Cihan Çakmak

The new work Where I left you by Cihan Çakmak is made up of the quarter-hour film and the portrait series My sister and I. The experimental film Where I left you takes us through the memories and emotions of a departure on two screens. The film's two characters (performed by Burgtheater Wien ensemble member Safira Robens and freelance artist Hicran Demir) go through various phases of turmoil and grief in Çakmak's emotionally charged vignettes. The recordings stand on their own, are limited to telling individual actions and gestures, rather than a conventional story, and are thus reminiscent of their director's photography background. However, due to this subtle, reduced form of representation, Çakmak can draw from the universal experience of abandonment and point to the personal effects of oppression and family-dividing behaviors that underlie this for her. So the short film can be seen as a farewell.

It's a farewell to suppressing anger; Çakmak casts them into shape in her art. Motifs of revenge, fear and war repeatedly emerge from this stream, made noticeable in the tense acting of the actresses (in some shots, for example, a physical trembling suggests their intensity), the threatening sub-bass beneath the images, as well in the grandeur of the iconographic compositions typical of Çakmak, which simultaneously stimulate and subvert the image memory. At the core of the work, these gestures of political anger and indignation are complemented autofictionally by details of transgenerational trauma experiences, which manifest themselves as narratives of dreams in the voiceover of the film, as well as in the partly whispered, partly broken voice in which Çakmak and the players reproduce this violence. This resistant, political interior is contrasted with the poetic-abstract style of the film in order to reveal the actual poetic depth of the film: Should the whispering be understood as an extinction or as the potentiation of what was previously inaudible? Is the song on Kurmanci self-exaltation or a grief? Do we see farewell or escape? Çakmak deliberately leaves this open.

And while the film represents the abstract vanishing point of the work Where I left you, My sister and I is the documentary representation and indictment of the very political circumstances that created this violence. The double self-portraits show Çakmak herself, together with her sister. Using classical portrait photography, however refractively, concrete signs and symbols are repeated here and psychological processes are hinted at in order to explicitly refer to the historical context that influences the life of the subjects portrayed - as children of Kurdish immigrants.

This ranges from their gestures that reference the protective stances of boxers to her clothing reminiscent of traditional Kurdish, colored in the blue of Turkish military uniforms that were worn to murder Kurds en masse - a genocide that has not yet been fully solved.

Çakmak is concerned with showing, remembering, elucidating and rewriting as she returns to an uncertain origin, between tradition and emancipation, adaptation and self-realization, in order to trace the fragile ambivalent conditions across generations in which these tensions are interwoven.

Because Where I left you moves precisely in these places, on the threshold of departures, and seeks in them the consolation for the abandonment that these necessarily mean. “It's not the going that's hard, it's the leaving,” Çakmak murmurs at one point in the silence, over shots of Demir wildly punching a traditionally embroidered pillow; and then the thunder of the bass rises again.

Text by Fredi Thiele