'Paradise' deals with the emotional language of the images of female Kurdish martyrs and freedom fighters. The stressful, overburdening pictorial seance displays the fine line between transfiguring mythology and resistant emancipation. In 1996 at 23 years of age, Zeynep Kınacı (codename: Zilan) straps explosives around her stomach disguised as a pregnant women in the Tunceli (Dersim) region and blows herself and seven Turkish soldiers to death, while the young British woman Anna Campbell dies in 2018 for the freedom of Kurdistan in Afrin and becomes the longed-for star who also finds fans in Europe. The martyr's death is beyond our experience, what we are left with is a Before and an After. This context unfolds in Paradise: on five screens, the varied processes of a cross-genre deification are depicted — processes that can only take place through viewing. The video installation was premiered at the media art festival "Digifem" at Kampnagel in Hamburg.

Credits
Acting: Janosa Mike
Animation: Wassili Franko
Videomapping & effects: Kuno Seltmann
Dramaturgical consulting: Theresa George
Sound mixing: Kris @linear m/s

Sources
Video: Chapter 1: location Gare du Nord, Paris; Chapter 2: archive of the Yezidische Forum e.V. Oldenburg; Chapter 3: found footage (youtube, whatsapp, instagram)
Sound: Chapters 1, 3: original sound; Chapter 2: excerpt from Leyla Yenirce, 'Ava', 2019 (Xquisite Releases)