Art Challenging Digital Repression (English)

The panel »Art Challenging Digital Repression«, held at the annual conference »Digital Interventions. Bodies, Infrastructures, Politics« of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) Intervening Arts at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin on May 10, 2025, explored the growing significance of understanding and resisting repression in digital spaces. As forms of digital repression, including mass surveillance, censorship, misinformation and invasive spyware, equip governments with powerful tools to suppress dissent, artistic interventions play a crucial role in challenging these mechanisms and fostering critical awareness. 

This follow-up conversation with film and media scholar Şirin Fulya Erensoy extends the panel's discussions by examining how these ideas translate into ongoing artistic, curatorial and academic practices. Having relocated from Berlin to Groningen in 2024, where she now teaches at the University of Groningen, Erensoy builds on her recent work to share insights into her feminist and intersectional approach, her engagement with video activism and archiving and her reflections on the possibilities and limits of resilience through art. The interview provides a personal and process-oriented perspective, connecting theory and practice, and highlighting how critical artistic interventions can remain visible and effective in an increasingly surveilled digital landscape. An audio recording of the original panel discussion from the annual conference is also available at the end of the interview.

The interview was conducted by Constanze Albrecht

Şirin, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to learn more about your work. I'd love to start by getting to know you a little better and from there, we'll move into our main topic today: how art can challenge digital repression and open new spaces for critical engagement. 
So could you briefly introduce yourself again and share how you became involved in film, media and activism in general?

Well, I studied at Queen's University years ago. At first, I gravitated toward theatre, but soon I was drawn by cinema which allowed me to think more deeply about images, stories and politics in ways that felt both personal and collective. But I have to say that my scholarly work and my activism are informed by lived experience, so these are not separate things; they have grown out of the urgencies and injustices I have encountered in Turkey and other places I have lived. It's not that my work evolved or unfolded in abstraction, it really grew out of this urgency that I have witnessed and been a victim of, or participated in, both as a citizen and as someone who holds a camera or writes. So that's kind of one thing in relation to what I do. Further, I'm a film scholar. I did my PhD in Turkey, and for a while now, I've also been working as a curator and a film programmer. I focus mainly on political cinema, activist video practices, feminist counter-histories and the politics of exile. So I am interested in knowing the ways in which moving images intervene in contexts of repression and displacement and how film, video, and curation become political practices rather than neutral cultural activities. In line with this, I recently co-organized a conference titled Cinema / Activism / Education at the University of Groningen. It brought together filmmakers, scholars, and activists to reflect precisely on these intersections; on how film functions as a pedagogical and political practice and how educational and curatorial spaces can themselves become sites of activism.

You mentioned several important and thought-provoking topics. Before we go on, could you elaborate a bit more on the feminist approach in your work?

So, I guess when you talk about feminism or more intersectional approaches to research and curation, it's not just a matter of presenting feminist themes or feminist works per se. Of course, it's important to create spaces where underrepresented voices and marginalized groups can be screened or written about or researched, but it's also a matter of organizing differently — to resist hierarchical structures, to work collaboratively, and also to foreground the invisible forms of labor and care that sustain both academic work as well as cultural practices. So it's a way of confronting power and insisting on what is uncomfortable, questioning these dominant narratives and norms and having these conversations in the institutions in which we operate and in public spaces so that we can actually find alternatives. This type of approach requires a lot of patience, a lot of conversations, a lot of understanding and a lot of care. So it's not just about presenting and creating spaces in a hierarchical way but really having a more horizontal form of organizing. One of the bigger projects that we did in 2023 was the Beyond Home Exhibition at Kunstraum Kreuzberg Berlin, in which we had received the support of the Capital Cultural Fund and the Berlin Senate. This was a big exhibition that had four components and aimed to feature female artists from Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and a couple of other countries. We aimed to look at the ways in which they engaged with the notions of home but through the concept of Sara Ahmed's feminist killjoy. So our aim was really to unsettle Germany's comfort zones in relation to migration and border policy. This was essentially one of the examples of my approach to feminist organizing and curation: not just representing difference but building structures of solidarity, care and critique through which we can imagine other ways of working and living together.

So you're trying to introduce some uncomfortable notions into the system – does it ever become uncomfortable for you as well, systematically speaking?

