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 told stories of migrating communities around the Mediterranean and the Aegean. After migrating to Germany in 2018, she produced films and video works mainly with archival materials related to ‘guest workers’, refugees and exiles living in Germany, in collaboration with scholars from different backgrounds, musicians and writers. Öğrenci will be giving a lecture on unrepresented stories of migrant communities, from home to school, from factory to the street. She will be discussing institutional and daily racist practices from urban policies to health and insurance sectors in Germany through her latest films Gurbet is a home now (2020), Inventory 2021, Good luck in Germany (2024) and Kein Change (2024).

Pınar Öğrenci was born in 1973 in Van, Turkey, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings at the intersection of social, political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human stories of forced migration. She has a background in architecture, which informs her video-based work and installations that accumulate traces of ‘material culture’ related to forced displacement. She was awarded the Villa Romana-Prize in 2022 and was nominated in the same year for the Prize of Böttcherstraße, Bremen. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, such as the 60th Venice Biennial (2024), documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018) and the Istanbul off-site project of Sharjah Biennial13 (2017). She has had solo exhibitions at MK&G Hamburg (2024/25), Frac Bretagne, Rennes (2024), Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2023), Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2018), Kunst Haus Wien. Museum Hundertwasser (2017) and Depo İstanbul (2017).

The lecture by Pınar Öğrenci is part of Dr. Gürsoy Doğtaş’ QuiS Research Fellowship at the Städelschule throughout the winter semester 2024/25 and summer semester 2025, which explores the history of migrant labor in Germany and the cultural, activist and artistic practices associated with it. The program of the QuiS Research Fellowship is made possible by the generous support of the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture.