WELCOMED TO GERMANY?

Özlem Sarıyıldız’s exhibition entitled “Welcomed to Germany?” will be at Bilsart on June 14 – 24 in a collaboration with Tarabya Culture Academy.

‘Welcomed to Germany?‘ is a self-reflexive film based on the motivations and experiences of friends who relocated from Turkey to Berlin since the Gezi Revolt in 2013. Driven by urgency, the film constructs an archive of feelings regarding migration to write the close histories of the departed and the arrived countries through minor stories of the newcomers. The film searches for democratic modes of history writing where the narratives intertwine, overlap, and their borders become ambiguous, and it comes closer to our common stories: te fabula naratur.

Zahir emerges from ‘Welcomed to Germany?’. Before the interviews, Özlem asked the speakers to give her a series of selected footage they filmed with their cell phones during their migration processes. Zahir is allowed to use only this footage provided and words uttered by the speakers; no other inputs are allowed. Using this obstruction as a constitutive challenge to think through montage, the artist borrows and multiplies the shared experiences to re-contemplate hers.

ABOUT ÖZLEM SARIYILDIZ

Özlem Sarıyıldız is an award-winning visual artist, documentary filmmaker, and editor with twenty years of hands-on experience. She pursued Industrial Design, Media, and Cultural Studies at METU and worked as a research assistant at University McGill in Montréal under the Jeanne Sauvé scholarship. Currently, she is the artistic co-director of Hier&Jetzt:Connections-Berlin Artist Residency Program. Using primarily audio-visual materials and focussing on gender, displacement, and the commons, her work uncovers the mechanisms underlying power dynamics and aligns with the determined voices seeking to reshape the course of history. https://utopictures.com