Yes, it does become uncomfortable and in many concrete ways. I have had repeated funding rejections and in that sense my last year in Germany was particularly difficult in that regard. In the current climate, even mentioning certain regions or terms – like Palestine and even beyond, like the Middle East and more broadly the Global South – these words have become by default censored words, and I think funders are moving away from this. I've had art or academic grants rejected systematically, and this is not just me. Since October 2023, many precarious activists and artists coming from these regions are having a very difficult time navigating the artistic milieu, and it's very difficult to secure funding and institutional support. Of course, there are several different reasons for this, including broader systemic issues like budget cuts, risk averse cultural institutions and a general reluctance to engage with politically charged or decolonial perspectives. This is a true revelation with regards to the art world's professed inclusivity. For those of us whose work is rooted in activism and exile, these conditions demand constant negotiation and resilience. And perhaps that's part of the feminist practice too: continuing to insist on visibility, care and solidarity even when the structures around us make it uncomfortable to do so.

So there were strategic reasons for you leaving Berlin?

Yes, there were definitely strategic reasons. The number of spaces with which we were able to collaborate with in Berlin diminished significantly. For example, this year we organized the film festival called Hive International Short Film Days, which we've been doing for the last five years in Berlin, and this year was the first year where we did it completely independently, we received no funding. Normally, we get funding from the local municipality, but as we used our platform to speak about political cinema with a particular highlight on Palestinian filmmakers the funding was rejected. Last year, we had Basma al-Sharif in conversation with Viola Shafik, who's an Egyptian-German scholar working on political documentaries, and this year we also showed the Sci-fi trilogy by Larissa Sansour, and we had the Palestinian artist Alexandra Sophia Handal joining us in conversation. So we use our platforms to essentially create spaces for Palestinian cinema. Therefore, this year, when it came around to the fifth edition of the festival, it was entirely self-organized. If it wasn't for the collaboration with Flutgraben e.V., we would not have been able to bring the festival forward. And of course the wonderful audience who has been so loyal and supportive over the years. But yes, it's very precarious, and a lot of labor goes unpaid and unrecognized. Beyond the art world though, I am also a scholar and this precarity is not limited to the art world. Academia in Germany operates in a similar way: it often relies on temporary fellowships that rarely lead to structural inclusion. As the Berlin-based scholar Aslı Vatansever has written, this produces a cycle of dependency and invisibility – welcoming displaced or foreign scholars as guests, but rarely integrating them into the system. So yes, leaving Berlin was partly a strategic choice, but also an act of self-preservation in an increasingly exclusionary environment.

Following on from that, are there projects or collaborations that have been particularly important in shaping how you approach art and activism? You've been working in Berlin with Spore Initiative, for example…

Spore Initiative is indeed such a great and singular space in Berlin that provides spaces that are no longer able to exist in the city. Its whole programming goes to the core of matters, inviting key names in the relevant fields to provide room for conversations that many other institutions no longer wish to host. So that collaboration on Environmental Defiance on Screen was, in fact, very important to me. As I mentioned, Flutgraben has been also very good to us in terms of providing space to conduct this film festival that we've been doing for five years. I would also like to mention Anorak Film which has also been very generous with its space in these restrictive times. Since I moved to Groningen, what I've been able to do is volunteer with Cinema Politica, which is an international, community-driven, volunteer-based network that screens political documentaries and facilitates public discussions around them. They created an alternative distribution model to the mainstream, where they screen in community centers, at universities, etc. This approach creates an environment where people can think collectively about global issues and their local resonances. Further, these screenings transform universities themselves into spaces of resistance. The other thing I've been very grateful for is being able to organize Palestine Cinema Days last year, and we will do it again this year, again with a local cinema. I'm really appreciative of these grassroots efforts to organize in this way. These models remind me that meaningful curatorial work doesn’t have to depend on large institutions but can become possible through solidarity, shared commitment and the willingness to create spaces for urgent and difficult conversations.

Social media might also have a huge impact on the networking aspects of the community and your work, which brings us to the question of the digital sphere. In May 2025, you took part in the panel »Art Challenging Digital Repression« at the annual conference of the CRC Intervening Arts. Following up on this panel and building on your work as a filmmaker and curator, what is your specific experience with digital repression and resilience through artistic practices?

