A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us
2017
Video, HD, colour, sound, 4'51''
Pınar Öğrenci (1973) is an artist and writer who lives in Istanbul and Berlin. She is the founder of MARSIstanbul, an art initiative launched in 2010. Her body of work, which consists mostly of video art and installations, exists at the intersections of social and political content, everyday practices, and human stories. Exhibiting anthropological characteristics, her work focuses on war, violence, forced displacement, nationalism, urban transformation and collective movements. In a number of her works Öğrenci is scarcely bothered with developing narratives on things, events or people. Instead she helps them to create and tell their own stories: here, it is a musical instrument, lost in the sea by a migrant who has become witness to political disorder and human suffering; there, it is a construction site that is at the same t
ime a site of destruction and social exclusion.
What Fernand Braudel once wrote about the Mediterranean could be said today about the whole globe: the experience of migration is an intrinsic part of our way of life. If the history and culture of the region around the Mediterranean cannot be explained entirely through the lives of those born there, and thus must be understood as having been influenced by those who sailed to its shores, along with their descendants and even those who throughout history have sought to conquer it, then migrants of all sorts should be seen as the rightful founders of cultures all around the globe. A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us asks a deeply rooted question: In our era of rapid social and technical transformation, in which our social order is no longer matched to our technological order, as Walter Benjamin predicted a century ago, what is home and what is homeland? Is it possible to tell stories of our world today without having had the experience of displacement and the terror and desperation that accompany it? Could the oud that softly slides across the waters of the Aegean Sea become the symbol of a deep culture that is now dispersed all over the world, seeking a place for itself?
pinarogrenci.com