Bird’s Eye View: A Screening and Talk on Colonialism and Infrastructure, curated by Sena Basoz
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From the expansion of imperial telegraph and wireless networks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the contemporary use of drones and satellites, imperial powers have long relied on airborne communication and surveillance infrastructures to assert control. The sky—once vast and open—has become a charged and contested space: an assemblage of aerial technologies, military optics, racial ideologies, and the labour that sustains them.
This aerial assemblage—comprising airplanes, wireless systems, and photography—was central to the British mandate system of the 1920s and continues to shape contemporary regimes of surveillance and violence today.
Bird’s Eye View brings together works by Jananne Al-Ani, Heba Y. Amin, Mircea Cantor, Harun Farocki, Christopher Stewart and Hakan Topal that explore the territorialization and weaponization of the air. Through poetic and critical engagements with aerial vision, these artists interrogate how landscapes are framed, surveilled, and targeted.
Following the screening, Professor Burçe Çelik, Dr. Sebastian James Rose and Sena Basoz will discuss five archival images on coloniality, communications, and the use of air power as a means of control.
This event is part of Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century, an AHRC-funded research project led by Prof. Burçe Çelik and Dr. Sebastian James Rose at Loughborough University, and artist Sena Basoz.
Sena Basoz was in residence at Delfina Foundation during our spring 2022 programme.
Screening Program
Harun Farocki
Serious Games IV: A Sun without Shadow (2010)
7’49’’
In A Sun without Shadow, Harun Farocki investigates how the U.S. military adapts video game technologies both to train soldiers for combat and to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after deployment. These computer simulations are generated from satellite imagery.
Farocki draws attention to the unsettling continuity between the images used to prepare for war and those used to process its psychological aftermath. The same visual language serves both to anticipate and to remember conflict—yet, in his words, “the program for commemorating traumatic experiences is somewhat cheaper.” Here, in the simulated world, nothing and no one casts a shadow.
Christopher Stewart
Swarm (2017)
2’8″
Shot during a series of international war game exercises in the Pacific and a response to the rhetoric of The Pacific Century being espoused by American politicians at the time, Swarm is a montage of the skyward component of these rehearsals. Swarm is a moving image work with a sound accompaniment about aerial rehearsal and how very slowly the sky becomes crowded with the technology of conflict, until a crescendo is reached and we are once more left with silence. Swarm is an aerial ballet but where beauty is replaced by the harbinger of destruction.
Jananne Al-Ani
Shadow Sites II (2011)
8’38’’
Shadow Sites ll is a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape that bears traces of natural and man made activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures. Seen from above the landscape appears abstracted, its buildings flattened and its inhabitants invisible to the human eye. Only when the sun is at its lowest do the features of the landscape, its archeological sites and settlements come to light. Such ‘shadow sites’ when seen from the air map the latent images held by the landscape’s surface. Much like a camera’s photographic plate, the landscape holds the potential to be exposed thereby revealing the memory of its past. In the case of the Middle East, which provides the context for Al-Ani’s film, images of the landscape, from William Holman Hunt’s 1854 Scapegoat to the media images of the 1991 Desert Storm campaign have depicted the region as uninhabited, barren and without sign of civilization.
Heba Y. Amin
As Birds Flying (2016)
6’50’’
In late 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork suspected of espionage due to an electronic device attached to its leg. “As Birds Flying” addresses conspiracies embedded in the political landscape that shape the present. It confronts the absurdity of the media narrative that has blurred fantasy with realty and turned a bird, that migrates from Israel to Egypt, into a symbol of state paranoia. The film juxtaposes drone footage of the “spy bird” with reconstructed audio from Adel Imam’s iconic film “Birds of Darkness” (1995) which critiques government corruption in Egypt through the opposing perspectives of secular and Islamist parliamentary candidates.
Camera: Amir Aloni, Heba Amin, Amir Balaban, Yuval Dax, OrangeHD
Audio: The Birds of Darkness – طيور الظلام
Hakan Topal
The Golden Cage (2022)
30′57″
part of The Golden Cage installation
The Golden Cage (2022) video is part of a media installation based on the northern bald ibis (a.k.a “kelaynak” in Turkish), the most endangered migratory bird in the Middle East. When Palmyra fell to ISIS, the kelaynak colony, which migrates from Northeast Africa to Birecik (a small town near the Turkish-Syrian border), faced total extinction. In March 2016, the Birecik Kelaynak Reproduction Center decided not to release the birds from the confinement cages to protect them—the center has been keeping a semi-wild population since the late 1970s. The Golden Cage refers to a set of confinements amidst the never-ending catastrophes in the region; it is a poetic examination of artifacts, ruins, water bodies, and organisms spread across a highly nationalized terrain. As the embodied symbol of the state, the cage is enacted through a text translated into multiple languages to create new associations about borders, migrations, entrapments, and untranslatability.
The Golden Cage explores the regimes of representation; to be precise—the question of representation of “mute[d]” bodies; the power and the limit of representation; who speaks for whom and how? When refugee bodies, non-human bodies, caged bodies, and gendered bodies need to be “represented,” specialists take the stage for them. State officials, media intellectuals, academics, social workers, human-right activists, environmentalists, and so on, all speak a specific and usually highly decorated language. Discourses of conservation, preservation, and humanitarianism spread and solidify in media outlets. With all its actors, the state asserts its power to determine beings’ fate, poisoning and decimating some and deciding who can live freely and who must be controlled. The state commits and annihilates.
This video was originally presented as part of an installation at Aga Khan Museum, Toronto; Mousonturm Frankfurt and DEPO Istanbul
Mircea Cantor
Aquila Non Capit Muscas (2018)
3’40’’
In this short, hypnotic film titled Aquila Non Capit Muscas, a golden eagle confronts a hovering drone in slow motion. The Latin title—“The Eagle Does Not Catch Flies”—evokes dignity, discernment, and restraint. On the other hand is a drone, an icon of technological victory. Cantor transforms this quiet aerial standoff into a potent allegory for the encounter between nature and technology, instinct and surveillance, power and its limits.