Thanks so much for framing it that way. I'm not like a digital humanities scholar, so I speak from the standpoint of a practitioner. Whether it's through my work with bak.ma or other efforts to organize campaigns on social media, for example, I've been part of initiatives supporting arrested scholars, journalists, or activists in Turkey in particular. I'm still very much concerned with and interested in what's happening in Turkey and with my networks over there, because digital repression has intensified in alarming ways. For sure, it's a global issue, but I would say the ways in which it's been expanding and operating in Turkey — whether through legal, infrastructural, or algorithmic regimes — have been really detrimental. It's creating a serious blow to online communities, whether through a series of laws that block websites or take down certain posts without court rulings, or even through bogus charges based on claims of disinformation, incitement to terrorism, or substance abuse. What concerns me most is that repression is not just a matter of silencing information but it leads to the criminalization of speaking itself. There are also much more serious consequences for those producing it, particularly journalists who have already been pushed out of the mainstream media and have turned to online platforms over the last ten years to continue doing their jobs. They are being intimidated, arrested and are facing lengthy trials. Of course, this is not unique to Turkey. Across Europe, too, journalists and cultural workers increasingly face intimidation, not always through direct state censorship, but through defunding, institutional pressure, or public vilification. These subtler mechanisms of control shape what can be said, shown, or funded. So this repression targets not only the circulation of information and images but also the very bodies of those who are attempting to speak up. One of the most painful recent examples is the case of Hakan Tosun, a journalist, documentary filmmaker and environmental activist whose camera chronicled Turkey's ecological struggles for years. His lens followed the destruction of forests, the displacement of communities and the protests against extractivist projects. His camera has created a living memory of resistance that mainstream media chose to ignore. On October 11, 2025, Hakan Tosun was brutally attacked in Istanbul's Esenyurt district, beaten on the street and died two days later from his injuries. The circumstances of his murder remain murky, as the investigation of the authorities is questionable. His camera was more than a tool of documentation, it was an extension of collective memory. I think it's important to highlight that, in terms of the research I conducted in Germany, I can definitely say this repression does not stop at the border. The reality of practitioners in exile shows us how repression also transforms, because it creates new forms of precarity and vulnerability that are shaped in relation to a variety of different issues. So sure, exile creates spaces, but it also creates new constraints. And again — bringing it back to what's been happening over the last two years — Palestinian solidarity has faced systematic censorship, whether through the cancellation of screenings, exhibitions being shut down, or strategic silencing. The mechanisms differ, but the underlying logic is the same: the attempt to manage visibility, to decide which bodies and which struggles are allowed to be seen. 

In this context, do you consider art ever not to be political? 

[Laughs] Absolutely not, no. Obviously, there's a spectrum to it, but in the end, everything is political, everything carries ideology in one form or another; everything is propaganda. This is also something I discuss with my students quite a lot, especially when teaching film history. There are certain things that you don't really question anymore, you just take them for granted. But actually, when you rethink how we teach film history and how canons are constructed, you see which stories are foregrounded and which stories don't have space in these curriculums. So for me, this year has been a lot about foregrounding films by women and highlighting cinemas of the Global South — developing curricula that open film history beyond Eurocentric or male-centered frameworks, aspects that have been rendered invisible…

Speaking of which: during the panel and also earlier today, you talked about bak.ma, which is an online open video archive that was created to host and share visual records taken during the Gezi Park protests in 2013 and is accordingly working against this invisibility. In your view, what is the unique role of archiving in confronting and resisting digital repression?

