A Conversation with Didem Pekün: On the Responsibility of Images
Art & Culture: The Curator’s Pick
Interview by Flora Fettah
The first conversation Didem and I had was a rather deep one. It took place in 2023, while I was researching her work as a fellow at KADIST in Paris. At the time, her practice felt like one of the missing pieces in the historical hegemonic puzzle I had been taught. What resonated with me was the way political events filtered into everyday life, creating unsettling gaps and moments of dissociation that felt familiar. Our own social context was unsettled as well. The images I was watching, shot ten years earlier, carried the hope and optimism of the revolution. By 2023, however, we were left with the memory of what had not happened. Together, through the screen, we wondered whether this wave of history had already passed, or if we were simply at its lowest point.
Two years later, we met again, still on Zoom. It felt as though the conversation wasn’t yet over.
As we speak, where are you and how are you doing?
I am good actually, I am in London. Starting a busy teaching term at Goldsmiths.
Disturbed Earth (2021), courtesy of Didem Pekün
You create documentary films as well as video installations. How do you articulate these two parts of your practice? Also, they are not always distinct — for instance, Of Dice and Men, a two-screen video work, features images of your daily life, shot in London and Istanbul between 2011 and 2016.
They indeed overlap a lot. Even though I am informed by my training in documentary, I am interested in stretching that form and making it more than what is expected of it. Its versatility allows me to engage with audiences through different modes of communication — something central to my practice.
I also make feature documentaries — quite rarely though — about once every fifteen years or so, whenever a topic or a character truly captivates me. In 2024, I released Otherwise in Istanbul, a film that follows the Istanbulian dancer Mihran Tomasyan. The previous one was on the singer Tülay German, and came out in 2010. So I probably won’t be making another one for quite some time.
It is a character that draws me to the long format, but audience interaction is what pulls me toward installation work, a space where I feel more free. These two mediums actually have very different work processes. Art adds a magic to it: it can be undefinable, unfinished. Perhaps I can continue this project in a future iteration, or keep inventing this film within an installation, or even split it in two to create a two-screen version… All these questions allow for a more playful mode of working. Whereas the other mode of working follows more decisive steps: you finish shooting, you lock the edit, you lock the picture. It is called locking picture, locking sound — it marks its irreversibility. Then the documentary goes to festivals. It has a very different modus operandi all together, from the making to distribution.
Your artworks oscillate between narrative essays, mise-en-scène and documentary, emphasizing the use of a first-person lens. How important is it for you to make clear that your position is a subjective one?
Subjectivity connects the two practices I mentioned. Making my perspective explicit is a political act: a deliberate disclosure of my embeddedness. We all have dependencies and positionalities; naming them is, to me, an ethical commitment. Whether documentary or mise-en-scène, my work probes that situatedness and insists we acknowledge our own complicity in the violences we critique. So there really is no escaping embeddedness — we must make our own violence accountable and visible.
Disturbed Earth (2021), courtesy of Didem Pekün
I agree with you. What I also really like about your work is the very honest way in which you acknowledge that situating yourself is a mandatory starting point and that no creation can start beforehand.
It has to do with the enunciator of the “I”. I use the “I” and you know it is me, Didem, who is speaking — even though sometimes it is through a fictional character. In my film Araf, I use the “I” and it is both the voice of Nayia, the main character, and mine.
But you know, I can lie! I am sure I have lied in some works to make them a little nicer or better. I keep that right in my pocket. So then we must also keep in mind the politics of what happens in a work, and whilst making the work, which is the unseen labour. The situatedness I mentioned starts here.
"Banal is part of the disaster. The banality of witnessing something and continuing through life as if everything was normal, is part of the disaster. That’s why banal has always had a place in my films"
That’s true. But you don’t have to say everything…
That’s the thing with editing, right? We don’t have to say everything — we can edit out the things that don’t fit quite well and we don’t have to say the things we don’t want to confess — and that’s all right.
Swimming in fish bowl, still from the series at night, on faultlines, courtesy of Didem Pekün
It is also about protection, right?
I am currently working with my students on mémoires, and I ask them to keep a diary. In this writing class, we are tackling the differences between a diary and something diary-esque. After all, when you publish a mémoire you don’t publish an unedited diary, do you? This notebook (through the screen, she shows me a small black notebook) is not for anyone else’s eyes — it is unedited and has nothing to do with the films I make. We should always remember that there is an author with an intentionality behind any publicly displayed work.
That is why I was talking about honesty: the subjectivity of the maker’s point of view is made clear through the first-person perspective, the edits, and the aesthetic you chose. You do not embrace a raw-footage look and prefer something more stylized, which underlines the existence of narrative choices. I also feel it is a way of affirming your situatedness in a straightforward way.
Precisely. It is possible to make everything look like raw footage out there but I don’t think that they bring more honesty than something constructed. Footage is a representation, it is already constructed. It articulates particular points in time&space, so putting it out there as a raw material doesn’t make it more honest than a stylized version. At least editing, as you say, when shaped into an aesthetic form, has a clear purpose in saying something — it makes itself known.
Your work reflects on life during and after episodes of violence. To do so, you often present images of everyday life or the banal moments behind major political events. This is the case in Of Dice and Men, which we previously mentioned, but also when you restage the diplomatic discussions preceding the Srebrenica genocide in Disturbed Earth. How does that work? Would you say it is your way to contribute to how History is being written?
