The landscape surrounding Lake Van in Turkey is part of a route that people use to flee Iran or Afghanistan and enter Turkey. The cemeteries in the Van region serve as a dehumanizing testament to the migrants who lost their lives in this landscape. Many drowned in the shrinking lake, which is a victim of the climate crisis. The exhibition “Cemetery of the Nameless,” by artist Pınar Öğrenci, explores the ecological, historical, and social aspects of Lake Van, offering a haunting portrayal of a region defined by profound loss. In this interview, the artist reflects on the process and ideas behind her project.
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Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: You are from Van, a city in eastern Turkey located on the eastern shore of Lake Van near the borders of Iran, Iraq, and Georgia. It is a complex, multilayered geocultural landscape characterized by histories of displacement and genocide. What childhood memories do you have of this place?
Pınar Öğrenci: The demographic composition of Van, a city with a predominantly Armenian and Kurdish population, changed after the 1915 Armenian Genocide, when Turks were brought in from various parts of Anatolia. Add to that the Armenians who converted to Islam to escape the genocide, as well as the assimilated Kurds, and it was clear that Turkish identity was dominant in the city where I grew up – at least in the city center. Talking about the Armenian Genocide, or even Armenians, was a huge taboo. Speaking Kurdish, publishing in Kurdish, and organizing Kurdish cultural activities were all prohibited. These prohibitions were the result of the 1980 military coup. The coup suppressed not only the Kurds but also all intellectual and leftist groups in Turkey. Thousands of people were imprisoned, while others fled to Europe and went into exile. I spent my childhood and early adulthood under the shadow of the 1980 military coup.
In 1990, I moved to Istanbul to study architecture. During that time, Kurds fleeing oppression in Hakkari, Ağrı, and Muş began migrating to Van. The 2011 earthquake, the migration of the middle and upper classes to western Turkey, and the construction of new housing during the city’s reconstruction provided new impetus for Kurdish migration from surrounding cities. Today, Van is a crowded, dynamic city with a predominantly Kurdish population.
Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: In your exhibition, “Cemetery of the Nameless,” you explore the landscape surrounding Lake Van. This area is part of a route that people use to flee Iran or Afghanistan for Turkey. If they survive, they continue on to Europe. The cemeteries in the Van region serve as a dehumanizing index of deceased migrants who lost their lives in this landscape. Instead of featuring people’s names on the poles, there are only Rather than featuring people’s names on the poles, only forensic registration numbers and locations related to the migration route and its end are featured. How did your encounter with these cemeteries inspire you to explore the landscape as both a death zone and a space of mourning?
Pınar Öğrenci: Zeynep Sayın’s book, “Ölüm Terbiyesi” (“Death Training”), was published in 2018. Through this remarkable book on state violence, punishment, body politics, and the absence of graves that I first encountered the term Cemetery of the Nameless. Through online research, I discovered that the largest Cemetery of the Nameless in Turkey is located in Van. When I was invited to documenta fifteen in 2022, I wrote a project proposal interpreting the city of Van through Armenian, Kurdish and refugee graves.
The proposal aimed to examine the city’s historical body and punishment politics, and it was accepted. However, since we did not receive the filming permit from the Ministry of Culture in time, I directed the film crew to Müküs (also known as Bahçesaray), where we shot the film “Aşît” (“The Avalanche”), my backup plan. After documenta fifteen opened in 2022, I created my first video work related to the Cemetery of the Nameless for an exhibition at the Istanbul Cendere Museum. In 2023, we exhibited a two-channel version of the same piece at an exhibition in Nordichouse Iceland. The Cemetery of the Nameless is a long-term project that I continue to work on.