Bak.ma was established after the Gezi Park protest in 2013, and it really emerged from an urgent recognition that there were thousands of videos documenting the protests, but they weren't systematically being collected. Instead, they were being erased or deleted out of fear, or even confiscated by the police, or got lost due to platform takedowns. So the archive was built to safeguard these materials, and not just in a way of neutral preservation. Bak.ma really embodies the idea of a counter-archive because it intervenes in the politics of history and visibility. There have been active efforts to write history from above by effacing certain voices, and we really wanted to make this part of Turkey's history visible through audiovisual means and create an alternative memory. In terms of digital practices, the question arises: do we use the very platforms that oppress us, or do we create alternatives? And this is what bak.ma does: it uses the open source archive software pan.do/ra. It has its advantages and disadvantages, because it's less accessible and less known than, say, Instagram, but it also allows some sort of protection, as well as allowing us to host, describe and share materials on our own terms. In that sense, there is this interesting kind of duality that one has to grapple with. So this idea of making everything visible at any cost has, with the growing digital repression, obviously turned into finding more tactical and situated ways to navigate it. With an independent infrastructure, we gain autonomy and control even if it means accepting the tradeoffs of lower discoverability, more maintenance and ›messy‹ community metadata. It is a collective and participatory structure, as bak.ma is an open archive where anyone can upload videos. This can also lead to a bit of messiness with regard to tagging and annotating. But we feel that this messiness and the fragmentary, open-ended nature of the archive is also a reflection of the urgencies and contradictions of the movements that we're documenting. At the same time, bak.ma functions as a pedagogical tool: engaging with the videos allows viewers to understand how collective action unfolds: how people organize, document and protect one another under repressive conditions. In this sense, the archive is not only about preserving the past but also about transmitting forms of knowledge and solidarity that sustain ongoing struggles.

And what does the process of archiving mean for people in the diaspora?

Video activism and archival practices came a little hand in hand at the time, I have to say. Many of the people who were video activists are the holders of the biggest audiovisual archives, and those are the ones that have been digitized. It is true that many of them are also now in exile, whether it's in the Netherlands or Germany. This creates a complex trajectory where those who once filmed on the ground are now the caretakers of those images from afar. A lot of people who are now in exile don't do video activism anymore, just because they're afraid of different laws that might hold them accountable, especially if they don't have permanent residency. So many have taken a step back from activism and archiving. For those who are able to continue, they continue by pairing it with more of an artistic practice, finding ways to translate these materials into public contexts. There are a lot of residency programs; for example, we did an exhibition on 10 Years of Archiving Social Resistance at AGIT Berlin, as well as one Residency at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. We've been thinking about: how does an activist archive function in an art space, and how do we avoid aestheticizing what was never meant to be art in the first place? Or how do we maintain its urgency while engaging with new publics? This relation between art, activism, and digital spaces versus artistic spaces, and the circulation of activist media in these spaces, are tensions that we're interested in navigating in exile now.

Have you additionally observed specific strategies used by artists or activists to navigate censorship or surveillance in digital spaces, different from what you are doing? Especially in Turkey, there are artists who are either imprisoned, like Çiğdem Mater, or in exile. Turkish artists are struggling to continue their artwork, but they are still trying to uphold it to go against this repression.

In Turkey, there's a lot of self-censorship happening for the very basic condition of survival. Cultural and political spaces are shrinking, and in that sense, in order to maintain even limited autonomy, one has to compromise quite a bit. So in that sense, there's a lot of auto-censorship and self-censorship happening in the arts for several years: people must constantly negotiate what can be said and shown. It does create issues for artists that engage with political issues, so their work has to be much less direct. In Turkey, even mainstream artists can be detained for something as simple as expressing queer love in a song, like Mabel Matiz, or supporting women's rights, like Demet Evgar, which shows how arbitrary and political repression really is. These cases reveal how fragile the line is between visibility and punishment. Feminist and queer groups in Turkey are very inventive, despite these constraints, and still very active in this regard. They use social media and audiovisual tools to disseminate campaigns, create awareness, mobilize, evoke emotions and solidarity, and create counterpublics. So it's very important to highlight that, despite the auto- and self-censorship and the accompanying difficulty in navigating digital and public spheres, these practices continue.

Considering everything we've discussed, what is the real difference between repression and digital repression? While the definitions might seem straightforward, in practice the two are closely intertwined. With emerging technologies and the rise of artificial intelligence, which will certainly affect the future of artistic resistance, creating safe spaces online and offline becomes even more challenging. What do you think the future holds, and what challenges do you anticipate?

