Carlos Kong // Postmigrant Fabulation: Archival Afterlives of Turkish German Migration in Contemporary Art
My project examines how contemporary artists excavate and imaginatively remediate archival materials from Turkish German migration histories in their artworks. I study a group of exemplary artists—including Nezaket Ekici, Cana Bilir-Meier, and Aykan Safoğlu, among other visual artists, filmmakers, and writers—who are implicated in Turkish German migration histories, either as the descendants of so-called “guest workers” recruited from Turkey to West Germany in the 1960s and ‘70s, or as migrants themselves to Germany at different historical moments. Throughout their practices, the artists I study utilize archival documents related to Turkish German migration to produce performative, photographic, and moving-image artworks that narrate and memorialize the afterlives of labor migration, racial violence, and transcultural belonging in Germany and Turkey. The artworks I investigate thus bear on the construction of contemporary Germany as a “postmigrant society”—a society constituted by the aftermath of global migrations as well as the multigenerational presence of migrants and their descendants.
My project is divided into three sections, each of which focuses on a particular archival object that is repeatedly cited, reused, and reenacted in postmigrant artistic practices.
The first section analyses how artists uncover and revoice Turkish-language poetry written by family members who were labor migrants in West Germany, with a focus on archives of poetry vocalized in artworks by Nezaket Ekici and Cana Bilir-Meier.
The second section examines the afterlives of historical photographs of guest workers alongside the performative reenactment of family photographs taken of and by migrants in essay films by Aykan Safoğlu and Bilir-Meier.
The third section investigates filmic remakes of critical documentaries that thematize the multigenerational settlement of migrants as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall from a (post-)migrant perspective, with case studies centered around experimental documentaries by Thomas Arslan, Can Candan, and Pınar Öğrenci.
My project argues that contemporary artists and filmmakers retrieve and remediate transnational archives of migrants’ poetry, vernacular photographs, and documentary films to speculatively reimagine, critically re-narrate, and “fabulate” the afterlives of Turkish German migration in the present. In doing so, their artworks investigate how migration histories, and their encoded experiences of racism and exclusion, are retold, archived, and remembered, and how they affirm and challenge Germany’s self-conception as a postmigrant society.
[Caption: Aykan Safoğlu, Still from Untitled (Gülşen and Hüseyin), 2015]