Three Doors

Today’s discussions about migrants and marginalized communities often contribute to the spread of discriminatory attitudes in society, crystallising in instances of hate speech and physical violence. Initiatives seeking legal redress for such acts often encounter forms of structural racism. These mechanisms of indifference and impunity hinder the pursuit of justice and struggles for rights, and the rise of divisive rhetoric in public discourse undermines efforts to foster coexistence.

At the centre of the programme is the exhibition Three Doors developed by Forensic Architecture/Forensis, the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau and the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh, which will be open to visitors at Depo between 27 September – 28 December 2024. Based on detailed technical analyses, the exhibition explores police negligence and complicity in two racist attacks: On 19 February 2020 in the town of Hanau, nine people with migrant backgrounds were killed by a German far-right extremist, and on 7 January 2005 in Dessau an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone was burnt to death while in police custody, in a police station which has been the site of three unexplained deaths, including the death of Hans-Juergen Rose, whose death is also explored in the exhibition. The terror in Hanau, Dessau and beyond need to be seen in the context of the structural racism latent in institutions and society.

The wider public programme aims to reflect on racism through a series of panel discussions and initiatives to promote public engagement while fostering dialogue, raising awareness, and empowering individuals and communities. In partnership with Goethe-Institut Istanbul, Anadolu Kültür, Stiftung Mercator, Heinrich Böll Stiftung Istanbul, and Tarabya Cultural Academy, the project will survey different examples of violence and impunity through the tools of forensic architecture, art and literature, performances in a way that reveals how these phenomena work together.

In the public programme accompanying the exhibition, the families of victims of the Hanau attack will be hosted in Istanbul. Additionally, the methods used by Forensic Architecture and civil society initiatives for producing evidence of state crimes will be discussed with its founder Eyal Weizman and forensic researchers. Going beyond the incidents covered in the exhibition, the public programme will more generally address struggles against racist violence in Germany and Turkey, including a roundtable focusing on the cultural refractions of the complex surrounding the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany. A talk that exposes anti-immigrant racist attacks in Turkey will address the local conditions and discuss antiracist mobilization. With Tuğsal Moğul’s theatre play AND NOW HANAU as well as with Aslı Özarslan’s film screening Ellbogen the programme delves into the urgent topic of racism.

Three Doors exhibition by Forensic Architecture/Forensis, the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau and the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh at Depo

First shown at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2022, then at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2022) and at the Neustädter Rathaus in Hanau (2023), Three Doors influenced political, public and media responses to the Hanau terrorist attack and the murder of Oury Jalloh, gave visibility to the ongoing struggles, and shed light on deeply rooted racist structures in Germany. This year the exhibition was shown at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg.

The exhibition is organised around three investigations, each of which relates to a door and an incident of racist violence in Germany. Doors that separate and connect different spheres – state, public and private – are not only physical objects, but also social contracts. Locked when they need to be open, and left closed when they should be broken through, three doors at the heart of this exhibition embody failures of social order. The investigations in this exhibition illuminate a wider context in contemporary Germany, of racist perpetrators, state failures, and structural racism, which together constitute a threat to marginalised and racialised communities across the country.

The first door is the emergency exit of the Arena Bar in Hanau-Kesselstadt, where six people were killed on 19 February 2020. Survivors say they did not try to escape through the emergency exit of the bar because they knew it was locked; it is shown that more people could have survived if the door had been open. The door stands as an example of systematic over-policing of racialised communities in Germany: witnesses claim that the emergency exit was often locked as a result of an agreement between local authorities and the bar owner, so that customers would not be able to escape from frequent raids on the premises.

The second door was the front door of the perpetrator’s home, which he returned to after the attack. The police failed to enter the house until around five hours after the attack; the investigation revealed shocking new evidence of a series of police failures during that time.

The third door is that of a cell at the detention centre where Oury Jalloh, an asylum seeker from Sierra Leone, was burned to death in Dessau in 2005. Analyses of smoke traces left on the cell door show that it was open for all or most of the duration of the fire. This suggests that Oury was killed by the police officers who detained him. Questions around the death of Jalloh become more urgent, in the context of two other unexplained deaths connected to the police station – one of these, the death of Hans-Juergen Rose in 1997, is also explored in the exhibition.

The events in Hanau and Dessau are eruptive moments of racist violence set against long-term social and institutional conditions.

Public event programme accompanying the exhibition at Depo (prepared with Başak Ertür* from Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture)

28 September 2024, 14:30: Opening panel with representatives from partner institutions, Forensis team, the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, and the Ferhat Unvar Education Initiative.

Following the opening of the exhibition on 27 September, a panel discussion will be held with representatives from partner organisations on their involvement in this project. Robert Trafford (Forensic Architecture) and Dimitra Andritsou (Forensis) will talk about how their research was conducted, and how the exhibition was developed. Representatives from two initiatives founded by the families of the victims of the racist murder in Hanau will share their efforts to reach the truth and to design educational programs to prevent similar racist attacks.

