The Gropius Bau is currently showing the outstanding exhibition Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960, devoted to visual artists who came to West Berlin between the sixties and the eighties, above all from Turkey but also from Greece, Italy, South Korea, the former Yugoslavia, Chile and Iran: as labour migrants, on scholarships, or fleeing, for instance from the military coups in Chile in 1973 and in Turkey in 1980. Many of them shaped Kreuzberg, with façade paintings, sculptures in public space, with the founding of associations and with exhibitions that would not have existed without them. Hardly any of them are known. The show was curated by Gürsoy Doğtaş and Patrizia Dander. As a cooperation partner, the Berlin Museum at the Ephraim-Palais is showing the parallel exhibition “Divided Life. Art and Migration in Berlin“.
The timing is simultaneously coincidental and fitting: a fortnight ago Die Linke won a clear election victory in Berlin, led by Elif Eralp, whose parents had to leave Turkey in the eighties as trade unionists and socialists. A biography, then, of a kind that appears several times in the exhibition. Hans Krestel spoke with both curators about visibility and its history, about the question of why this exhibition manages without historical documents, about anti-fascist image politics in a Federal Republic whose chancellor had been a member of the NSDAP, and about what an art institution can and cannot achieve in the current debate on migration.
The Berlin Linke has won an election victory and may, with Elif Eralp, provide Berlin’s first Governing Mayor of Turkish descent. Kreuzberg in particular was always a place of migrant and political self-assertion. Is this a political recognition of the histories your exhibition makes visible?
Gürsoy Doğtaş (GD): It is at the very least a convergence that has occupied us too. Elif Eralp’s politically active parents fled Turkey for Germany in 1980 after the military coup, her mother (note: the mother is the feminist activist Hülya Eralp) heavily pregnant with her. She was born in Munich in 1981, grew up in Dortmund and Hamburg, and only after her studies does she come to Berlin and work in Kreuzberg. She did not grow up there. The exhibition takes as its starting point the period of labour migration from 1961 to the recruitment ban of 1973. These people often came from Greece, the former Yugoslavia and Turkey. Pınar Öğrenci’s film picks up a later moment, the years after the 1980 military coup. Now refugees arrive, mostly of Kurdish origin, politically engaged people. Eralp’s parents are among them. They were active in the trade union, they were socialists, and for that reason they had to leave Turkey. For many of the artists, the political conflicts over Turkey that were fought out from Berlin played an important role. Those conflicts inscribed themselves into the city’s space, and migrant remembrance work has kept them visible there:
At Kottbusser Tor stands Hanefi Yeter’s stele for the activist Celalettin Kesim, who was killed in 1980 at a trade union protest by supporters of the Grey Wolves and the Islamic Millî Görüş movement. That breaks with the idea that Kreuzberg was solely a place of left-wing immigration. The self-assertion you speak of here was always also directed against the Turkish right.
You tell Kreuzberg’s history not through period documents but starting from the artworks. What changes in our view of migration and urban history? Why has there been no visibility until now?
Patrizia Dander (PD): Here I would contradict the assumption that there was no visibility. In Berlin especially, and in Kreuzberg in particular, there were institutions in the seventies and eighties that campaigned very strongly for migrant artists and exhibited them. In our exhibition too the central idea is to let art speak.
GD: Exactly. Letting art speak means not treating it as an illustration of history. A document records what happened. An artwork shows how someone looked at it and positioned themselves in relation to it. It can therefore raise questions that go beyond pure documentation and offer a different form of projection onto that period.
Which questions, specifically? What can be read off a work that a document does not yield?
GD: When we show works in which artists take up John Heartfield’s photomontage, for example, it is not only about the political message but about an aesthetic decision taken at a particular moment. Paolo Baratella, Alexis Akrithakis and Mehmet Ünal worked in a climate in which former NSDAP members held high political office in the Federal Republic. Kurt Georg Kiesinger was federal chancellor, Peter Lorenz was CDU state chairman. That artists in this situation revived a visual language from the twenties is an artistic position: they refer to an artist whom the National Socialists had driven into exile, and in doing so place themselves against the continuity of the Nazi elites and within the tradition of anti-fascism. The political statement lies here in the choice of form, and you only grasp that if you look at the works as art and not merely as documents. Whoever starts from the art also sees labour migration differently. Labour migration is often narrated only as an economic process. Behind the works stand people who worked artistically alongside their jobs. Atiye Altül came to Germany as a guest worker, was a social worker, and painted on the side. Such biographies become visible when you ask where these pictures came into being and under what conditions.
