Raised as a child of “guest workers” in Germany, Gürsoy Doğtaş has worked for many years as a guest curator for art exhibitions, festivals, and events. The term “guest,” which originated in the German Recruitment Agreements (from 1955), has evolved through this cultural appropriation and transitioned into a curatorial practice under different circumstances. Cultural institutions in Germany have missed several generations of people from immigrant backgrounds, whether in their programming, as audiences, or as staff. Working with them means acknowledging the pain while showing alternatives. He (co-)curated the exhibitions There is no there there at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2024), Annem işçi – Who Sews the Red Flags? at the Marta Herford Museum in Herford (2024), Gurbette Kalmak (Staying in foreignness) at the Taxispalais in Innsbruck (2023), and the symposium Public Art: The Right to Remember and the Reality of Cities (2021) in Nuremberg. Between 2020 and 2023, he conducted research as a post-doc at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and in 2022/23 he taught as a visiting professor at the Institute for Art in Context at University of the Arts Berlin.

Gürsoy Doğtaş’ research fellowship at Städelschule is generously made possible by Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur through the QuiS funding program.