Burcu Gündüz — Videoart with meaning
Public Eyes 1
“In this work, I combined a drawing I made with the video recording of nature. The question in my mind was: how do we see nature? Is nature always in the shape of the way our eye sees? How does the feeling change when other things than nature emerge? When do we perceive nature purely when other things don’t emerge, which feelings come by? Could it be like this video; like the relation of parts and whole when one observer in different times or many observers in one time see?”
Love Protest
“In this video-mix I tried to give the sense of affection to life; cry, death and water upon a classical music piece which will give the sensation of sadness of the thing…Tree as life, elder’s anger, future as the child, and human’s reaction were in my mind. All the videos are captured near the gold mine and resistance area in Ida Mountains from August till October 2019. This video-mix is planned to project on a building as a video mapping art in a city with live music in front of the building.
Music: Max Richter On The Nature Of Daylight 2019 October, 13 @ Çanakkale”
“I”
“A performance of the I who is detached from nature that a gold mine destroyed: who is also in search of a proper place in nature by bodily movement, gestures and speech acts.
03.26 min. video art film about the modern subject and ecological destruction such as the gold mines. The self we call ‘I’ is a hallucination; a distorted perception that we are other than nature. This misleading conception of the human world destroys the real world we live in.
The ecosystem near Mount Ida in Turkey was going to be annihilated by the Canadian gold mine company Alamos Gold in 2019. The city Cannakkale’s only water source is very close to the mine that will use about 19 tons of poisonous material; cyanide. Ida Mountain and the region are very important for the world’s plant genetics. It is a world heritage site. For the Ida Mountains Homer said “with a thousand springs, many springs, abundant animals and plants”. Please save ida, save yourself!
The videos are recorded in the tented resistance area near the gold mine that is close to Mount Ida. Then the videos are projected on a screen made up of real tree leaves and then used for this video.
2021 Average Activists Production, TR.
in youtube channel of Average Activists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqGpNbJ1k3g”
Water without cyanide is a human right!
Water is sacred. Every human has the right to reach drinkable water which is needed to be preserved by the laws. In Ida mountains, gold mines are on the catchment basin of the only water source of a city. Thousands of people’s drinking water is threatened by the poison; cyanide. Tons of cyanide is used to get the gold. This dirty water, soil, and air will affect all the vegetables and fruits people produce as well as all animals. They lost their home because they already cut more than 300 thousand trees. Recently we are globally in a climate crisis and what is done is not logical for the future of living beings, diversity, and ecology in general.
In this projection mapping, I found aesthetically appealing white foam plates from where I found the gold mines resistance place (Çanakkale/Turkey). Pictures of the vegetables and fruits are from the same place. In general, we are rarely eating natural plants. Most of them are like plastics, with hormones, pesticides, and chemicals. It is not fair. We put them in plastic cups and throw them in the garbage which we don’t know where they are going to. Maybe into the whale’s stomach. What a shame they lost their lives because of that. Why don’t we change?
Video mapping on foam disposable plastic plates by Burcu Gündüz K in Ida mountains (gold mining protest area) in March 2020.
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Burcu Gündüz K (VJ VJunk) studied Industrial Design and met video art while attending Ulus Baker’s lectures at METU, Ankara. She got her MFA in graphic design in 2003, writing a thesis on the electronic music culture “Rave As Carnival ‘’. She organized an independent video jockey art festival VJ Fest İstanbul (2008–2012) and workshops, talks as well as wrote about live visual performance art. She joined VJ Finland in Helsinki, Live Performers Meeting in Rome, Freemote in Utrecht, Scope Sessions in Berlin, Occupy Yourself in Sofia, Zdravo Mladi in Skopje, Nodefest in İstanbul. Since 2019 she has put her visual power into ecological activism in the Ida Mountains. She continues exploring the video art’s audiovisual language through the body and material of the screen. She is a new yoga and breath-work teacher.
Links: https://vimeo.com/vjunk
