Nazli Dinçel

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Borrowing words from Laura Mark's 'Transnational Object' and DW Winnicott's 'Transitional Object', all carefully etched into the 16mm film surface, Nazli Dinçel's latest work Between Relating and Use is an attempt to work ethically in a foreign land. Transitioning from assuming the position of an ethnographer, we turn and explore inwards – on how we use our lovers.

The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

Leafless is an expansion of collections, a hand processed love poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.

Found Film.

A film concerned with the chaotic sphere of disengagement invoked by the threatened subsumption of the sensitive and vibrational biorhythm into the cold and regulated logic of algorithmic capitalist automation. Explored through abyssal bridges of language. Towards the conspiratorial, intersubjective, and irregular oscillations of life as resistance.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

Borrowing words from Laura Mark's 'Transnational Object' and DW Winnicott's 'Transitional Object', all carefully etched into the 16mm film surface, Nazli Dinçel's latest work Between Relating and Use is an attempt to work ethically in a foreign land. Transitioning from assuming the position of an ethnographer, we turn and explore inwards – on how we use our lovers.

The ground holds accounts of once pagan, then christian and now muslim ruins of the city built for Aphrodite. As she takes revenge on Narcissus, mirrors reveal what is seen and surfaces, limbs dismantle and marble turns flesh.

Leafless is an expansion of collections, a hand processed love poem of textures about becoming familiar with a significant other’s body in reservation with its landscape.

Found Film.

These three films follow a young girl through her teenage years while she explores her sexuality and discovers her perversions. Hand-processed and altered images (16mm film) form a labour-intensive, formal questioning of the medium. Female and male masturbation, flowers being taken apart and being put back together, extreme close-up shots of fabric and the practice-kissing of a mirror create a visceral, humorous and tumultuous experience of these personal memories.

Shot at the Film Farm in Mt.Forest, this comedy is a quest about performance, educational voiceover, analogue filmmaking, ASCII, language, ethics of ethnography and narrative storytelling under a metaphor of instructions to farm land. Text by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Wikihow/shoot-film.

A reconstruction of Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1929), Interval exploits dimensions of summer and winter while expanding time, questioning the process of the surrealist manifesto.

8 stereoscopic slides taken to the jk-104 optical printer, shot frame by frame, by hand. The slides were found at a thrift store, of Cuba between 1948 and 1950 taken by an army officer. To reclaim his touristic gaze, photographs are fragmented into new frames, reviving the bodies that may have perished by the revolution in 1952.

Dinçel’s meditation on female labour utilizes close-up textures of skin, grape leaves, earth, and fabric, which are accompanied by a song written on occasion of a wedding.

A transcription of what I have been told during intimate experiences while separating from my husband. Sections consist of destroyed originals from Leafless (2011) and motifs of the “feminine”. These decorative objects are re-valued through a controlled act of cutting, with an allusion to synchronization. Direct sound of cuts and hand processing are composed of 26 frame shots. Un-synced, it reveals a hearing of past images, as an act of translation.

"An eye-opening piece of guerilla counter-surveillance, Untitled documents Dinçel’s time working as a tech assistant at a film festival where they managed to record the headset chatter between themselves and the two male projectionists working the event. Over the course of 12 short minutes, we hear the men continually berate Dinçel, ignoring their specific knowledge of film and dismissing them when they correctly diagnose technical problems." - Michael Sicinski (from Cleo a Journal of Film and Feminism)

Inability is the first film in the series about human failure. The filmmaker destroys and re-creates a film she was unable to finish in 2013. Filmed at the Sutro Bath ruins in San Francisco and in final domestic spaces occupied with her husband. Film was destroyed in ocean water.