12 October 2024, 14:30: Roundtable on the aesthetic refractions of the NSU Complex organised by Başak Ertür and Banu Karaca in collaboration with Ayşe Güleç and Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

The National Socialist Underground (Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, NSU, a German neo-Nazi terror group) murdered nine people of immigrant origin and a police officer in Germany between 2000 and 2007, and carried out several bombings and bank robberies. How did the NSU remain undetected for years despite the numerous intelligence informants lurking around and within the organisation? This question requires analysing not only extra-legal state activities, but also regimes of perception and the senses, namely the field of aesthetics, as well as spatial politics and memory practices. The roundtable will be led by Başak Ertür, an academic from the Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture, Banu Karaca, an academic who directs the research project Beyond Restitution at Forum Transregionale Studien, and two organisers of the Tribunal: Unraveling the NSU Complex, Ayşe Güleç, a curator and educator from Kassel, and Berlin-based artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian. 

9 November 2024, 14:30: Panel discussion on the Festus Okey and Dina (Jeannah Danys Dinabongho Ibouanga) cases in Turkey with lawyer Murat Deha Boduroğlu, artist Banu Cennetoğlu, lawyer Gülyeter Aktepe and activist Fatma Gül Altındağ.

This event will focus on two cases from Turkey where the state is seen as a perpetrator or collaborator in racist murders. The first is the killing of Nigerian Festus Okey by the police at Istanbul Beyoğlu District Security Directorate in 2007. The second is the case of Dina, a Gabonese woman who was subjected to racist and patriarchal violence in Karabük, where she came for university education, and was killed in 2023. In the first case, artists together with lawyers and in the second case feminists waged an important struggle for the truth to be revealed and the perpetrators to be held accountable. Speakers will discuss the state’s attitude towards such racist crimes and the importance of activism around these cases.

7 December 2024, 14:30: Exhibition tour with Turgut Tarhanlı.

Turgut Tarhanlı, director of Bilgi University’s Human Rights Law Research Center, works at the intersection of human rights, human rights activism and contemporary art. Tarhanlı, who examines the links between artistic forms of expression and rights advocacy, brings his students to the exhibitions at Depo as part of the human rights courses he has been teaching for 22 years. It is the first time that the exhibition visit leads to a tour. On this tour, Turgut Tarhanlı will talk about the exhibition and its method of forensic architecture, and the connection between this kind of work and the field of law.

14 December 2024, 14:30: Conversation with Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture, on their working methods.

Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture which uncovers cases of state violence and human rights violations using the latest techniques in spatial analysis and digital modelling, will talk about how they choose their projects, what kind of methods they use and how they share their findings. Born out of the open-source revolution, Forensic Architecture’s multidisciplinary team investigates the violence perpetrated by governments and legal entities, including armies, law enforcement agencies, public institutions and corporations.

*Başak Ertür’s contribution to this public programme was enabled by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

Public event programme with fellows of Tarabya Cultural Academy

28 September, 4 October, and 22 November 2024, 17:30, Depo

Exhibition tours with Newroz Duman (Initiative 19. Februar Hanau), 17:30

Current Tarabya Cultural Academy resident Newroz Duman has been politically active in the fields of migration and anti-racist self-organization since 2006. She is the spokesperson for the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, which was founded after the racist attack in Hanau on February 19, 2020. A central focus of Newroz Duman’s work is the further development of remembrance politics in the public sphere and the comprehensive social and political dismantling of right-wing extremism and structural racism. Newroz Duman is a resident of Tarabya Cultural Academy from October 2024 to January 2025.

01 November 2024, 17:30, Depo [CANCELLED]

Necati Öziri: Vatermal (Father’s Mark) (2023)

Scenic Reading with writer Necati Öziri and actress Esme Madra

13 – 14 December 2024, 20:30, @Kumbaracı 50

Tuğsal Moğul: AND NOW HANAU

Documentary – Theatre play

Language: German with Turkish surtitles

On February 19th, 2020, a racist murdered nine people in Hanau: Fatih Saraçoğlu, Gökhan Gültekin, Hamza Kurtović, Kaloyan Velkov, Mercedes Kierpacz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Sedat Gürbüz, Vili Viorel Păun and Ferhat Unvar. Together with the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, the Tarabya-Alumnus, playwright, director and doctor Tuğsal Moğul poses questions in AND NOW HANAU about the many mistakes of the police, the public prosecutor’s office, politicians and the media made before, during and after the attack. The perpetrator from Hanau escaped a trial and conviction by taking his own life; no legal proceedings will take place.

A co-production of the theatres Münster and Oberhausen in cooperation with Kumbaracı50

15 December 2024, 19:00, @Beyoğlu Sineması

Aslı Özarslan: Ellbogen (Elbow) (2023)

Film screening and Q&A with the director

17-year-old Hazal lives in Berlin. She wants a chance in life. Her fervent wish is to get one step further than her parents. But on her 18th birthday, a fatal incident turns her life upside down, she flees alone to the unknown city of Istanbul. In her multi-layered drama Ellbogen (Elbow), based on the novel by Fatma Aydemir, the film maker and Tarabya-Alumna Aslı Özarslan tells of everyday racism, systemic exclusion and young people who do not have the same opportunities as many others. The award-wining production has been previously shown within the scope of Kino2024 at Kadıköy Sinematek.

Q&A after the screening at Beyoğlu Sineması with the director Aslı Özarslan.

More Info: Ellbogen (2024) – IMDb

 

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Public programme curated by
Başak Ertür, Asena Günal

Turkish translation
Feride Eralp, İpek Tabur

Exhibition install consult and coordination
Sevim Sancaktar (Karşılaşmalar)

Prints and installation
Lamarts

AV installation
Techizart

Graphic design
Robert Preusse / operative.space
Salih Gürkan Çakar

 

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21 December 2024
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