"Wedding takes its name from the predominantly Turkish neighborhood in Berlin where most of the footage of the film has been recorded. During the course of six months in 2006-2007, I have recorded the wedding ceremonies of Turkish and Kurdish immigrants in Berlin, which culminated in a large video archive. From this archive I have created a three-channel video piece.. But the experiences I have gathered during the course of this project and the archive later led me to include this subject in my current PhD thesis, on cultural performances, and crowd theory."
--Köken Ergun
"In his last piece, a three-channel video installation, Köken Ergun points his camera at various Turkish wedding ceremonies and marital rituals performed in Berlin, depicting them as mirrors of cultural production.
Shot by shot--starting from the moments of preparation at coiffeur salons and ending at the jewelry queues--he creates a fictive documentation of the entire process, exploring what it is that makes these weddings “Turkish”. In his practice, Ergun does not only decode culturally specific perceptions of beauty, happiness, love and family inside the Turkish community, but also reconstructs how hybrid identities have been performed through the diverse codes and forms of the ceremonies and rituals.
Over a period of eight months Ergun shot more than forty wedding ceremonies, then edited and re-edited his work until a fictionalized “Turkish wedding in Berlin” is created out of the ones that have actually taken place. What strikes the audience is the tension between the gaze of the women--who look into the camera with the insecurity of becoming beautiful or not--and the fingers of the men who count the money and keep the jewelry--with the frustration of being strong or not.
When dancing, everyone is so beautiful.
--Adnan Yildiz, 2008
Available for rental only as 3 channel video for exhibitions or split screen version for single screenings.