Ela Kazdal (b. Istanbul, Turkey) is a London-based artist working across moving image, sculpture, installation, and print. She engages with film as both material and experience, deconstructing its forms to explore how images exist beyond the screen. Her work has been presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR); Royal College of Art (London); Firstsite (Colchester); Fabrica Gallery (Brighton); Everyman Cinema (London); Æden (Berlin); and Swiss Cottage Gallery (London). She is currently a video editor at MUBI.
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