Istanbul-Berlin Stipendium: Open Studio mit Serpil Polat

18:00-21:00: Open Studio with Serpil Polat
19:00-20:00: The scholarship holder Serpil Polat in conversation with the anthropologist Banu Karaca

Kunstquartier Bethanien, 1st floor Studio 139

Since January 15, 2025, the artist Serpil Polat has been living and working at Kunstquartier Bethanien as a fellow of the Berlin Senate and the nGbK. As part of the residency program, she is exploring spaces of memory in Berlin with the help of documentary photography. Polat will present the results of her work in an open studio event, moderated by social anthropologist and academic Banu Karaca.

In her artistic practice, Serpil Polat deals with themes such as identity, gender, ecology, urbanity and memory. She develops her own narrative visual language at the intersections of these areas. She uses photography to tell the stories of the places where she lives, making the different layers of reality visible.

Polat has been documenting abandoned and transformed places of remembrance in Turkey for many years. In Berlin, she focuses on the relationship between urban space and collective memory after the Second World War. With photographic works in places such as the Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital, abandoned airports and former military installations, she shows how spaces change over time and what role they play in social memory.

In the course of her stay, Polat developed a comparative perspective on Berlin's politics of remembrance and the state of places of remembrance in Turkey. In her open studio presentation, she will provide insights into this research and show photographic examples that document the multi-layered traces of memory in urban space.

Serpil Polat studied photography at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Kocaeli University. Her work has been published in various magazines and she has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. She was an active member of the NarPhotos collective from 2012 to 2020. Today she works in the Zin Collective on individual photo projects in which she deals with social, cultural and personal issues using the means of documentary photography.

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics and cultural politics, museums and feminist memory research. She has published on freedom of expression in art, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual education and restitution. She is the author of "The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany" (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of "Women Mobilizing Memory" (Columbia University Press, 2019). In 2011, she co-founded Siyah Bant, a research platform documenting censorship in the arts in Turkey. Banu was awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her project "Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge", which she leads at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her current research examines how art expropriated during episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic shaped the production of knowledge about (post-)Ottoman heritage and art historiography.

The scholarship from the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion is made possible as part of a cooperation between the Kunstverein neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin as well as the DEPO in Istanbul.