Ipek Hamzaoglu is an artist, film director and cultural worker based in Vienna. Her work revolves around collective melancholy and the potentials of post-apocalyptic future narratives, collective knowledge and gossip. Published in 2021 by K.Verlag Berlin and translated into Turkish by Feride Eralp, "Mülksüzlestirme Inat: An Activity Book", translated into Turkish by Feride Eralp. She is also part of many queer-feminist art practices focusing on friendship, collective knowledge production and women's histories.

Portrait Barbara Juch
Photo 1: Ipek Hamzaoglu
Photo 2: Malu Blume, Andrea Haas, Ipek Hamzaoglu, Franzis Kabisch and Juliane Saupe
Photo 3: Ipek Hamzaoglu
Photo 4: Ipek Hamzaoglu, Laura Nitsch, Sophie Thun

IPEK HAMZAOGLU
TURKEY / AUSTRIA

Despina, 2021. HD video with 2 audio channels, 11 minutes.

Set between dream, reality and future, this film explores the social and environmental impact of a nuclear disaster through the journey of a young girl who survives it. The use of different cameras in the film causes the narrative to collapse by deriving shifting image qualities in a reference encoded in the multiple temporalities that define the work. The moving images in the work are accompanied by an interrupted melodramatic acoustic space and the siren-like dirty cries of the girl mourning her future. Despina is set in the historic fortress prison where the controversial nuclear power plant is planned to be built and where dozens of thinkers, poets and writers have been imprisoned for "thought crimes".