Köken Ergun

Gropius Bau | Berlin, Germany

SAHA provides support for Köken Ergun’s project China,Beijing,I love You! in Martin Gropius Bau, 6 April – 13 August 2023. Curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with Michelangelo Corsaro, the exhibition is titled Indigo Waves and Other Stories: Re-navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora. Ergun participates in the exhibition with a new, discursive work around the Indian Ocean as a sequel to his work about China’s global expansion by way of its Belt and Road Initiative. 

“Invest in Indonesia / make sure that you don’t miss it!” goes the refrain of a song featured in Köken Ergun’s China, Beijing, I Love You! (2023). The newly-commissioned film is an animation that charts with documentary rigour the network of sea routes known as the Maritime Silk Road, which services the extractive economies of rare earths between Indonesia, China and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Essential to the production of EV batteries, mobile phones and missile technology, in the film Nickel and Cobalt are metals-turned-characters who face extraction and exile through Afrasian networks of profit and consumption. While a group of suited-up men tout investment as the way forward to national prosperity, the grievances of Nickel are echoed by the political unrest of workers in processing plants, who protest for better working conditions, environmental protection and health safeguards. Along with the plea of Nickel to be returned to the ground where she belongs, ecological depletion and health hazard are reminders that different forms of planetary cohesion are needed in the Indian Ocean world.

Köken Ergun (1976, Istanbul) is an artist working in film and installation. His films often deal with communities that are not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Ergun usually spends long time with his subjects before he starts filming and engages in a long research period for his projects. He also collaborates with ethnographers, historians and sociologists for publications and lecture series as extensions to his artistic practice ERGUN studied acting at Istanbul University, completed his postgraduate degree in ancient Greek literature at King’s College London, and earned an MA in art history at the Bilgi University, Istanbul. After working with American theater director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with video and film. His video installations have been exhibited at Kathmandu Triennale 2077; Jakarta Biennial: ESOK; Documenta 14; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; SALT, Istanbul; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; and Casino Luxembourg. Ergun’s films have received the Tiger Award for Short Film at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the Special Mention Prize at the 2013 Berlinale.

About Martin Gropius Bau

The Gropius Bau is one of Europe's most important exhibition venues and since 2001 part of the Berliner Festspiele, a division of the Kulterveranstaltulgen des Bundes in Berlin GmbH. With its acclaimed contemporary, cultural-historical and archaeological exhibitions, the Gropius Bau has consistently opened up new realms of experience and established its international reputation. Given the eventful history being located right next to the Berlin Wall and the diverse institutions that have been active in the building over the years, the listed Gropius Bau structures itself as an open framework for dealing with a wide variety of artistic ways of thinking and their social implications.