INTERVIEW: DERYA BAYRAKTAROĞLU

Installation View "unspeakable home, enchanting companions, Badischer Kunstverein, 2019 © the artists, Photo: Stephan Baumann 

The Baden Art Association (Badischer Kunstverein) is currently hosting two expansive exhibitions synchronously focusing contemporary feminist art practices from Turkey; Nilbar Güreş’s solo exhibition "Lovers" and the group exhibition "unspeakable home, enchanting companions" curated by Derya Bayraktaroğlu. Collaborating with local artists, collectives, archives and publishing houses, and taking a satirical yet archival curatorial methodology, Derya Bayraktaroğlu focusses on bringing together current feminist and proto-queer discussions and practices from Turkey. In our interview, Bayraktaroğlu told me about the research period prior to the group exhibition, details about its public program and the difficulties of expressing up-to-date feminist discourses within and through art. 

INTERVIEW: ARTSPRING

artspring 2019 / KEP Raumforschunglabor at Schönhauser Allee Arcaden, Photo © Ralph Bergel

Anna-Lena Werner: Julia and Jan, with artspring you are organising one of Berlin’s largest open-studio events and an extensive one-month art festival in all parts of Pankow. Its first edition took place in 2017 –– which reasons led you to initiate artspring in the first place and how did your collaboration come about?

Julia Brodauf & Jan Gottschalk: We were actually working together on other projects, but the idea of organizing an event based on open studios has been around for a while. We had the impression that the art scene in the district of Pankow was falling apart, while individual artists are struggling with the same challenges: because of the lack of exhibition facilities, the artists in the district are not very visible, and at the same time their workspaces are a sought-after property in the real estate market. There was and still is a risk of the artists slowly being pushed out of the district, if they would not become visible. So we wrote a concept for the first artspring weekend and found support in the project funding by the Cultural Office. The artists also reacted very positively and made already the first artspring weekend an event marathon, which we had not expected in advance. It was then clear that we could not just let that energy evaporate again, and that's how the series came to be.