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ICM Film Screening and Conversation

A screening of two short films followed by conversation with filmmaker PINAR ÖĞRENCİ and ESRA AKCAN (Cornell University). Moderated by IFTIKHAR DADI (Cornell University)

 

GURBET IS A HOME NOW (2020) Produced in collaboration with Esra Akcan and Heide Moldenhauer and based on Akcan’s book, Open Architecture.

AŞÍT (2022)

 

Gurbet is a Home Now (2020) was produced in collaboration with Esra Akcan and Heide Moldenhauer and based on Akcan’s book, Open Architecture.  The film centers around the personal experiences and solidarity amongst the women migrants and guest workers living in Kreuzberg. Heide Moldenhauer, one of the few female architects of the IBA project and her photographic archive from Landesarchive Berlin plays a central role in the reappraisal of a slice of Kreuzberg history that has remained in the shadows. 

*The term “Gurbet,” which does not have an exact English counterpart, comes from the Arabic root “ğrb” and means being away and apart from homeland. The name “Gurbet Is a Home Now” is inspired by Aras Ören’s poetry collection Gurbet Değil Artık (Not ‘Gurbet’ Anymore), the last part of his Berlin Trilogy (1980). “Gurbet is a home now” expresses the transformation of the “place” that, for the guest worker who came to Germany with plans to return to their homeland after a while, was at first a foreign land and gradually became a home.  The film won Special Jury Prize of Documentarist Film Festival in 2021.

 

Aşít ('The Avalanche') (2022) is a film 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.   The film is set iniÖğrenci’s father’s hometown, Müküs,  an untouched spot within a mountainous region in southern Van, on Turkey’s border with Iran, an area now home to an urban population of mainly Kurdish speaking communities.   Müküs is known as Bahçesaray for the Turkish, Moks for the Armenian and Müküs or Miksi for the Kurdish.

Aşît’ refers both to the threat of avalanche that disconnects Müküs from the rest of the world and to 'Meds Yegher’ (The Big Disaster or The Great Catastrophe) in 1915.

 

Biographies

Pınar Öğrenci is an artist and award-winning filmmaker based in Berlin. Displacement, migration, survival, and resistance are cornerstones of Pınar Öğrenci’s films and installations. Driving her works are difficult, everyday struggles: the stories she hears, observes, experiences, collects, and documents from different geographies. In earlier works, Öğrenci followed the rarely-spoken stories of migrating communities around the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and in Berlin. 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. 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 forced migration.  Her works have been exhibited widely at museums, art institutions, and festivals, including documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel, Berlinische Galerie (2023), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), Survival Kit (2019), Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018), Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome ( 2016), 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.  

 

Esra Akcan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture and board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities. Akcan's research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia, and Northeast Africa and offers new ways to understand architecture's role in global, social, and environmental justice. She has written extensively on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history. She is the author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion/Chicago University Press, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan); Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (Birkhäuser/De Gruyter Academic Press, 2018); Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (CCA, 2022), and co-editor of Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (Routledge, 2023, with Iftikhar Dadi) Her book Architecture and Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflicts and Disasters is upcoming from Duke University Press in 2025.

 

Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor in History of Art and resident director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities.  He teaches and researches modern and contemporary art from a global and transnational perspective, with emphasis on questions of methodology and intellectual history. His writings have focused on modernism and contemporary art of South and West Asia and their diasporas. Another research interest examines the film, media, and popular cultures of South Asia, seeking to understand how emergent publics forge new avenues for civic participation. Publications include Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (University of Washington Press, 2022), a pioneering scholarly examination of mid-century cinema from Lahore; and Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), which has been widely reviewed in academic and art journals and received the 2010 Book Prize from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Informed by postcolonial theory and globalization studies, the work traces the emergence of modernism by selected artists from South Asia over the course of the twentieth century. More broadly, it offers a way of writing histories of nonwestern modern art by situating modernism as transnational rather than located primarily within a national art history. Other publications include the edited volumes: The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (2022); Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015); Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Pakistan, Turkey and their European Diasporas (co-edited with Esra Akcan, 2023); the co-edited catalog Lines of Control (2012); and the co-edited reader Unpacking Europe(2001). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, edited volumes, and online platforms. He has received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

 

 

 

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