In its focus on Müküs, a small town in the mountainous far East of Turkey and her late father’s birthplace, this prize winning essay film by Kurdish artist Pinar Öğrenci listens gently to the memories of a landscape that has witnessed the eruptions of the Armenian genocide and the recent and ongoing Turkish war on the Kurds. Archival photo images of Armenian life are superimposed ghost-like on documentary images from the present under Turkish military occupation. Armenian songs accompany pans of snowy mountains. As the film shows old men playing chess, Öğrenci, who now works in Berlin, conjures up Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle in silent subtitles, thus broadening a local memory work into a multirelational realm. In its move to salvage remembrance of a submerged and threatened past, Avalanche offers a palimpsest of enforced erasures, not just of avalanches of political violence, but of slowly changing ways of life that have led inexorably to a loss of population, migration and exile. The film was shown at Documenta 15, Berlinische Galerie and at several biennials.
We are pleased to welcome discussant Işın Önol, curator and writer at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
This event is co-sponsored by Film and Media Studies/School of the Arts, Columbia Seminar on Sites of Cinema and the Department of Germanic Languages.
Registration
The event is open to the public. Non-Columbia affiliates will need to register by April 7, 2025.
