Under the Red Sky: Pınar Öğrenci’s Art of Responding

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, October 10 at 3pm for Under the Red Sky: Pınar Öğrenci’s Art of Responding, a retrospective glimpse into the past ten years of artist moving image by Pınar Öğrenci. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between Öğrenci and novelist Maaza Mengiste.

From early videos using found YouTube footage to large-scale installations, this retrospective screening traces the history of Öğrenci’s cinematic production from her first publicly exhibited video to her most recent site-specific work. The films in this screening attest to the artist’s sustained commitment, publicly and privately, to the issues of displacement, migration, survival, and resistance, and are threaded together through formal considerations of music, source material, and re-enactment. In this progression, we witness not only the development of Öğrenci’s artistic vision through various non-fictional experiments but also her own biography—forced to flee Istanbul for Berlin under political persecution and the threat of undue incarceration. Once a fierce advocate, she found herself in the position of having become an unexpected immigrant herself in Germany, where her artistic production has regularly challenged the established (and increasingly problematic) conventions of Erinnerungskultur (memory culture), thinking with and alongside scholars such as Michael Rothberg. Öğrenci’s films document not only the subject matter at hand, but her larger approach in responding to social hegemonies and violence. In doing so, she offers us a toolbox of strategies for resistance.

This event is presented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut New York.

Films

Red Air (2017, 4 minutes)
Red Air is a collage of found YouTube footage on war’s damage to nature in Iraq. When dust storms carry in from the Saudi desert, the Baghdad sky turns red with the chemicals, bombs, oil fires, and radiation of the American invasion. The video was first shown at Under the Red Sky, Öğrenci’s first institutional exhibition, at Depo Istanbul in 2017.

Mawtini (2016, 9 minutes)
Mawtini (My Homeland) is a 1934 poem by the Palestinian poet İbrahim Tuqan, set to music by Muhammad Fuliefil and adopted as the anthem of the Palestinian independence struggle; in 2004 it became Iraq’s national anthem as well, replacing Ardh Alforation, the anthem of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime. Öğrenci first heard it as a street song in Istanbul, performed by Arab musicians who had recently arrived from Syria. The video gathers YouTube recordings from Algeria, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria—army choirs, pop singers, home recordings, street performances—and asks what nation and homeland mean for a stateless population.

A New Year’s Eve (2021, 8 minutes)
Öğrenci recorded this footage while fleeing a police attack on a peace march in Diyarbakır on December 30, 2015. She was detained for five days along with twenty-four others; the prosecutor later sought an eighteen-year sentence, and she left for Berlin. Inside a shopping center where demonstrators had taken refuge, people passed out sugar cubes to blunt the teargas—a tactic of solidarity through which the Kurdish community endures daily violence. The video is part of a larger installation.

Inventory 2021 (2021, 16 minutes)
A remake of Želimir Žilnik’s 1975 Inventur, originally filmed in Munich, relocated by Öğrenci to Chemnitz and grounded in the anti-racist struggles of people living there. In Žilnik’s version, guest workers from southern Europe descend the stairs of their building one by one; in Öğrenci’s remake, migrants from Palestine, Jordan, Kurdistan, and the Philippines climb up. Here, Germany appears not as a temporary posting, but as a permanent home.

Hotel Miks (2023, 17 minutes)
Snow blocks the roads to the Kurdish town of Miks (Moks in Armenian) for nine months of the year, where avalanches are a regular and deadly occurrence. Cut off, the men play chess in the coffeehouses as a daily ritual of survival. Chess carries no identity marker here, and it endures as a trace of the Armenian community that made up the town’s population before the genocide of 1915. The film draws loosely on Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (1941), in which a prisoner of the Nazis finds solace in chess during a period of confinement in a locked hotel room. Hotel Miks exists in three-channel and single-channel versions.

I Wish You Luck (2024, 6 minutes)
Five women whistle the “Steigerlied,” the centerpiece of the German miners’ songbook, known by its opening words: “Glück auf,” or “Good luck.” The miners’ choruses Öğrenci approached refused her access to their voices, so she turned to Turkish and Kurdish women, who whistle their own “Good Luck.” Whistling is forbidden underground, where it resembles the hiss of leaking methane. Inspired by the original song, Öğrenci wrote her own lyrics about migrant fear and the darkness of racist attacks in Germany. Shown here as a single-channel version of the original five-channel installation.

Objection of the Mothers of the City (2025, 13 minutes)
Öğrenci turns to her hometown and revisits a 2024 action by the Peace Mothers, a Kurdish women’s group who led a street-cleaning campaign in Van to protest the removal of the city’s elected Kurdish co-mayors and their replacement by a government appointee. An Armenian center until the end of the Ottoman Empire, Van has drawn Kurds fleeing persecution in Hakkari, Ağrı, and Muş. Restaging the sweeping, the film follows the women’s part in the peace struggle and the poetics of water as border and agent, and claims the ground of the city’s memory against attempts to erase it.

Cemetery of the Nameless (2025, 25 minutes)
Climate change has drastically lowered Lake Van’s water level, exposing microbialites—coral-and stalagmite-like formations built over millennia from calcium, carbonate, phosphate, and magnesium, the same elements of human bones. In Öğrenci’s Cemetery of the Nameless, this environmental unearthing runs parallel to a human rights crisis: Kurdish villagers shot near the Iranian border, Afghan refugees lost and frozen in nearby mountains, and Iranian refugees who died in the waters of the lake are often buried without names, marked only by forensic registration numbers. Weaving displacement, persecution, and flight together, the video frames Lake Van as an archive of trauma, where human and more-than-human histories settle into layers of collective memory. Drawing on Zeynep Sayın’s Ölüm Terbiyesi (Death Training, 2018), the work takes up the ethics of death.

A Labour Dictionary (2026, 12 minutes)
The Christian symbolism shaping mining culture in the Ruhr region meant Muslim and immigrant miners remained largely invisible—a gap that widened after the mines closed in the late 1980s. What Germans call “Strukturwandel” (structural change) or deindustrialization led to a loss of identity and memory for working-class families. Inspired by this term, A Labour Dictionary concentrates on the hidden violence of German industrial language. Projected on the altar wall and mapped around the cross of St. Anna Church in Bochum, Öğrenci’s site-specific video opens a counter-space, overlaying the church’s sacred world with mining culture’s visual symbols, exposing exploitation rooted in both.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.