What I try to achieve with my works is never one thing only. I was recently reading Writing of Disaster (Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre, 1980) and the first sentence of that book is “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” I thought that it summarized the current situation very well. Banal is part of the disaster. The banality of witnessing something and continuing through life as if everything was normal, is part of the disaster. That’s why banal has always had a place in my films. For instance, Araf, is a road film set in post-war Bosnia, seen through the eyes of a fictional character. Two-thirds of the film takes us through villages, investigating the residues of violence, and examining what kind of traces are left behind. This also includes looking at people: how they carry on with their lives, both meanwhile or after the event.
So my work indeed looks at violence itself but does not directly show it. For me, the best example is Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, dir. Alain Resnais) about post WWII that was shot in the location of two extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland). The strength of the film was to not show the violence that happened but looks at the remains after it. There is an aura, an energy — it is inscribed in the walls, inscribed in the space. I find this a far more powerful way to address violence. Leaving the viewer with the impact of such an atrocity opens a space for reflection. And I am interested in that space where conversation can start occurring.
Last dinner, still from the series at night, on faultlines, courtesy of Didem Pekün
It reminds me of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s work The Natural History of Rape, presented at the 12th Berlin Biennale in 2022, in which she explored the mass rapes of women in post–World War II Berlin. It was documented through books and photographs produced by these women but she occulted all the explicit descriptions of violence. This choice didn’t weaken our comprehension of what happened or what was at stake: the violence against women and women’s bodies in that period of time. Nor did it prevent us from engaging in interaction and reflection; rather, it acknowledged the violence, respected the integrity of those involved, and sought not to replicate it…
On the other hand, at the same biennial, a work by Jean-Jacques Lebel was on display: it took the form of a labyrinth composed of panels bearing enlarged screenshots from videos documenting acts of torture at Abu Grahib prison, carried out by American soldiers on Iraqi prisonners. In my opinion, this work ultimately fails in its attempt at condemnation, as it actually produces its own symbolic violence by displaying the victims’ bodies and using their images without their consent for the eyes of a Western audience within art institutions. It was quite questionable to present these two different works together as if they were two equivalent options to fight political violence — while one is actually only instrumentalizing people's suffering to one’s personal symbolic and financial benefit.
The issue of ethical representation does not really have a straightforward formula for determining when an artist crosses an invisible line or demonstrates a strong moral compass. Still, it is a rather obvious thing to say, but respecting people is central to any ethical approach when working with trajectories and stories of violence — on both sides of the representation: those who speak about it and those who view it. To show violence is also, in a sense, to repeat it. How, then, can we work with such inflammatory subjects and still remain within a communicable boundary? This question permeates my work.
So it is not only about what we write when we attempt to contribute to the collective reparation of History’s writing, but also how we do it, who is entitled to do so, and by what means — using which lives?
We are not outside the structures we critique, which brings us back to the question of situatedness. Criticizing violence does not mean we are exempt from reproducing it.
I mean, we talk about “shooting” films — look at the violence of the terminology!
On another note, you worked as a DJ in Istanbul’s underground music and dance club scene. Has it had an impact on how you work with sound in your current artistic practice?
I studied music in my BA and I have been very invested in it since I was a kid. Music is my first love, really. I moved into visual arts so I could integrate everything — from sound to image to performance. All my moving image works have a very detailed sound impact and design. I work very closely with my musician and sound design collaborators. And if I have the resources, I make sure to fill the space with 3D sound in a very meticulous way. Genuinely, for me, music is the highest art form. There is an immediacy about it that nothing else captures.
Of dice and men (2011-16), courtesy of Didem Pekün
When you are creating a new piece, at what point does it intervene? Is sound something you imagine and project while making the images? Does it come before, or at the end of your process? How does it interact with other mediums that come into play when you are creating?
Usually, I have a piece that gets me going — a tune. For instance, before I made Araf, I attended a concert of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Henryk Górecki performed by Ross Birrell, David Harding, the Athens State Orchestra, and the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra during Documenta 14 in Athens. It was such a haunting concert — so strong and mournful. Past history and present history seemed to collapse into one piece of music that brought it all together. It colored my entire filming process and I listened to it throughout.
Or David Lang’s incredible piece Again, in my film Disturbed Earth, which is such an important part of the film. As the chorus sings “again and again”, we circle in a diplomatic roundtable whilst they discuss whether they should intervene to stop an atrocity or not. That is what makes the film, as I called it, a choreography of bureaucratic incompetence.
Or in yet a different collaboration process, in my last work, at night, on faultlines, I collaborated with two musician friends (Elena Kakaliagou and Berke Can Özcan). We shot a performance that we did together: for three days in the studio, it was live dance, live music, creating not only the images but also the soundtrack. I was like a conductor of dancers, musicians and film team, which was an amazing experience. I suppose music is present each time through a different method. I really try, in my practice, not to repeat myself. I always try new ways of telling something — I would hate to repeat a form.
I will now move on to my last question — the same I ask everyone I interview: what are you watching when you are on the internet, scrolling through social media?
I have an instagram that I regularly deactivate. Sometimes I come back for ten days, two weeks. And when I am online, I watch a lot of crap — like everyone. I admit there are a lot of animal videos: that’s my soft spot. But I also watch comedy or tennis or David Bowie.
