Three prominent directors and film professionals from three different generations of Turkish cinema unite in Akbank Sanat's latest exhibition, "Prizma Expanded: Poetics of Perception," showcasing site-specific and experience-based cinematic works produced jointly by the directors and film professionals.
It is also the first project of the independent art initiative Prizma, which artist and curator Lara Kamhi established to explore the concept of "expanded cinema fully." In line with this concept, "Prizma Expanded" explores expanded cinematic art forms with an awareness of new ways of thinking proposed by communication networks such as social media, inclusive experience-providing technologies, and interactive storytelling. The exhibition will kick off on May 11 and run until July 29.
The curator of the exhibition, Lara Kamhi, described the impact of communication networks on the cinematic experience: "While the didactic dimension of social media, the commands, reminders, and warnings it provides keep our minds away from the slightest gap, our approach to the cinematic experience continues to be fundamentally affected. Amid all this information chaos, we seek an ultimate state of transcendence. We continue searching for an experienced environment to entrust our exhausted, bewildered, and tired minds with peace of mind."
As television became more widespread in homes in the Western world in the 1960s and digital cameras began to be produced, the cinema experience became popular among the masses.
In response to these processes, on the one hand, video art emerged, and on the other hand, the artist Stan Van Der Beek used the term "Expanded Cinema" for the first time in his manifesto titled "The Culture Intercom." In his manifesto, Van Der Beek drew attention to the dangerous aspects of technology that were getting out of control while emphasizing the urgency of creating a universal language.
He also proposed expanding the cinematic experience and giving it an interactive dimension with alternative and radical approaches, arguing that this could only be achieved through a universal experience. For this reason, the "Expanded Cinema" movement emerged, centered on science, art, and technology, designed as crafted cinematic experiences, asking, "As cinema expands, does consciousness expand too?" These works, which restructure films from the ground up by spatializing them in a gallery or public spaces, give observers active roles and involve them in story and narrative creation. In contrast to the one-way narratives offered by television or cinema, they bring new dimensions to the cinematic experience.
Lara Kamhi summarized the question at the center of the exhibition's conceptual framework.
"Although Steven Spielberg pointed out that virtual reality would push the audience away from storytellers and give them much freedom to make their own choices, Morton Heilig's prediction that 'the cinema of the future will no longer be a visual art but a consciousness art' is quite accurate. While cinema today can be compared to the experimental frenzy of the late 1800s and early 1900s, we may finally be able to ask a question that may be too late: 'What if the difference between 'storytelling' and 'story living' has not disappeared, yet never existed?'"
The exhibition can be visited from Tuesday to Saturday free of charge.
