CAGDAS KAHRIMAN

Fenêtre sur cour
2009-2011

Video, HD 16:9, colour, 6 min 4 sec

The last years of a tree in town, photographied through my windows between 2009 et 2011

" This selected stop motion video shows Kahriman's examination of the everyday by photographing the courtyard from her parisian flat. As the name refers to Alfred Hitchcook’s Rear Window (1954) witch deals explicitly with issues of voyeurism, gaze or Scopophilia, questions also about the representation of cinema spectorship. In Kahriman’s version of Rear Window (2009-2011) the audience is invited to stare from the window watching people wandering around the yard and to witness the story of a tree cut down by the local authorities. The look in this case is tied to powerlessness and allows the viewer to experience the tragedy of modern urban life, a terror-in-distance. Thus not only creates anxiety and guilt but also inquires the passive role of the spectator: is there a distinction between knowledge and action? In a political sense, Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes the audience aware of the social situation on which theater itself rests, prompting the audience to act in consequence, dragging into the circle of the action, which givesthem back their collective energy. This implicite call for collectivity is visible in this video when a little girl holds the cutted stem with her hands and turns her head up to the sky (5’20) like a pagan magician revealing our pantheist or shamanist ancestors. "

Cem Bölüktas, august 2015