belit sağ is a video artist living in Amsterdam. She has studied mathematics in Turkey and art in the Netherlands and completed a residency at Rijksakademie in 2014/2015. Her video works are informed by her experiences in video activists collectives from Ankara and Istanbul, where she co-initiated projects like VideA, Karahaber and bak.ma. Her most recent works are on the issues of visual representation of violent experiences, and focusses on practices of creating imagery that aims to challenge dehumanizing widespread violent imagery. The works often deal with the impact of images in the media and the connected problems of representation and visibility. sağ scales down larger political problems to a personal level, elucidates their influence on everyday life and is thus able to make them accessible to a larger public. Her works have been featured at a.o. documenta, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam.
For her site-specific work Die Mutter der L. (The Mother of the L.) belit sağ invited young women of Cologne-based Bosnian Islamic Cultural Community ‘Gazi Husrevbeg’ to reinterpret archived family photos of Yugoslavian migrants via re-enactment. In her three-channel video installation sağ combines the historical and newly created material with recordings of religious chants, the ‘Ilahi’, into a new narration. As an alternative to the conserving practices of archives, she brings these artefacts back into public space. Die Mutter der L. (The Mother of the L.) was developed as part of the discursive programme Memory Lab, a laboratory for collective commemorative practices. Memory Lab is a series of events and projects initiated by Cologne’s Academy of the Arts of the World in collaboration with DOMiD – Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany and is supported by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).