Cemetery of the Nameless

EXHIBITION OPENING
Thursday, October 15
6-8 PM

EXHIBITION VIEWING HOURS (October 20-25)
Tuesday, October 20, 12-6 PM
Wednesday, October 21, 12-6 PM
Thursday, October 22, 12-8 PM
Friday, October 23, 12-8 PM
Saturday, October 24, 12-4 PM
Sunday, October 25, 12-4 PM

For the presentation at the Goethe-Institut Boston, artist Pınar Öğrenci adapts her "Cemetery of the Nameless" solo exhibition to the ornate nineteenth-century interior of the institute’s Back Bay Brownstone to create a site-specific installation that connects the landscape of the Turkish-Iranian border to Europe’s migration regime. Öğrenci excavates stories of disappearance—of both waters and people—as part of a return to her hometown and an ongoing artistic investigation she initiated in 2021.
 
Climate change has dramatically lowered Lake Van’s water level, exposing extraordinary structures that lay hidden in the lake’s depths: microbialites, bizarre sedimentary formations resembling corals and stalagmites. These mineral deposits are the result of a millennia-lasting accumulation of calcium, carbonate, phosphate and magnesium—the very elements that human bones are made of—and take on a central role in Öğrenci’s haunting allegory. 
 
The exhibition takes its name from cemeteries in the region where the many buried refugees and Kurds remain nameless outside of the forensic registry numbers on their tombstones. Öğrenci suggests an unsettling parallel between the loss of water and the loss of people’s lives:  the lake serves as a mass grave, and these ghostly formations may well be monuments to the countless victims who perished in the region without burial—Armenians killed in the genocide of 1915-1916, Kurdish villagers shot at the Iranian borders, Afghan refugees who lost their way in the nearby mountains. She then takes her hypothesis to the another level: could the minerals released from the bodies lost in Van Lake over the centuries be contributing to the formation of the microbiolites? Through these interwoven narratives of displacement, persecution and flight, the exhibition questions the entanglement of environmental catastrophe and human suffering. Lake Van emerges not merely as a body of water, but as an archive of traumatic events—a repository where the stories of the living and the dead, both human and non-human, sediment together in layers of collective memory.