18:00-21:00: Open Studio with Serpil Polat
19:00-20:00: Residency artist Serpil Polat in conversation with anthropologist Banu Karaca
Kunstquartier Bethanien, 1. OG Studio 139

Since January 15, 2025, artist Serpil Polat has been living and working at Kunstquartier Bethanien as a scholarship holder of the Berlin Senate and the nGbK. As part of the residency program, she has been exploring memory spaces in Berlin through the medium of documentary photography. Polat will present the results of her work in an Open Studio event on May 15, 2025, moderated by social anthropologist and scholar Banu Karaca.

In her artistic practice, Serpil Polat explores issues of identity, gender, ecology, the city, and memory, developing a distinctive narrative language at the intersection of these themes. She uses photography as a tool to tell the stories of the places where she lives, aiming to reveal the different layers of reality.

Polat has a long-standing practice of documenting abandoned and transformed memory sites in Turkey. In Berlin, she focuses on the relationship between urban memory and space after World War II. Through her photographic works in locations such as Beelitz-Heilstätten hospital, abandoned airports, and military sites, she seeks to make visible the transformation of space over time and its role in social memory.

During this process, Polat has developed a comparative perspective between Berlin’s memory policies and the state of memory sites in Turkey. In her Open Studio presentation, she will share examples from this research, which documents the layered traces of memory within urban spaces.

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 numerous national and international exhibitions. Between 2012 and 2020, she was an active member of the NarPhotos collective. As a member of the Zin Collective, she now focuses on individual photography projects, producing works that address social, cultural, and individual issues through the lens of documentary photography.

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. She is the author of “The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany” (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of “Women Mobilizing Memory” (Columbia University Press, 2019). In 2011, she co-founded Siyah Bant, a research platform that documented censorship in the arts in Turkey. Banu has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her project “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge,” which she directs at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her current research examines how art dispossessed in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic has shaped the knowledge production on (post-)Ottoman heritage and the writing of art history.

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.