Ilkin Mehrabov

Video Activism in Turkey: Empowerment of Oppressed or Another Kind of Surveillance? the Curious Case of Karahaber Ilkin Mehrabov

Immediately after being released to the mass market in the middle of the 1960s, commercial video device was adopted by social movements and activists all around the world to produce their own media and to challenge the visual domination of mainstream media both in terms of content and style. This new form of challenge, named as video activism, emerged as a process of documenting realities and ?truth of life' in an artistic way for political purposes. Even if video devices became available in Turkey starting from the late 1970s, the first Turkish video activist collective Karahaber was formed only in 2005. This book explores the conduct of video activism in Turkey through a case study on this collective, claiming that the practices of Karahaber, which theoretically should have helped the oppressed and under- represented to empower themselves, led rather to an unexpected result of enforcing a panoptic/synoptic surveillance society, since Karahaber limited the dissemination of produced videos only with Internet, excluded protesters and activists from the phases of filming, and explicitly revealed their identities in the films.