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6:00 PM-8:00 PM

Cemetery of the Nameless

Exhibition Opening|An Exhibition by Pınar Öğrenci

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Filmstill Sedimented Lives by Pinar Öğrenci © Pinar Öğrenci

filmstill-sedimented-lives by Pinar Öğrenci © Pinar Öğrenci

EXHIBITION HOURS (October 20-25)
Monday-Wednesday: 12-6 PM
Thursday-Friday: 12-8 PM
Saturday-Sunday: 12-4 PM

EXHIBITION OPENING
Thursday, October 15
6-8 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 remainless 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.

Öğrenci’s use of drone technology to capture these revelations adds another dimension of complexity. The same surveillance apparatus that now revolutionizes warfare through AI-enhanced precision is used to document this very landscape of violence at Turkey’s border with Iran. Since their invention in the 19th century, both photography and cinematography have been used for military purposes, but today’s satellite and drone imagery render the documentation of climate destruction and displacement with chilling efficiency. By making use of this technology to bear witness rather than to target, Öğrenci subverts its destructive potential, transforming these tools of surveillance into instruments of testimony and remembrance.

Pınar Öğrenci

Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Displacement, migration, survival, and resistance are cornerstones of Pınar Öğrenci’s films and installations. She 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. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social and political research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of forced migration. Öğrenci engages with place, site and architecture as the materialisation of violence. Her practice serves as a response to a collective past often left in silence and urging her audience to imagine a future built on justice, equality, and collective healing. By delving into local archives, she initiates a process of collaborative memory, engaging communities in questioning what has been remembered, erased, or overlooked. Her works invites us to witness the rich, multifaceted layers of survival, resistance, resilience.

Her works have been exhibited widely at museums, art institutions including HKW (2025), Venice Biennial (2024), Harward Museum (2024), documenta fifteen (2022),12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018),Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), Survival Kit (2019),Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018),MAXXI Museum, Rome (2016),SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-6). She had solo exhibitions at Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG, 2025), Frac Bretagne (2024), Berlinische Galerie (2023),Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna(2017) and Depo İstanbul (2017). Her works included private and public collections such as Neue Galerie Kassel, Fraq Bretain France, Harward Museum, Stadt Museum Berlin and İstanbul Modern Museum. Besides receiving prestigiousinheritscholarship from Humboldt University for 2026, she will have solo exhibitions at Harward Museum and Städtische Galerie Nordhorn and participating Manifesta 16 and group exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau in 2026.

Öğrenci teaches at HBK Braunschweig. She used to work as guest lecturer at Master Studies of Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee Raum Strategies. She continued giving lectures at many universities including Columbia, Cornell, UCLA and Berkeley Universities, Bard College NY, HFBK, Stadelschule Frankfurt and many others.

She has been nominated for Böttcherstrasse Kunst Prize 2022 in Bremen and won Villa Romana Art Prize for 2023. Her films nominated for film competitions by many filmfestivals including Visions du Reel (2023) and İstanbul Film Festival (2022-3). Her first documentary film ‘Gurbet is a home now’ won Special Jury Prize of Documentarist Film Festival in 2021.She is the founder of MARSistanbul, an art initiative launched in 2010. Since the late 1990s, Öğrenci has extensively written on contemporary art and architecture in magazines, including K24, Agos, Radikal, ArtUnlimited, m-est, SALT Online, Arkitera, Arredemento Mimarlık, İstanbul, dissident blog of Swedish PEN among others.

She has participated in residency programs at Villa Romana (Florence, 2023), HIAP (Helsinki, 2017), Henie Onstad Kunstcenter (Oslo, 2016), R.A.T. (Mexico City, 2015), Willa Waldberta (Munich, 2010).

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