apart’s third annual Short Film, Video and Photography Symposium, one of the finest and idiosyncratic events of its kind, featured a video screening session titled Invisible Load, which took shape around the theme of “authority” this year. The program consisted of 11 selected films, screened in Kadıköy, İstanbul, on October 25, 2025. For me, curating this selection was both a pleasure and a privilege. The following is a list of the works screened, in the order they were shown:
Early Stages of Carrying the Boulder – Ela Kazdal (United Kingdom, 20’ 22”)
Towards White – Letiția Popa (Romania & Netherlands, 6’ 11”)
Odunları Getirdiler Zanna Abasova (Türkiye, 3’ 13”)
Hand of God, Ghosts of Empire – Nathaniel Sullivan (United States of America, 11’ 30”)
No Ball Games – Sam Brewster (United Kingdom, 2’ 35”)
The Sight is a Wound – Parham Ghalamdar (United Kingdom, 6’ 49”)
Tacet – Nonoka Matsuo & Tomi Katz (Japan, 10’ 44”)
The Lie of the Land – Jacqueline Heeley & Philippe Faujas (Ireland, 10’ 08”)
Transmission – David Anthony Sant (Australia, 2’ 44”)
Pouring Water on Troubled Oil – Nariman Massoumi (United Kingdom, 25’ 56”)
Satisfied – Hazal Naz Kılınç (Türkiye, 5’ 47”)
The selection was made based on a limited time slot, and unfortunately, several other great works were submitted couldn’t be included this time. Together with Tahir Ün, the co-curator of Invisible Load, our main effort was to be fair to everyone and to reach as many films as possible within our limits (to the extent that fairness is humanly possible).
In line with the pretentious and overly formal side of academia, I somehow ended up writing a really, really informative text for the video screening call, and I have no idea why (link here ). Anyway, I’m probably not going to be involved in such a cliché way again, but we’d like to share some of the works here as permitted. Due to rights and screening restrictions, a few couldn’t be included (and some are still completing their festival or premiere runs). I hope that as you watch this selection, you’ll find the works as striking and thought-provoking as we did while curating them. The films and videos —each unique in form, structure, and narrative— are now entrusted to your emotions and perception.
We will be releasing these films and videos in parts, and the first part features Nathaniel Sullivan’s Hand of God, Ghosts Empire. Here is the (what a) summary (that captures precisely what we seek in Invisible Load) of the work: “The Hand of God, the loss, the feeling of loss. The sun never sets. The last colonial war. The last gasp. Leviathan. A severed hand, for the first colony. The invisible hand of the free market. We will devour ourselves, and you. The idea of something is more dangerous than the thing itself, the hand has run amok. The goal of the century was preceded by the hand of God by about four minutes. Grace built on a cheat. Two-nil. The Hand of God, a slight of hand. The invisible hand, a cheat. Hand of God, Ghosts of Empire is a video collage that uses the hand as a visual symbol to thread together several nationalistic and economic narratives—the last gasp of an empire, the invisible hand of the mythical free market, and an insatiable desire for spectacle and consumption.”
Tuncer Mert Aydın
