Pınar Öğrenci

documenta 15 | Kassel, Germany

SAHA provides support for Pınar Öğrenci’s new project "Aşit (2022)"within the scope of documenta fifteen.

Curated by ruangrupa, an art collective from Jakarta, documenta 15 is titled lumbung. While lumbung means “rice barn”, it is also the name of a value method used in rural areas of Indonesia. It refers to a system based on fair sharing, where crops are collectively produced and stored as a common resource for the future. Within the context of Documenta 15, lumbung describes a gathering of ideas, stories, human power and other shareable resources. Pınar Öğrenci’s work, exhibited at the Hessisches Landesmuseum, can be visited between 18 June - 25 September 2022.

Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van) is the founder of MARSistanbul, an art initiative launched in 2010. Öğrenci used to work as guest lecturer at HFK, University of Arts Bremen and Leuphana University in Luneburg and currently works at Master Studies of Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee Raum Strategies. Pınar Öğrenci 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, political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of migration such as war, state violence, collective movements, as well as industrial and urban development projects. While transforming the visual and audio documents she archives by detaching them from their contexts, she makes relational connections between different cultures, spaces, and time periods as well as architecture, literature, and history. Öğrenci lives in Berlin. 

About documenta

documenta was founded by artist, curator and teacher Arnold Bode in 1955, and was an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism after World War II. Gathering outstanding artists of modern and contemporary art from day one, documenta has been creating a space for exhibitions that question and propose. The exhibition takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. Every documenta is limited to 100 days of exhibition, which is why it is often referred to as the “museum of 100 days” within the art world.