We also talk about this in terms of the future of education. As university staff, we are constantly rethinking how to evaluate or guide students as new technologies like AI are not only used as tools but begin to structure the way of thinking and producing knowledge. These are questions we're trying to navigate and find answers to, and it's really difficult to keep up with the ways in which these technologies are developing. The same technologies that promise efficiency and access also enable new forms of surveillance, data extraction and algorithmic control, shaping the conditions of artistic and political expression. But I think the distinction between repression and digital repression is blurry. The tactics we see online are not new: they have long histories in authoritarian systems. Digital infrastructures now make it easier to target individuals and suppress dissent as well as manipulate visibility. I think what we need to do is be much more collective and situated. We need to build decentralized structures, create independent circuits of circulation, and use these parallel spaces to intervene and resist co-option. This has always been possible. I think it's a matter of allying with these spaces and political practices in order to generate counter-histories, reconfigure visibilities and open spaces for collective engagement and dialogue. And this can be done through scholarly work, screenings, or by using platforms outside of the very systems that cause surveillance, to finally break the loop, that is, to become tools to intervene, rather than reproduce, the systems that surveil us.

Would your work be different if the world were a little different? It's a somewhat random question, but I was thinking about the freedom of the artistic mind. Many artists from Turkey have described how differently they approach their practice now, compared to when they were not politically engaged. So, can there even be freedom for the artistic mind in this world?

I think we just reconfigure our political subjectivities. Some of the artists I've worked with in exile no longer talk about Turkey, simply because they don't live there and are not the subject of that repression on a daily basis anymore. They don't feel they have the right to speak on behalf of those who remain in Turkey and don't have the cultural capital and mobility to move to the West. At the same time, there are still other issues we have to deal with in our new environments. New urgencies. For example, Turkish and Kurdish video practitioners have been making films about the history of migration in Germany. They are creating new histories or re-narrating existing ones, disrupting the dominant guest worker narrative that was centered on male labor. They create alternative genealogies of migration grounded in women's voices, women's bodies, and their labor. So I think it is part of the kind of art that you create: it’s forcibly political, and there's always a way of interfering and disrupting new hierarchies and exclusions. What we see, then, is that artistic freedom is never absolute. The conditions of production – whether in Turkey or Germany – inevitably shape artistic practice. Exile might offer physical safety, but it also produces new hierarchies and forms of gatekeeping. There remains a pervasive expectation to perform a particular kind of »grateful migrant« identity, one that is tolerated only as long as it does not speak back to power. This tension, I think, reveals how deeply art and politics are entangled: artistic practice continues to be a site where the politics of visibility, voice and belonging are negotiated.

And on top of that, there is the emotional labor you constantly have to do for yourself and your well-being to be able to keep going. To sum up all the topics we've discussed, I have a final question: what advice would you give to artists, researchers, or activists seeking to address and confront repression or digital repression through their work? More generally, what advice would you give for sustaining oneself and continuing despite the challenges?

Oh, that's quite a hard question to answer. [pauses thoughtfully] There's this video that I love by Özlem Sarıyıldız, an artist based in Berlin. She made a video-collage called #hahaha as a response to a comment by a Turkish minister who said that Turkish women should not be laughing in public, that it shouldn't be part of the public image of women. Her response, as a kind of digital intervention, was to make a collage of women laughing in classical melodramas. She collected all these instances from Turkey's cinematic history of women laughing. It's a short video, but she lines the images up one after another in a super cut. The series of laughters is contagious — you're watching these iconic figures from iconic scenes, and it's such a beautiful artistic and political response, using the tools we have to just laugh back and spread that laughter. This is essential to how we sustain our lives. So the most important thing is to remember that we’re not alone. Activism can be exhausting both physically and emotionally. It’s a privilege to be able to take a step back, but sometimes we have to rest in order to continue and to safeguard the mental space for it. In the end, it is about community. If you stand on the unpopular side of challenging power and exposing injustice, you will inevitably have difficult conversations. But that is also where solidarity forms. That's why the struggle is intersectional, and the strength lies in showup for one another, focusing less on the self and more on the collective. That is how we endure, and how we keep conversation and laughter alive.

Thank you for sharing your insights with me today. Hearing about your experiences and the projects you're involved in has been both enlightening and inspiring, and I hope this conversation encourages others to explore how art can respond to repression and foster resilience.

Panel Discussion at HAU Hebbel am Ufer

Audio by HAU Hebbel am Ufer

During the panel »Art Challenging Digital Repression«, the German artist Aram Bartholl, the journalist and artist Jean Peters, and the film programmer and curator Şirin Fulya Erensoy discussed their experiences with digital repression, its various dimensions and the ways in which art can resist or subvert it. The discussion was moderated by Simon Teune.

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