Nagehan Uskan

Nagehan Uskan is a sociologist and documentary filmmaker who works across militant cinema, exile, and collective video practices. She engages with illegalized migration, counter-visual practices, and autonomous forms of film and video production developed under exile conditions. Her work explores how images can serve as forms of migrant and anti-border struggles and critical knowledge production. Her previous research focused on visual practices developed in response to border violence on the island of Lesvos. In this context, she has co-created films with migrant film collectives and developed co-research publications and projects, including Multilingual Dictionary: Living Together in a Refugee Camp, What is a Pushback? and I Escaped to my Future.

She has held postdoctoral researcher and lecturer positions at the University of Fribourg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Off University, among others. Her writings have been published in journals and platforms including Population, Space and Place, Jump Cut, and 1+1Express. Her works include the short film Sweet Home Adana (2024), which received the Johan van der Keuken New Talent Award.

This project examines contemporary film and video making in exile through the lens of autoreduction. It moves beyond historical accounts of exile, minor cinema, and accented cinema to focus on practices shaped by restricted or criminalized image-making, particularly in border zones governed by surveillance regimes and confidentiality laws. In these contexts, strategies such as collective anonymity, refusal of authorship, and the repurposing of hostile or operative images emerge as modes of tactical and formal invisibility.

The project conceptualizes autoreduction as an active withdrawal from growth-oriented regimes of visibility, in which invisibility functions as a condition of fugitive politics. The research explores how practices of invisibility and counter-framing generate autonomous visual infrastructures against surveillance, instrumental visibility, and epistemic capture.