding of a multifaceted modernity. By producing critical images of specific places, as noted by art critic and curator Mark Nash, documentary therefore became the elected tool to ponder on the complex dimension of an increasingly globalized yet multicultural universe, as moreover opposing the slowness of narration to the fast-paced dimension of the Information Age. Inscribed within this general shift towards narration, Ferhat Özgür’s latest video works further exemplify a shared will to renegotiate the very notion of documentary. As combining factual realities, fictitious fantasies and autobiographical memories, Özgür’s video experimentations thus set up a platform of which storytelling is the core. In his short films, visual descriptions of always transforming urban landscapes along with individuals’ private and intimate narratives, therefore allow for an elaborated recognition of Turkey’s heterogeneous cultural dimension. By giving fixed form to both images and language, the apparatus thus becomes a vehicle that the artist confidently orchestrates in order to engage with the oral tradition of storytelling and subsequently preserve memory. Ultimately, this essay will look at the figure of Özgür as resurrecting that of the Storyteller, the auteur not only reproducing but also shaping and affecting phenomena through the camera, i... ... middle of paper ... ...er 2007), Kassel, 2007 Flusser, Vilem, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 2011, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Handran, Christopher, Looking into the Light: Examining the Apparatus in Contemporary Art, Queensland University of Technology, 2013 Leighton, Tania and others, Art and the Moving Image - a critical reader, London, 2008 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age, Princeton University Press 2009 Yildirim, Semih Goksel, Comparison of Low Rise Residential Industrialized Building Systems in Turkey, Journal of Literature and Art Studies, Vol. 2, No. 9, September 2012 Electronic Sources Ferhat Özgür's Website, Trading Economics, < http://www.tradingeconomics.com/turkey/unemployment-rate> World Population Review,

Open Document