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Infamous Library

Note from Jess: Much of what has been posted here in the last two weeks has contemplated the hallucinatory leaps, the generative space between things. For Alexander Lumans, Shawn Huelle, Mary Hamilton and myself, these jumps traverse the white space between text and text and image. In Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo, we don’t leap so much as tumble deep into the crevice of what’s been erased—not a move forward but a fall into. In Işıl Eğrikavuk’s Infamous Library, the quick shifts to black and back aren’t moments of movement but paralysis. Those who were kidnapped and kept in the library communicated by underlining words in the books they erased. An artifact shown at the beginning of the film is meant to prove the existence of the library; the books altered in it question the existence of history. The Infamous Library arrests its viewer within the ambiguous space of truth: a stasis as generative and hallucinatory as any leap.)

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Işıl Eğrikavuk (b.1980) lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.
Işıl Eğrikavuk studied literature at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) then went to The School of The Art Institute of Chicago for her MFA in Performance Art. She moved back to Istanbul in 2008 where she is currently teaching media and video art at Bilgi University. Işıl Eğrikavuk is also a reporter for Turkish Daily News, where she covers stories on the verge of culture and politics.

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