2019-2022
Nazlı Dinçel (Turkey / USA) is a first-generation immigrant born in Ankara, Turkey. They studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Dinçel’s films have screened at museums, festivals, and micro-cinemas around the world, including the MoMA and MoMI (NY), IFF Rotterdam, MuMok (Vienna), BAFICI (Buenos Aires), Hong Kong IFF, etc. Their hand-made work reflects on experiences of disruption, recording the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation, and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material. Their use of text as image, language, and sound imitates the failure of memory and their own displacement within a western society. Dinçel is the recipient of The Helen Hill Award from the Orphan Film Symposium, Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Eileen Maitland Award, a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2018), and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University (2019). They live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Dinçel began transitioning from female to they/them in early 2022. All genders in previous works and writings will stay as they were created and should be understood accordingly.
Dinçel’s films are rooted in the body, charting her and her lovers’ flesh across experiences of desire and dislocation. Hand-making her films—scratching, sewing, hammering, letter-punching, and typewriting all figure into the process—allows the artist to manifest intensely private subject matter in an equally physical cinematic object. Moments of carnal sublimation or self-pleasure, breakdowns of communication, and the lyrical textures of bodies in the spaces they inhabit all contribute to Dinçel’s self-described “female polemic against representations of the body.” Her work also gestures toward her upbringing in Turkey, from which she emigrated on her own as a teenager; the films’ painstaking construction evokes traditions such as rug-making, while their themes signal an urgency of self-expression without shame or reductive notions of gender. Reminiscent of Carolee Schneemann and Kathy Acker but articulated through a contemporary critical voice that is uniquely her own, Dinçel’s films are knowing, vital anthems about empowerment through art. – MoMA
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