22.11.2022, Dienstag 19:00 Uhr
University public screening by Pınar Öğrenci and artist talk
Ort:
- Hörsaal der HFBK Hamburg
University public screening and artist talk, moderated by Prof Tobias Zielony
Aşît, film by Pınar Öğrenci (2022)
For her new film, commissioned by documenta fifteen, Öğrenci returns to her father's hometown, Müküs an untouched spot within a mountainous region in southern Van. On Turkey’s border with Iran, this former capital of the Urartian civilization and the Armenian Vaspuragan dynasty has a dense urban population of mainly Kurdish speaking communities today. Müküs is known as Bahçesaray for the Turkish, Moks for the Armenian and Müküs or Miksi for the Kurdish. 'Aşît' is inspired by Stefan Zweig’s final novella The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941) - a psychological thriller in which chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism. Meaning avalanche and disaster in Kurdish, 'Aşît' refers both to the threat of avalanche that disconnects Müküs from the rest of the world and to ‘Meds Yeghern’ (The Big Disaster) in 1915. Öğrenci turns towards Hayrik Muradian, an Armenian musician who had to escape Van in 1918 to hear the impressive landscape of Müküs. She traces everyday survival strategies and cultural traces of Müküs people under the pressure of state and religion with the songs Muradian collected from his homeland.
Biography by Pınar Öğrenci
Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Öğrenci used to work as guest lecturer at Master Studies of Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee Raum Strategies. She has a background in architecture, which informs her poetic and experiential video-based work and installations that accumulate traces of ‘material culture’ related to forced displacement across geographies. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social, political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of migration such as war, state violence, collective movements, as well as industrial and urban development projects. She has been nominated for Böttcherstrasse Kunst Prize 2022 in Bremen. Her first documentary film ‘Gurbet is a home now’ won Special Jury Prize of Documentarist Film Festival and selected for National Documentary Film Competition by Istanbul Film Festival in 2021. Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel, 3rd Art Encounters Biennial (2019), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018); the Istanbul off-site project for Sharjah Biennial13 (2017); MAXXI Museum, Rome, 2015-6; SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-6). Her first solo exhibition abroad was realized at Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna, “A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us” in 2017.