TikTok's Emek Cinema Exhibition focuses on the question "Does the spectacle-surveillance society also produce possibilities that can be used against itself?" and centers on the reflection of the relationship between labor and body in cinema by asking whether it is opened to new productions by shooting in different venues and multiplying with challenges.
The producers of TikTok cinema are turning workplaces, streets, and even fields into plateaus. They transform spaces by using the production line as a podium while creating shovels, crates, and pipes with shooting tools.
Istanbul Gelisim University (IGU) Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) Department of Communication and Design, who has studied in the field of "Digital Culture and Its Reflections on Art". Asst. Prof. Dr. Melis Boyacı states that this situation offers us the chance to follow the examples of the use of a social media platform in the field of communication with an avant-garde but as an organic rebellion, and to discuss and even question the relationship between demonstration and media with a new perspective.
Also, Asst. Prof. Dr. Melis Boyacı expresses her thoughts on this subject with the following sentences:
“Today's advanced capitalist society, known as the society of desire, constantly recreates itself by using the consumer culture and the desire to establish the self that lies at the basis of human existence. It uses the urge to exist by consuming it to nurture it and keep people in this system. On the other hand, he keeps them under constant surveillance. This continuous consumption and surveillance are the wheels of the system that feed each other. Who we are is determined by the objects we consume, the latest mobile phone we buy, and the places we go. To confirm our existence, there is a system that constantly encourages us to share them on social media and to reveal ourselves, in a way. A spectacle society has been built. There is a constant show of how rich, how happy, how beautiful you are from these social media platforms. While these social media environments feed this system, some of them automatically reveal the channels that will break this game of the system. Thus, these social media platforms, which have become public spaces, contain the possibilities of opening spaces that criticize the system.”
The social media platform called TikTok can be given as an example of these channels that feed the system but also create cracks in the system. "TikTok's Labor Exhibition", which is currently on display at the "Counter Art" works in Beyoğlu, brings the audience together with a selection of videos on TikTok that make visible the labor power made invisible by the system.
