Ela Kazdal (b. 2001, Istanbul) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of materiality, image, and personal history. Her practice draws from memories, cultural references, and femininity. She is an artist of Display Fever.
Primarily working with 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film, Kazdal integrates contemporary technology to push the boundaries of the film strip. Using tools like laser cutting, UV printing, and software such as Adobe and Runway, she creates analog-digital hybrids that foster a dialogue between past and present, material and film. Her work is deeply engaged with the dual nature of moving images as both physical objects and projected experiences.
She has presented her films at Everyman Cinema in London, Æden in Berlin, Salt Beyoğlu in Istanbul as part of the 4th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival and in the UK tour of Platform Asia’s ‘Germinate’ screenings at Firstsite, Fabrica Gallery and Royal College of Art.
In a more or less conscious way, Ela takes the forms from the existing social bonds that she is a part of, and cautiously re-stitches the relational fabric in her own immediate experience. The moments of sociability and exchange that she produces provide the underlying pattern of her films. Through filmmaking, Ela renegotiates the meaning of kinship and tests its limits according to the viewer’s encounter with her works. Acting within a confined and seemingly-broken structure, Ela expands the possibilities of relationships by engaging them in a covert creative collaboration. In fact, the evaluation of these relationships are never openly revealed, but remains in the background of the work, weaved among reminiscences and past experiences from the artist’s life.
Text by Jael Arezi