#143: Pınar Öğrenci

In her often poetic films and installations, Pınar Öğrenci deals with themes at the interface of social, political and historical issues, always adopting a decolonial and feminist perspective. One focus of her artistic practice is the examination of migration, forced displacement, state violence and strategies of survival and resistance. From her first video work ‘Awaiting for the sense of life’ (2013) to her film Aşît -The Avalanche produced for documenta fifteen (2022), theme of the game often appears on her film and video works. By carefully negotiating the purpose of the game between pleasure, leisure and the political, she explores the potential of ‘play’ to elicit experiences that expand our capacity to reimagine the contradictions suppressed in everyday discourse, the paradoxes of the world around us, and our relationship to the universe. Instead of winning and competition, she sees the game as a symbolic experiment in (co)existence and survival.

As the first of three collaborative events, Videoart at Midnight and the Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art invite Pınar Öğrenci to show her previous and current works on the theme of ‘play’ and her latest documentary film:

‘Awaiting the onset of the sense of life’*, 2013, 3:20 min
The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms… We connect with other beings only and only through our body.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.

Pınar Öğrenci’s earlier video work ‘Awaiting the onset of the sense of life’ shows artist performing in the bathroom. Playful positions of her body makes the electricity and the space visible, while activating its components at the same time. Öğrenci explores the use of electricity and sensor technology in private space, questions their relationship to body and space. Her jammed body is reflecting artist’s state of mind between darkness and light, during her mourning period after her father’s death when she produced her first art works. 

*“Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a ‘refill’), but a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of the ‘sense of life’. 8 December” Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary“

Erika and the Night, 2014, 13:00 min
Öğrenci stays in Erica Schlik’s house in Munich. 84 years old Erika soliloquizes and refreshes her memory at nights. Öğrenci spontaneously decides to follow her with her camera. 

Hotel Miks, 2023, 17:00 min
Avalanches are a regular and deadly occurrence in Kurdish town Miks (old Armenian town called Moks in Armenian), which roads used to be blocked by snow for 9 months of the year. Cut off from the rest of the world during these months, playing chess in the coffees is a daily ritual for Kurdish people of Miks to survive under the pressure of the state. Without having any identity, chess also becomes a symbol of Armenian community which was the main population of the town before the Armenian Genocide in 1915. The hotel is a compelling metaphor for authoritarian states like Turkey; although having some alluring amenities, it is never intended to become a home for opponents, non Muslim and non Turkish communities.
Hotel Miks includes video materials that has been realized in the framework of documenta fifteen and supported by Protocinema.

Un Peso, 2018, 5:00 min
“Un Peso” is the story of children who dive in the sea with an aim to find coins thrown away by the tourists waiting for boats in the city of Acapulco, Mexico. Acapulco, was fashionable city frequented by Hollywood stars and wealthy Americans in the 1950s and 60s. Having lost its former glory, the city is regarded together with Guerrera region’s drug cartels, news of violance, stories of youth and women have been lost or killed since long time.  They had migrated from Costa Chica, across the border between Guerrero and Oxa, to live on coins which they collect from the sea in the erstwhile famous Acapulco. Children keep coins inside of their mouths during swimming. The innocent image of children floating in the water, almost like dancing, seems to cover up for the widespread violence and economic inequality in the city, but it also reveals it. 

Öğrenci recorded the diving children encountered by chance in Acapulco during her stay in Mexico in 2015 for the De Las Fronteras Biennial.

Glück auf in Deutschland, 2024, 44:00 min
Glück auf is a greeting used in the Ruhr region, the old center of German coal mining, to wish luck to the miners, ensuring they return from the pit profitably and safely. Pınar Öğrenci montages black-and-white archival photographs introduces viewers to the industry and life in the postwar Ruhr and applies the wish of ‘good luck’ of miners to today’s migrant communities under pressure. Using photographs taken in the region between 1950 and 1987, Pınar Öğrenci explores the politics of the body and architecture in the mining industry and transformation of mining buildings, the lack of representation of migrant workers, and racist practices in the health and insurance system in the Ruhr area. Her arrangement of images on film points up that the much-vaunted miners’ traditions are a construct, a symbolic idealization designed to tell the history of the wastage of bodies and lives in coal mining as a story of heroism rather than exploitation. And one in which men are the heroes, while the women—as Öğrenci’s film has made us see—labored without pay to produce the basis for their partners’ breadwinning toil. The artist, who studied architecture, taking us to collieries and steel mills to compose a cogent visualization of a politics of bodies in the Ruhr region.

Pınar Öğrenci was born 1973 in Van, Turkey and currently lives and works in Berlin. She was awarded by Villa Romana Preis 2022 and nominated for Böttcher Strasse Kunst Prise 2022 in Bremen. Öğrenci’s works has been exhibited nationally and internationally at group exhibitions including documenta fifteen, Kassel, MAXXI Museum, Rome, 12th Gwangju Biennial, 6th Athens Biennial, the Istanbul off-site project of Sharjah Biennial13, Kunsthalle Bremen, SALT Galata, İstanbul and many others. She had solo exhibitions at Frac Bretagne Rennes, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Hundertwasser Museum Kunst Haus Wien, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and Depo İstanbul. Her works recently included exhibitions at Disobobedience Archive, Venice Biennial, Biennale Matter of Art Prag, Fraq Bretagne in Rennes and Harward Museum in Massachusetts in 2024.
Selected screenings: Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Schirn, Frankfurt, Brücke Museum Berlin, Protocinema, New York, Kunst Meran, Merano, İstanbul Modern, Architecture Centre Museum Quarter, Vienna and Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin.

pic: Glückauf in Deutschland, 2024 (film still) © Pınar Öğrenci, courtesy of the artist and Ruhr Museum Photography Archive @ruhrmuseum commisioned by Kunst Museum Bochum and supported by #gwaertlerstiftung #kunstmuseumbochum

A co-operation of Videoart at Midnight and Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art.