ŞİİR YAZ (WRITE A POEM) is a 2023 video-poem project that premiered at Karşı Sanat Çalışmaları Gallery's 'Witness' exhibition in Istanbul, produced with the support of ALİKEV Young Artist Fund. It has been nominated for Best Short Film in the 56th Turkish Cinema Awards by SİYAD (Film Critics Association of Turkey).
Artist's Statement:
According to the latest estimations from institutions working with big data statistics, a staggering 328.77 million terabytes of data are generated every day. In addition to the hundreds of events we witness in our daily lives, our brains, which are constantly stimulated by unfiltered data consumed through media, have not evolved to process such massive amounts of information in a healthy way. The compassion fatigue, desensitization, exhaustion, and stress caused by this excessive information overload also reveal the pathological dimension of the issue.
We transformed WRITE A POEM's, initially an ironic, satirical, and manifesting meta-poem, into a camp video-poem with an epileptic and fragmented aesthetic. WRITE A POEM's each line was meticulously edited together with visuals from social media platforms, stock footage and archive sites, advertising films, series, and reality shows as the result of a deep excavation process; as well as a chaotic sound design and raw handycam footage we captured.
As multidisciplinary artists inspired by popular culture and current aesthetic trends, with WRITE A POEM, we reject the conventional understanding that “art” should act as escapism, induced by "poetry" which is a concept often confined to romantic and individualistic norms prioritizing it over the broader concept of "art”. Contrary to the functional mystification of contemporary art, we aim to evoke possibilities of movement that will be nourished by our lived experiences and confronting the pathology of chaos.
Director, Poet, Narrator: Suhan Lalettayin
Assistant Director: Esen Arıkan
Editors: Hakan Öktem & Suhan Lalettayin
Assistant Editor: Doğaç Yurduseven
Moodboard Artist: Gürkan Özer
VFX & Color: Hakan Öktem
Sound Designer: Hakan Öktem
Vocal Coach: Erdeniz Kurucan
Poster: Hakan Öktem
English Translations: Esen Arıkan
Thanks: Ali İsmail Korkmaz Vakfı, Karşı Sanat, Berk Sivrikaya, Deniz Braderin, Şeyma Keskin, Hüseyin Serhat Arıkan, Andrea D. Torres, Akdeniz Ege Ceyhan, Ela Akdaş
