with Ruken Aslan, Ayşe Tülay İnce, Janis Schroeder

Southeastern Europe is a multi-ethnic home for people with diverse languages and religions. For centuries, ethnicity was not a key distinguishing factor. This changed with the influence of major European powers in the middle of the 19th century. They juxtaposed the concept of belonging to an ethnic to the notion of belonging to a religious group. The new concept of identity quickly spread throughout the region. This resulted in uprisings against the Ottoman rule, and as well in hegemonic claims against other population groups. A bloody trail of massacres, expulsions and refugees has been running through Southeastern Europe since, giving rise to small-scale, mostly homogeneous nation-states.
After the end of the 1st World War, this policy manifested itself in population transfer and forced resettlements. With the reorganization of Europe after the 2nd World War, Bulgaria was politically linked to the Soviet Union, Turkey belonged to the Western Alliance.
From 1980 onwards, Bulgaria introduced a tightened policy of restrictions against Muslim minority, coupled with a „Bulgarianization campaign“ which forcibly „Bulgarianized“ 800,000 muslim names between 1984 and 1989. The fierce resistance of those affected prompted the Bulgarian government to open the border with Turkey in 1989 and more than 350,000 people left for Turkey.

Ruken Aslan’s drawings are a dense web of lines, image fragments and text snippets. The collages of mythological narratives and newspaper catch phrases create an associative, multi-layered picture. Her narrative imagery combines the aesthetics of Art Deco graphics with contemporary comics.
The series „Borderline Patterns“ is shown in the exhibition. In it, the artist deals with the border region she lives in. Romantic ideas of „being on the road“, „homecoming“, „another life“, „The Great West“ are invoked, as well as the topics of flight and forced resettlement.

Janis Schroeder artistically explores landscapes and habitats.  In his research and archival work, he searches for stories, historical documents and images, which he juxtaposes with his own photographs, video recordings and intuitive drawings.
During two trips to the region and by researching archives in Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany, Janis Schroeder explored the Bulgarian-Turkish border landscape. For the exhibition he created a collage of found and self-created images, texts and sound material. It is a personal geography of the region, which also critically examines his own perspective and privileges.

Ayşe Tülay often works with objects and artifacts that convey stories. In the two channel video work „Boundary“ we see a young girl wearing a traditional Bulgarian shirt in a park. The shirt is an heirloom of the artist’s family. It was a gift from her mother-in-law who brought it with her when the family was expelled from Bulgaria in 1989. The work was created in 2022/23, while the artist went to Sofia to apply for Bulgarian citizenship for her children.

Accompanying program:
Film screening and artist talk with Birgit Auf der Lauer, Caspar Pauli and Janis Schroeder, moderated by Juliane Zelwies.

During an Istanbul scholarship, Birgit Auf der Lauer and Caspar Pauli created the video  „Good Smugglers / Bad Escape Helpers – Gute Schleuser / Schlechte Fluchthelfer“.