“Art und Weise: It All Started With a Song”
An artist Talk/performance with Pinar Öğrenci

When: April 10, 2025, 6:30pm-8:30-m
Where: Goethe-Institut New York, 30 Irving Place, New York NY 10003
Language: English
Admission: Free
Registration: Required. Register here.
Info: Goethe-Institut website here ; or write to program-newyork@goethe.de

“It All Started with a Song” is the audio-visual representation of Kurdish artist Pınar Öğrenci’s autobiography intertwined with collective stories. Born in Wan, Turkey, Öğrenci as a child learned classical Turkish songs in choirs. 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. In the following years, she created her own language of rebellion, blended with her efforts to preserve her Kurdish roots.

In this experimental artist talk, Öğrenci will tell 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 for the ethos of coexistence.

Pınar Öğrenci (born in 1973 in Wan) currently lives in Berlin. She creates 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 materialization 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 the art initiative MARSistanbul, which was active between 2010 and 2018.