Nazlı Dinçel’s 16mm films are entirely hand-made by themselves, from the beginning to the completion of each piece. They only use a laboratory to finalize copies of their work for public screenings. Their process is to film, and to use hand-processing techniques to achieve desired perfection/imperfection with their imagery. If text is used, they embed it on the film, frame-by-frame, by hand. They use physical techniques that flick off the emulsion; like hand scratching, typing, sewing or hammering letter punches or punching the text directly onto the image. 

Working with the camera original is an invitation to making a fault. Physically achieving failure and playfulness is a confirmation of this overarching theme in their work, as their process. 

Their films offer a language to an avant-garde history that re-evaluates what it means to create work on celluloid, as an immigrant to the United States, in the millennium. They relate the tedious acts of physically animating the text onto their imagery with the traditional female roles in their Turkish upbringing as intricate cooking or rug making. 

Because of the scale of a 16mm frame, the amount of scratching that goes on top of their images are often fragmented into words that create a visual rhythm similar to poetry. The minimalism of the language and the repetition of the text are similarly simple and precise as the language of fables. 

The tediousness of the making of their text is a form of meditation. Over-working a subject matter is a form of healing. The content is exhausted in the making of the films. The repetition of re-photographing, scratching, cutting, typing the text on the film systematically becomes a form of bodily memory due to the amount of time spent doing it. The constant repetition becomes a method for sensory deprivation, distancing them from their subject matter. Their desires for others, the painful, embarrassing, sexually charged childhood memories, obsessions and scarring aftermaths: they can only truly access these only if they are studying them as their subjects. 

Dinçel is interested in pornographic imagery, engaging with the human body and creating a conceptual equivalent of the nonbinary gaze. Their use of explicit imagery is not primarily intended to arouse the viewer. They are interested in using sex as a subversive force, a force that is capable of altering social structures or representations of gender binaries in society and in the art world. 

Aside the sexual subject matter, their work intends to provoke a visceral feeling and presence that would put their audience in a mode of self-intervention. Their pleasure as the filmmaker would translate to the viewer in the modes they offer in their films: the sense of touching, physically capturing the sound of their images and  the visual pleasures of perfections and imperfections of their process.

The work of the artist is to create a disruption for their viewer, to make work that moves beyond aesthetically pleasing images into a realm of pleasure that is self-aware of its own language.