Following a screening of her film Disturbed Earth, this evening’s conversation between the artist Didem Pekün and scholar and curator Sandra Noeth focuses on the role of bodies, choreography and political violence. The conversation will therefore specifically revolve around Pekün’s aforementioned film with her earlier work Araf (2018) and her recent installation at night, on faultlines (2024) which was produced during Pekün’s residency at Between Bridges following her fellowship at Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung. 

The evening is co-hosted by Between Bridges and Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung and was initially planned and postponed from June.

Disturbed Earth (2021, 29 minutes, English)

Behind closed doors, the world’s leading diplomats and military experts are ineffective, reluctant and carefree about the fate of an entire people, despite all reports from the field and corresponding evidence. The men act deliberately, sending messages and directions to other officials off-screen, yet no decisions are ever made. The tragedy unfolds elsewhere. 

The reasons are manifold: some personal ambitions, some bigoted prejudices, some fanatic obsessions. All flavored with the procedural lockstep of bureaucracy, all adding up to a disaster that has been steadily and predictably approaching. A genocide transpires under the benevolent guardianship of the United Nations. 

Disturbed Earth was filmed as a one-day rehearsal of a script inspired by the archived UN conversations during the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.

Didem Pekün (1978, Istanbul) is an artist-filmmaker and academic based in Istanbul and Berlin. Both in her education and her approach as an artist and educator, Didem’s work is marked by a combination of theory and practice. She made several films that tackle questions of political violence, displacement and their myriad intersections. A recent turn in her practice is moving from ‘history’ to ‘future. While her previous films focused on historical events, her current works explore how we can live together from here onwards. Her films have been shown at Berlinale, Venice, BFI London Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festivals amongst others and won awards. Didem received her BA (Hons) Music from SOAS and holds an MA & a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths.  

Sandra Noeth is a professor at the HZT-Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin and an international curator. She specializes in ethical and political perspectives toward body-practice and theory. Recent artistic-theoretical research and publication projects focus on the role, status and agency of bodies in bordering processes; the relation between arts, bodies and unequal politics of protection; the embodiment of violence; the performativity of class dynamics in arts as well as the ambivalent status of the body in international humanitarian law. Sandra was Head of Dramaturgy and Research at Tanzquartier Wien (2009–2014) and worked as an educator with SKH-Stockholm University of the Arts and Ashkal Alwan Beirut, among others.