Weltoffenes Berlin

The one-year fellowship Weltoffenes Berlin is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion since 2021. The fellowship is aimed at people working in arts, media, and culture who have left their previous countries of residence due to the political situation there.

Onur Karaoglu

Onur Karaoglu’s current work focuses on how memory and remembrance reorganize the body. His videos bring together research from different areas – archival, personal, and fictional – and present it on the same plane. From a queer perspective, the personal story of the other is subjected to forced integration, inevitably turning its daily aspects into political symbols. Karaoglu converts these stories into video documents in order to give them back a depth and complexity they are otherwise denied. Believing in the transformative impact of the aesthetic and political language of these works, Karaoglu seeks to create a language that can diffuse into the wider circumstances it exists in, helping to create new strategies and demanding change.

In his projects, Onur Karaoglu works with the human body, discovering different meanings through it. “But whose bodies are they?” is the question he is considering now. As the queer body gets older, it fades away from daily life. Lacking support, visibility, or adequate means for their representation, aging queer bodies are subjected to more vulnerability, both physically and emotionally, becoming abandoned and fetishized human forms. With his research in Berlin, Karaoglu wants to understand how an aging queer body can embody their narrative. What gestures, what kind of spaces, what type of relationships will be needed for them to be heard, represented, included? Rather than suggesting a final form for this research, Karaoglu hopes to discover the particular presence(s) which create an access to the aging queer body, both physically and politically. 

Onur Karaoglu works in performance, video and theater. Since 2010, his original and adapted writing and directing pieces have been commissioned and presented by festivals and institutions such as Wiener Festwochen, Dancing on the Edge, Media Art Xploration and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. His installations and video works were presented at Bahar (Sharjah Biennial 2017), SPOT, Operation Room and Protocinema. He is one of the founding members of Studio 4 Istanbul, which produces theater and film works, and performance space KÖŞE in Yeldeğirmeni, which has since turned into an international performance festival. Between 2014 and 2019 he worked as the director of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. Karaoglu taught classes on performance at Boğaziçi and Koç University. He received a BA in Sociology at Boğaziçi University and an MFA in Theater Directing at Columbia University in New York City.

Former fellows:

Susan Azizi (2023)
Barış Seyitvan (2022)
Alice Kahei Yu (2021)