Istanbul-Berlin Residency Program
Since 2018, two scholarships have been granted annually to artists who live in Istanbul. The existing Istanbul stipend of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe was expanded to a true exchange, with a jury annually selecting two artists from Istanbul to be sent to Berlin and vice versa. The aim is to further enhance the relations between the partner cities of Berlin and Istanbul as well as the connections to the Turkish art scene. This is done with the conviction that international exchange and direct communication allow cultural diversity be experienced as an enrichment, inviting people to a change in perspective.
The scholarship takes place as part of a cooperation between the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) and ZK/U (from 2018 to mid 2021), from June of 2021 on with Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, and DEPO in Istanbul.
Nejbir Erkol
July 15 – December 15, 2025
From July to December 2025, Nejbir Erkol is the recipient of the „Berlin Senate Istanbul-Berlin Residency“ stipend. In her artistic practice spanning video, installation, painting, and performance, Nejbir Erkol engages with questions of precarity, migration, identity, and collective memory. Born in Nusaybin, Mardin, in Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia region, about 20 km north of the Syrian border and not far from Iraq, her projects often draw on her own experiences of political violence and displacement, creating spaces for reflection on how communities remember, rebuild, and narrate their histories.
Her long-term project Çukur (Hole), which she has been working on since 2019, centers around a rocket that fell just 97 steps away from her house during Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring. Launched in October 2019 in the east of the Euphrates to establish a so-called safe zone. The work confronts the dissonance between official narratives of security and the reality of living in a war zone. Through this and other repeated incidents, the people in her community are faced with urgent questions: What is a safe space? Do we have one?
During her time in Berlin, Erkol plans to explore how art intersects with different communities, spaces, and practices to critically engage with and reshape the past. She is particularly interested in tracing the fragile imprints that war leaves on society—both in Berlin and in her home region—and in understanding how repeated experiences of violence and uprooting transform collective memory and artistic expression.
The residency will also give her the opportunity to engage with people who, like herself, have been displaced—especially those who fled the Syrian–Turkish border—to learn what it means to begin a “second life” in Germany. Her project will document these experiences and reflect on how, in conditions of freedom, stories can be told without censorship: what can be shared, and how.
By building connections with the diaspora from Mardin and the wider region, Erkol hopes to create an archive of personal histories and artistic responses to displacement, identity, gender, migration, and precarity. Her work aims to contribute to a broader perspective on how communities rebuild after violence and loss.
Erkol holds an MFA in Painting from Hacettepe University in Ankara, where she wrote her thesis on artistic practices addressing precarity. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions and research programs such as Flux | bell sRTUcTURs (Berlin, 2024), Festival SACRe – Gaîté Lyrique (Paris, 2023), the 5th Mardin Biennial (Mardin, 2022), and SAHA Studio (Istanbul, 2025). In 2023, she was one of the winners of the Prince Claus Seed Award. She recently opened an exhibition titled “Making a Land” at the Goethe Institute Gallery Vitrin in Ankara.
Serpil Polat
January 15 – June 15, 2025
Serpil Polat’s artistic work focuses on issues of identity, gender, ecology, the city and memory, and develops a unique narrative language at the intersection of these areas. While the artist uses photography as a tool to understand and tell the stories of the places where she lives, she also uses different media such as video, sound and editing to reinforce her narrative. Documentary photographic works are at the heart of her productions, and she aims to make visible the different layers of reality in such works. Polat positions her art as a means of dialogue and confrontation, shedding light on not only individual but also social issues through the themes she addresses.
Beelitz-Heilstätten, located in south-west of Berlin, is a place with a deep social memory. Known as Hitler’s private hospital, the building was used to treat wounded soldiers during the First and Second World Wars and served as a military hospital for the Red Army after 1945. Continuing her work on abandoned sites of memory, the artist aims to document how Beelitz-Heilstätten and similar buildings contribute to social confrontation, to the act of reckoning with the past and the construction of memory. Through her documentary photographic work, she aims to make visible the historical realities and alternative discourses of these sites.
Serpil Polat graduated from the Department of Photography at Kocaeli University’s Faculty of Fine Arts,. Her photographic works have been published in various magazines and she has participated in many national and international exhibitions. Between 2012 and 2020, she has been an active member of NarPhotos collective. As a member of Zin Collective, the artist focuses on individual photography projects and produces works that address social, cultural and individual issues using the possibilities of documentary photography.
The stipend of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion is made possible in the frame of a cooperation between the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin as well as DEPO in Istanbul.