Cana Bilir-Meier
Bavaria-UK Live Art Residency
Cana Bilir-Meier
Working across film, installation, drawing, sound and performance, Bilir-Meier's practice explores memory, migration, collective learning, and cultural education. Her work critically engages with questions of representation, social participation, and institutional structures, often bringing together archival material, personal histories, and collective forms of knowledge.
Bilir-Meier studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Sabancı University in Istanbul. Her work has been presented internationally at venues and festivals including the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Kunsthalle Wien, SAVVY Contemporary, Maxim Gorki Theater, and documenta 14 Public Programs. Alongside her artistic practice, she has developed an extensive teaching and educational practice and served as Visiting Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
During my residency with LADA and the Goethe-Institut London, I will learn more about translation, collective singing, community choirs and the relationship between breath, voice, sound and meaning. The residency in London will offer an opportunity to reflect on and further develop my position as an artist, educator, and cultural worker while drawing inspiration from a new context. I hope to do this in dialogue with the community at LADA and the wider local arts, educational, social and political scene. As an educator, I understand art as a collective way of thinking, a space where we can ask what concerns other artists, what possibilities exist for understanding art as a political, participatory, and social practice, and how we learn and unlearn from one another. One strand of my research will focus on the texts of the writer Semra Ertan. Together with my mother, we published her poems in Germany. An English translation would bring her writings to a broader audience. I want to explore different forms of translating her texts not only from one language into another, but through voice, sound and collective practices. What happens to rhythm, sound, emotion and meaning as a poem moves between languages, voices and contexts? I am particularly interested in the ritual of singing together as a form of community building. In my recent short film “Ein neues Wort / A New Word”, I follow a local choir of first-generation "guest workers" from Turkey exploring collective memory, belonging, and shared voices. Extending this work, I co-organised an evening of performances by community choirs at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in June 2026. Alongside this, I will work with LADA’s Study Room and archive, exploring how archival materials can be read, translated, voiced and brought into conversation with the present. Through encounters, listening, breathing, singing and collective translation, the residency becomes a space to think about language, memory, migration and forms of shared knowledge. This research can form the foundation for new film and installation works that investigate how collective imagination can help us narrate and perhaps shape possible futures.
