Note To Self: Psychosexual Films Of Nazli Di̇nçel

An evening of visceral and provocative handmade films that explore bodies, acts of the solitary, text, language, visual information and personal exposure. Nazlı Dinçel’s work reflects on experiences of disruption. She records the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire in juxtaposition with the medium’s material: texture, color and the passing of emulsion. Her use of text as image, language and sound attempts the failure of memory and her own displacement within a western society.

*Note: This program contains explicit content*

PROGRAM

REFRAME
2009 | 16mm | Silent | 4min

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.

LEAFLESS
20011 | 16mm | Silent | 8min

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.

HER SILENT SEAMING
2014 | 16mm | Sound | 10min

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.

SHARING ORGASM: COMMUNICATING YOUR SEXUAL RESPONSES (Found Film)
1977 | 16mm | Sound | 12min

SOLITARY ACTS #4
2015 | 16mm | Sound | Exacto Knife | Typewriter | 8min

The filmmaker films herself masturbate the object of debate. She hears others claim her body, her habits: those in her conservative surroundings as a child. She learns how to read.

SOLITARY ACTS #5
2015 | 16mm | Sound | Exacto Knife | Fishing Line | Sewing Machine | 5min

The filmmaker films herself practice kissing with a mirror. She recalls teenage memories of overconsumption, confusing oral fixations that are both sexual (kissing) and bodily (eating). She ends up eating the carrot she is masturbating with, and she feels a sense of cannibalism.

SOLITARY ACTS #6
2015 | 16mm | Sound | Exacto Knife | 1.5mm Letter Punches | Hammer | Leather Puncher | 11min

The filmmaker films her subject in a private act, complicating what could be considered a solitary act. This is a feminist critique of the Oedipal complex. It is not the male child’s desire to have sexual relations with the mother. It is the mother’s desire to be sexually attracted to child-like men. The filmmaker recounts an abortion she had in 2009. If she had the child, he would have turned six in 2015. The aborted child survives and becomes her lover.

VOID (4.INABILITY)
2016 | 16mm | Silent | 4min

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.

SHAPE OF A SURFACE
2017 | 16mm | Sound | 9min

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.

Artist Bio

Born in Ankara, Turkey, Dinçel immigrated to the United Sates at the age of 17. Dinçel resides in Milwaukee, WI where she is currently building an artist run film laboratory. She obtained her MFA in filmmaking from UW-Milwaukee. Her works have been exhibited in numerous venues around the world including Tiger Shorts competition at IFFR, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Dallas Contemporary. She recently won the Marian McMahon Akimbo award at the 2017 Images Festival with Untitled (2016) and was also awarded Best Experimental Film at the 2015 Chicago Underground Film Festival with Her Silent Seaming (2014).

In addition to exhibiting with institutions, Dinçel avidly self-distributes and tours with her work in micro-cinemas, artist run laboratories and alternative screening spaces in order to support and circulate handmade filmmaking to communities outside of institutions.

This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.