PD: Another example is the artist Mehmet Aksoy, who founded the Turkish Artists’ and Academics’ Association in Berlin and thereby took on a role that went far beyond his own artistic practice. He showed not only his own works but organised exhibitions, brought people together and in this way made visible positions that would otherwise have received little attention in the institutional context of the time. The moment we stop using artworks as illustrations of documents and instead take them seriously as historical sources in their own right, the kind of questions we can ask changes. In the end it is also about which and whose art history has been seen and told, and which has not.
Many of the artists shown are placed in a shared art-historical context here for the first time. Which relationships, networks or surprising connecting lines struck you most during your research?
GD: What surprised us was how dense these networks already were, and this across origin, route of entry and residence status. At the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in the late 1970s, Akbar Behkalam, who comes from Iran, and Hanefi Yeter, who came from Turkey on a scholarship, share a studio. In the same building, Mehmet Aksoy, who himself had stood on the assembly line, organised the Nâzım Hikmet exhibition in 1977 together with the Kunstamt Kreuzberg. The Turkish Workers’ Choir of West Berlin sings at exhibition openings as well as at strike meetings. With the coup of 1980 a further line was added: people from Turkey, often of Kurdish origin, who were organised in trade unions and socialist groups and therefore had to flee, like Elif Eralp’s parents. They meet in Kreuzberg those who are already there, and they carry on the resistance against the military dictatorship from Berlin. In catalogues and collection records these connections barely appear, because they were tied to no institution. The research found them in apartments, studios and cellars, in the memory of the people involved.
Which work would you show to someone who grew up in Kreuzberg and knows their family’s migration history?
PD: We would take that person not only into the Gropius Bau but also onto the street. At Schlesisches Tor stands the sculpture group “Human Landscape”, with works by Azade Köker and Mehmet Aksoy among others. On façades in Kreuzberg you also find works by Hanefi Yeter and Akbar Behkalam. Anyone who grew up in Kreuzberg has walked past these works every day, often without knowing who made them and what history lies behind them. A walk like that changes your awareness of the presence and influence of these artists in the cityscape. You see your own neighbourhood differently afterwards.
Hanefi Yeter struck me very strongly in the exhibition. He was the artist who painted the house façade with the colourful market below it; the picture was also the cover of an issue of Monopol. How did his experience as a migrant show itself in his pictures, and which themes did he take up?
GD: He is a remarkable figure on many levels. He came to Berlin in the early seventies. His first exhibition is in East Berlin, at the Intergrafik, an international graphic art exhibition; a second follows there in 1982/83 at the city library. And he decides very early on for a style he had already developed in Istanbul, in the manner of Ottoman miniature painting, and combines it in Berlin with socially critical montage. In Zuzugssperre and Zurück he lays the police stamp and the deportation order over the faces, as a pictorial form for the power of immigration law. He took up all the themes that affected labour migrants in this period: the children, how they go to school, the residence ban, the premiums with which the federal government pushed for return from 1983 onwards. On top of that comes music: he sings in the Turkish Workers’ Choir of West Berlin and designs record covers, among others for the choir. He is an artist who passes through all the spaces we set out as themes, even where he does not appear in every room.
What can the exhibition achieve in view of the current debates on migration, racism, belonging and political art, and where are the limits of a museum when it wants to make social conflicts visible or even change them?
PD: It can achieve something very concrete, namely visibility and historical memory. The Gropius Bau is an art institution without a collection of its own, but with a large public. That gives us the possibility of securing a high level of attention for the subject. An exhibition can show how earlier generations dealt with similar questions. If a younger generation discovers predecessors here for its own concerns, that is the best thing that can happen. That is how bridges into the present emerge out of historical contexts.
GD: But we have to be honest about the limits. An exhibition changes no election results and no rent conditions. Only, politics does not begin in parliament. It begins where people take for themselves what no one has granted them: being seen and being heard. That is precisely what the artists in this exhibition did, whether they came to Berlin as recruited workers, on a scholarship or into exile, in a city that recorded migrants as labour or as guests, but not as a voice. An exhibition cannot resolve social conflicts, and it does not have to. Secondly, the museum too is no neutral place outside those conflicts. It is here that it is decided who is collected, who is invited and who is meant as the public. Many of these works lay in estates, apartments and cellars until our research. And the families whose history is told here have long experienced that museums do not reckon with them. That is why the accompanying programme, the talks and the mediation work are so important.
Do you have a favourite place in Kreuzberg?
GD: I like to sit on the steps of Bethanien and look out at Mariannenplatz.
PD: Not a favourite place, but a place that has become very important to me in the context of the exhibition is Pfuelstraße, where Hanefi Yeter and Akbar Behkalam had their studios for many years. I can’t walk past there without imagining the view the two of them worked with, onto the border, onto the division of the city, embodied by the Spree and the Oberbaumbrücke. The corner between Pfuelstraße and Schlesisches Tor carries a great melancholy for me. I often think about which borders you felt there, but also which spaces of possibility you had. The studios have long since gone.
