Nevin Aladag (TR/DE) | Voice Over

SYNOPSIS

The film Voice Over unfolds in three distinct parts – a sort of prologue, followed by two alternating, equally weighted sequences. The fourteen-minute video starts with a car ride through a social housing district: an anonymous hand sticks a harmonica out of the car, as we hear the soft whistle of the wind blowing through the instrument. Cut to a riverbank: rain is pouring down on a seemingly abandoned drum kit. Follows a night shot in a park: adolescent Turks sing folk ballads in the shady light of the camera lamp. The voice-over is a cinematographic device essentially made popular by film noir. In many instances it is used to convey a contradiction between image and sound. Aladag’s video does not, strictly speaking, use an off-voice.
Yet the teenagers’ singing reveals a shift, itself pointing to a significance beyond the actual frame: the roughly fourteen-year-old Turks, who were probably born and ‘socialised’ in Germany, sing traditional laments from their ancestors’ native country. The incantatory lyrics speak of loosing one’s homeland, of deportation, longing and unrequited love. A semantic gap instantly appears between what we see and what we hear, between these streetwise kids in their rapper outfits and the archaic folk tunes. [...] Text by Boris Kremer.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Nevin Aladag was born in 1972 in Van, Turkey. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.
She graduated in sculpture in 2000 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2008 her work is exhibited at the Pulse Art Fair in New York and in various group exhibition, among others at the Kunsthaus Zürich, at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, at U-Turn, Kopenhagen and in the Wip Galerie in Stockholm.

FILMOGRAPHY

• Raise the Roof, 2007, 9'00", MiniDV
• Voice Over, 2006, 14'00", MiniDV
• Lowrider Bellydance, 2004, 3'30", MiniDV
• Familie Tezcan (The Tezcan family), 2001, 6'40", MiniDV