Ela Kazdal (b. 2001, Istanbul) is a multidisciplinary artist working with film, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores materiality, image, and personal history, drawing on memories, cultural references, and femininity. Using 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film alongside digital processes such as laser cutting and UV printing, she creates analog-digital hybrids that blur the boundaries between film as material and projection.
Her work has been shown at Everyman Cinema (London), Æden (Berlin), Salt Beyoğlu (Istanbul) as part of the 4th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Platform Asia’s ‘Germinate’ UK tour, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).
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