Pınar Öğrenci’s background in architecture informs her experiential, video-based works and installations, which engage with decolonial and feminist concerns at the intersection of social, political, and spatial research. She engages with place and architecture as sites where violence materializes. Her artistic language foregrounds the intergenerational transmission of stories, often circulated through popular genres and practices, ranging from poetry and music to public protest. In her video Objection of the Mothers of the City (2025), Öğrenci revisits a 2024 public action led by Peace Mothers, a Kurdish women's group, who collectively cleaned the streets to protest the replacement of a democratically elected Kurdish co-mayor with a government-appointed candidate in her hometown Van. An Armenian centre until the end of the Ottoman Empire, Van became crucial for the Kurdish struggle in recent years with its growing population of Kurds fleeing from the persecution in neighboring cities such as Hakkari, Ağrı, and Muş. The film explores the role of Kurdish women in the peace struggle in the region as well as the poetics of water as both border and agent in political landscapes. By re-enacting the practice of cleaning the streets, the film initiates an act of reclamation by a community determined to shape its own memory culture, despite hegemonic attempts to erase Kurdish political and cultural agency and infrastructure.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Pınar Öğrenci and HKW, 2025. With the kind support of SAHA

WORK IN THE EXHIBITION: Objection of the Mothers of the City (2025), 1-channel video, colour, sound, c.12'. Courtesy of the artist