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6:30 PM-8:30 PM

Art und Weise: It All Started With a Song

Artist Talk/Performance|An Experimental Artist Talk with Pınar Öğrenci

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Big Day, Collage, 2025 Courtesy Pınar Öğrenci

Big Day, Collage, 2025 "Big Day," 2025. Courtesy Pınar Öğrenci

A gentle breeze passed over us
From the split of the valley
Oh breeze, for love's sake
Take me home
 
Mansour El Rahbani


It all started with a song is the audio-visual representation of Pınar Öğrenci's autobiography intertwined with collective stories. Born in Wan, Turkey, the artist's voice was assimilated by the classical Turkish songs she learned in choirs during her childhood. While her adolescent years were shaped by the 1980 military coup, her voice became strong and politicized with songs and poems of revolution and prohibited books of the time. The following years, the artist tried to create her own language of rebellion, blended with her efforts to preserve her Kurdish roots. At times, the foundation of the relationship with language and sometimes an escape from the weight of it - songs were always an invitation to the impossibility of translation. 

Invited by Zach B. Feldman to the Goethe-Institut New York, Öğrenci has created an experimental artist talk where she tells the stories of her transitional and transformative years in Wan and the impact they had on her video work in a form of a long song of longing and resistance. This poetic narrative transcends borders, expressing a longing for Anatolia's multilingual essence prior to the First World War, and the ethos of coexistence.

Artist

Pinar Öğrenci

Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives 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 across geographies.Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social and political research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of migration. Öğrenci engages with place, site and architecture as the materialisation of violence. Her practice serves as a response to a collective past often left in silence, urging her audience to imagine a future built on justice, equality, and collective healing. By delving into local archives, she initiates a process of collaborative memory, engaging communities in questioning what has been remembered, erased, or overlooked. Her works invites us to witness the rich, multifaceted layers of survival, resistance, resilience. Öğrenci is nominated to Böttcher Strasse Kunst Prize 2022 in Bremen and won Villa Romana Prize for 2023. Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including at Venice Biennial (Disobedience Archive, 2024), Harward Museum (2024), MK&G Hamburg (2024), documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), Berlinische Galerie (2023), Frac Bretain, Rennes (2024), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), Kunst Haus Wien - Hundertwasser Museum (2017), the Istanbul off-site project for Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2015-6) and SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-6). Her first solo exhibition was realized at Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna in 2017. She founded art initiative MARSistanbul which was active between 2010-2018.

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