Panel Talk: Are We Really the „New Wave“: Immigration Between Berlin and Istanbul | THE PATH

Panel Talk with Ingo Arend (moderator), Banu Karaca, Verena Niepe, Persefoni Myrtsou

Based on the recent immigration of cultural workers and queer people from Turkey to Berlin, in this panel talk, we want to reflect on the reasons and perspectives of this increasingly frequent change of location. In addition, we will focus on the connection between Berlin and Istanbul, which continues to have an effect even after this change in the cultural policy, and whose status and perspectives we want to explore. We also want to discuss the encounter of the different generations of immigrants from Turkey.

We are looking forward to an inspiring conversation. Don't miss it!

// Event Start 19:00 // Join the discussion on zoom here

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Ingo Arend, Politologe und Historiker, arbeitet als Kulturjournalist und Essayist für Bildende Kunst, Literatur und Politisches Feuilleton in Berlin. Von 1996 bis 2010 war er Kulturredakteur des "freitag". Von 2007 bis 2009 sein Redaktionsleiter. Redakteursstationen bei taz und Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Seither Autor und Kritiker. Mitglied des Präsidiums der neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (nGbK). Spezialgebiet: Global Art, Kunst und Politik, Kunst und Geschichte, Kunst und Kultur der Türkei.

Banu Karaca is an anthropologist and the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (2021). She is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey. Currently a EUME Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, Banu continues her research on how looted and dispossessed art has shaped the legal and scholarly knowledge production on art in Turkey and the wider European context.

As a researcher, Verena Niepel works on understanding relationships between contemporary artists from Turkey, curators and actors in cultural policies in Berlin. After living and working as a journalist, researcher and painter in Berlin and Istanbul, Verena decided to answer those questions in a dissertation project at Newcastle University (UK) that she started in 2019.

Persefoni Myrtsou is a visual & performance artist, an anthropologist, a mother, and a feminist, currently occupied with a PhD project exploring the migration motives and socioartistic practices of artists who work in and between Istanbul, Athens and Berlin. In both her academic and artistic practice, Persefoni is working on denationalizing/decolonizing dominant discourses through focusing on emic perspectives and through the artistic use of tools such as subversion, cultural appropriation and humour. Recently, she became engaged with peace & care activism in the Greece-Turkey context. She lives and works (mostly) in Istanbul.

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THE PATH: A Participatory Public Art Project

What do we experience in the metropoles of today´s world and what do the metropoles experience? Amidst all the flux of migration, gentrification and rapid urban change is the metropole able to contain us and vice versa? What if the paths we take every day start from nowhere and lead nowhere? Is it a togetherness that we experience or is it an ´otherness´ with a potential? What are the results, alternatives, solutions and what can art´s role be in this process?

THE PATH is a multidisciplinary art project that problematizes the relationship between the metropole and the individual from a queer, feminist point of view. Inspired by the pedestrian bridges over the highways in İstanbul, the participatory public installation at Tempelhofer Feld by Umut Azad Akkel invites the participators to an experience simulating the complex characteristic of our co-existence with/within/despite the metropole. Similarly, the events designed and planned around the conceptual basis of the installation, that will take place at Tempelhofer Feld and at Oyoun will create an experiential and intellectual hub for analyzing our complex being within/with/despite the metropole. The overall perspective of the series of events will be approaching the theme from multiple views and raising critical questions about all its complexity. The focus will be Berlin and Istanbul as two interrelated metropoles and the flux of migration between the two with its implications and possible historical as well as recent meanings.

See the full programme of THE PATH here

The Path project was produced by Oyoun in collaboration with Umut Azad Akkel as artistic director and Şehnaz Layıkel as lead curator. It was funded by the Lotto Stiftung and UdK KKWV.