For Another Eye, Cologne-based artist Şirin Şimşek will lend insights into the production processes and ideas surrounding her current film project ṣaqra, an essayistic portrait of falconry in Abu Dhabi. Hunting with birds of prey is deeply embedded in the history and culture of the United Arab Emirates. Şimşek met and accompanied Ayesha Al Mansoori, one of the few female falconers in the UAE, and in doing so gained an understanding of the daily routines of a falconer and the strong bond between human and animal. Focused training only becomes possible when these two beings have established trust in one another; according to Al Mansoori, this teaches people to interact empathetically with each other and other living beings as well. With her daughter beside her, Ayesha—who advocates for making falconry more accessible and equal—represents a generational shift and societal change.

The documentary approach in Şimşek’s film is marked by a contemplative, poetic visual language. The raw material was primarily created between 2020 and 2022, across two trips where Şimşek was able to attend a falconry conference and speak with Dr. Margit Müller, director of the Abu Dhabi falconry hospital—the largest in the world—and with key figures from the international falconry scene. Edits from these interviews are incorporated into the film, interwoven with striking landscape shots and sequences of falcon training. Alongside contrary potentials and ambivalent tensions—tradition/progress, control/freedom—the film also highlights possible pathways to social transformation and the spiritual significance of falcons, which are understood in various ways, including as links to the invisible and the beyond. In their conversation, Şirin Şimşek and Martin Bartelmus will discuss various aspects and facets of the film. The conversation will be held in German.

Şirin Şimşek (*1983) lives and works in Cologne. Her artistic practice primarily moves within the media of film and photography and along the borders that separate them. At the core of her work are predominantly the human subject, its social, geographical, and political context, and questions of identity formation and cultural belonging. She studied communication design with a focus on photography at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf and media arts at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Together with Melike Kara, she co-directed the Agnes Maybach project space from 2015 to 2016. Her works have been shown at venues including Gold+Beton Cologne (2021); Goethe-Institut Ankara (2022); Walther König Bookstore, Cologne (2021); Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf (2019); Michael Horbach Foundation, Cologne (2019); artothek, Cologne (2017).

Martin Bartelmus is a postdoc in German literary, media, and cultural theory at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. After completing his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies, he worked for the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf and as a curator for the Natural History Museum of the Stiftung Schloss und Park Benrath. His research focuses on literary animal and plant studies, French theory, time-based media, and analogue and digital literacies.

Another Eye is funded by The Gingko Foundation.