Fresh Kill

Director: Shu Lea Cheang 
Cast: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim
USA, 1994, 78', color

English with Turkish subtitles

Shu Lea Cheang's witty narrative Fresh Kill envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture.

Fresh Kill's title refers to a fictitious landfill that dominates Staten Island. Junk rules many of the film's compositions, and, thematically, the film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. From the beaches of Taiwan's Orchid Island, used as a nuclear waste site in the 1980s, to the shores of New York's Staten Island, Fresh Kill collapses the globe in solidarity against racism, sexism, and the excesses of transnational corporate capitalism as resistance circulates through networks originally designed to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital.

Freebird

Freebird

Fresh Kill

Fresh Kill

(chatlandia)

(chatlandia)

Valentine for Perfect Strangers

Valentine for Perfect Strangers

Wonders Wander

Wonders Wander

Shaping Forms  The Migrant Body / Shaping Ideologies

Shaping Forms The Migrant Body / Shaping Ideologies

Constituting the entirety of all the perceived aspects of an object creating their own order, form not only contains visual elements and characteristics, but can also help elucidate concepts. 

Istanbul’s Historical Peninsula in 18th and 19th Century Paintings

Istanbul’s Historical Peninsula in 18th and 19th Century Paintings

With the Topkapı Palace, the center of political authority until the 19th century, and many other examples of classical Ottoman and Byzantine architecture included in its premise the Historical Peninsula is the heart of the Empire. 

A Photographer’s Biography Guillaume Berggren

A Photographer’s Biography Guillaume Berggren

Berggren acquires the techniques of photography in Berlin and holds different jobs in various European cities before arriving in İstanbul. Initially en route to Marseille, he disembarks from his ship in 1866 and settles in İstanbul, where he is to spend the rest of his life.