On the occasion of the exhibition “Aykan Safoğlu. Wenn eine Weele bricht …” the artist, who was awarded the Birigt-Jürgenssen Prize in 2021, will lead a conversation with curator Fanny Hauser. The focus is on the artist’s work, which revolves around life, migration and family stories, and thus the past, which in Safoğlu’s work is always portrayed through the mirror of personal experience and feeling. The artist skillfully relates intimate memory work to the media conditions of its storage, documentation, and reproduction in film, photography, and scanning. The material qualities of the media are made present and at the same time used as a metaphor for the contents depicted in his films. In this way, Safoğlu manages to parallel political issues and image politics in his works, which are articulated not only cinematically but also as expansive installations.

Aykan Safoğlu is a PhD-in-Practice student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.