26.11.2024 // 6 pm // Lichtbrücke // HfG Karlsruhe

The series Archive Talks is organized by HfG Karlsruhe Open Research Center and funded by Stiftung für Innovation in der Hochschullehre.

Archives are not always established with state funding and institutional policy. They can also emerge from movements or from the initiative of individuals. The fragile and often nomadic state of these archives raises many questions that need to be addressed in moments of urgency and euphory. Can an autonomous act of archiving or the adoption of the archives as commons be an answer to this moment?

On this evening we have Dr. Özge Çelikaslan as our guest with her newly published book "Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma" (dpr-barcelona, 2024), who began her dissertation of the same title at the HfG Karlsruhe and completed it at the HBK Braunschweig. The lecture will focus on her intensive field research on bak.ma, a web-based nomadic video archive that was initiated in Turkey after the famous Gezi protests of 2013.

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearances or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan in his foreword to the book.

Özge Çelikaslan’s visual and scholarly work focuses on assembling counter-media narratives of social struggles, exploring overlooked moving image artifacts and mapping historical and archival absences through orphan images. She completed her PhD in media studies at the Braunschweig University of Art, where she conducted extensive research on archives as commons, resulting in her 2024 publication Archiving the Commons: Looking through the Lens of bak.ma by dpr-barcelona.

Over the years, she has produced testimonial videos, documentaries, and experimental films, showcased across various platforms and events including the 3rd Canakkale Biennial, Transmediale 2016, 14th and 17th Istanbul Biennials, Seager Gallery, and nGbK. Co-founder of the bak.ma digital media archive of social movements, she remains an active member. Currently, she teaches at the Hochschule Mannheim Faculty of Design and serves as a research fellow at the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research. She is also a recipient of the digital fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2024–2026), awarded together with the Bakma Collective.