Text Book For Knowledge of Life

Text Book for Knowledge of Life

Color Video, 6 min, 2011
Abuse Exibition, Sanatorium, İstanbul, 2011
If Istanbul, Shorts from Turkey, Istanbul, 2012
Berlin Film Festival, Shorts from Turkey selection, Berlin, 2012
Cannes Film Festival, Turkish Short Movies selection, Cannes, 2012
Swab, Barcelona, 2012


The video “The Text Book for Knowledge of Life” is a work focusing on the official history thought in the primary schools. The footage of the video is from a primary school in Izmir, taken through out the day. The voice over of the video is a collage text formed by the sentences taken from the 7th, 8th, 9th grade school books of Turkish Ministry of Education. Taken out from their context, the audience can observe the weirdness and uncleanness of these sentences while watching the displaced movements of the kids shot in a “peeping Tom” manner.

Extracts from the text book sentences: Oh people! Listen to me, I cannot address you from this position again. Young brains should be developed with the national education and protected from being filled with stupefying and imaginary excessiveness… In our opinion, every view should be respected. However, people who oppose should be reasonable. Otherwise, the truth will be expressed in a convenient way. But, perhaps, some heads will be chopped off. Our time is nothing but an economical period.

He got sick after this journey. One night, a heavenly light landed from the sky on a tree over there. Then the trunk of the tree got swollen, the heavenly light was on that swell for nine months and ten days. The Chinese light a fire around the stone to take it away; when it heated up, they poured vinegar on it. All the birds and animals in the homeland cried for the stone in their own language. Few hundred dogs were impatiently waiting on the meadow.










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