The third term of ‘BAK: Revealing the City through Memory’ project consisted of an 18-month training program that included BAK Trainings, BAK Platform, and Collective BAK sections. Following its first and second terms, in its third term, BAK invited young people between the ages of 18-28 from Antep, Bursa, Izmir, and Diyarbakır who were interested in video and photography to participate in the program. The first phase of the program, BAK Trainings, which was held as a three-day training program integrating social sciences and art education for young people, was designed to discuss social issues with different fields of art, to address them in relation to each other and to enrich them with different perspectives. The training modules, created around the themes of ‘city-place’ and ‘belonging-identity,’ which are the primary areas of focus for BAK, centered around social sciences, visual storytelling, photography, contemporary art, documentary film, media representations, and new media and tools. BAK Trainings took place in İzmir, Diyarbakır, Bursa and Antep January-March 2017 with approximately 200 participants.

In the three-day program, which progressed with two modules each day, social scientists Ayşe Seda Yüksel and Bengi Akbulut looked at the city with the concepts and tools used by sociology, while discussing themes such as daily life, gender, urban transformation, migration and refugees, as well as body, space, belonging and identity. Next, visual artist and instructor Sevgi Ortaç, starting from the question ‘Why do we tell stories?’ and providing visual examples from various art disciplines, discussed topics and themes such as the history of storytelling, different forms of narration, the language used in these forms, the production of reality, the problematic of representation in the opposition between the beholder and the beheld, those included in the narrative, those left out and their relationship with power, memory politics, the emergence of cities as a new field of experience, and the construction and transformation of place. On the second day, in the photography module prepared by photography artists and instructors Ali Taptık, Metehan Özcan and Serkan Taycan, topics such as the use of photography as a tool, medium and narrative, its functionality, the power of the image and multiple forms of production were discussed. Following that, documentary filmmakers and instructors Gülengül Altıntaş and Doğa Kılcıoğlu shared examples of the historical flow of documentary cinema together with discussions on approaches and methods. On the last day of BAK Lectures, art historian and curator Ezgi Bakçay and Erden Kosova discussed various examples of contemporary art from around the world in the context of the city and public space, memory and identity. They explored questions such as what contemporary art is, how it differs from modern art, and where the artist stands as a subject in these art forms. Lastly, journalist and media-communication trainers Altuğ Akın and Çiğdem Öztürk discussed the media as a medium and in the context of cultural industries, its relationship with the audience, and the possibilities and opportunities it offers. Throughout the BAK Lectures, which took place in different locations across four cities with different and sometimes similar lines of discussion, the participants encountered alternative and multiple perspectives in terms of approaching the city and city-related issues.

Following the BAK Lectures that took place between January-March 2017, 33 young people who applied to participate in the collective production process gathered in Diyarbakır for the Idea Development Workshop in April 2017, and 15 of them who developed project proposals went on to realize 10 photography and video projects during the production workshop held in Izmir in June 2017. The projects, which offer comprehensive conceptual frameworks and discussions on the city and bring together personal and collective memory, were developed to address different places and human stories from a broad perspective. Following the shooting process, the works underwent editing and a detailed post-production phase, and upon completion, they were presented to the audience in various galleries and screening halls. BAK 2016-2018 was supported by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Consulate General of Sweden, and Heinrich Böll Foundation.

BAK 2016-2018 Catalog of Exhibition