The harsh suppression of the first Armenian uprisings in 1896, the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Zilan Stream Massacre of 1930, the ‘33 Bullets’ incident (also known as the ‘Sefo Stream (Sefo Deresi) Massacre) of 1943, the disappearance of Kurds since the 1990s, and the deaths of refugees crossing the border all point to a continuous history of state violence in the city. Therefore, the landscape of mountains, rivers, and lakes can be considered a setting for this violence as well as a witness to it. As I looked at the accumulated waters of the lake, I began to see it not only as stagnant water, but also as a vessel – a place where bodies, along with their stories, are carried and stored, almost like an archive. The contrast between the magical beauty of the landscape and the harsh stories it contains made me view the landscape as more than just a physical form; it is also a repository of stories and memories. A similar tendency is present in “Aşît.”
Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: In 1991, researchers reported the discovery of microbialites up to 40 meters tall in Lake Van. These solid towers on the lake bed are formed by coccoid cyanobacteria that create mats of aragonite, which combines with calcite that precipitates from the lake water. These extraordinary structures are featured prominently in the video “Sedimented Lives,” which is one part of the exhibition. As the narrator explains in the video, climate change has lowered Lake Van’s water level dramatically, exposing the microbialites hidden in its depths and bringing them into view. Instead of making the common connection between migration and the climate crisis – the latter of which is caused by the Global North and drives the former – “Sedimented Lives” draws a poetic-speculative connection between the formation of these structures and the corpses of the Armenian Genocide and migrants who drowned in the lake. Could you explain the idea behind making this connection?
Pınar Öğrenci: Many films have been made that directly show the link between the climate crisis and migration. I didn’t want to take that approach. “Sedimented Lives” is a fragment of a feature-length film that I plan to make in the future. In this short film, I started with an exaggerated question about the connection between the climate crisis and migration. Could minerals such as calcium and carbonate, scattered from lost bodies, have nourished the structure of microbiolites? If so, can we tell the story of the loss of the city of Van through the microbiolites, the lake’s receding waters, and the soda remains sedimented on the ground? Without showing dead bodies or abandoned graves, I tried to make a connection between the loss of people and the loss of water. The film is built around a parallel story of absence and loss. I wanted to tell a story of absence and diminishment. On the other hand, the sculptural and gothic forms of the microbiolites inspired the idea of viewing them as monuments for people without graves. I wanted to convey the physical and moral devastation through a dystopian landscape of microbiolites. This landscape is characterized by an amorphous form similar to the surface of the moon.
On the other hand, the images of the Cemetery of the Nameless are powerful and striking. Resembling a field of numbers with grass growing between them as the wind blows, the graves have the potential to draw the viewer into the danger of nostalgic pleasure. That’s why I made the radical choice to not use these images in “Sedimented Lives,” a film about graves. Similarly, in the three-channel video installation “Cemetery of the Nameless,” I first show images of graves briefly to provide context. Then, I combine these images with text and sound. To draw attention to the genocide, destruction, and displacement that we have witnessed over the past two years, I narrate texts related to the ethics of death in a multilingual format that includes English, Farsi, Arabic, Kurdish, and Turkish.
Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: You have found a compelling way to reintroduce the viewers to a complex web of entanglements. People, especially in the Global North, are increasingly sequestering themselves from their broader environment and from the consequences of their way of living, which is based on destructive market-driven production and on sustaining pockets of wealth, order, and unpolluted air and water. Your exhibition challenges this seemingly safe position by making surprising connections between the climate crisis and migration, as well as by employing a post-touristic gaze in “Sedimented Lives.” How is the deployment of this gaze – for example, as epitomized by crisp, saturated images of the Lake Van landscape – intended to reflect viewers’ complicity while simultaneously exposing traces of death in the landscape and disrupting their comfort?
Pınar Öğrenci: I disagree with your claim that the film has a post-touristy perspective and overly saturated colors. Drone footage unintentionally evokes this perspective because we have become accustomed to seeing things this way through drone footage intended for post-touristic pleasure. In the film, I used the drone in a way that is very different from conventional methods. Typically, a drone approaches an object at a certain angle and speed. Sometimes it circles the object 360 degrees. In contrast to that, we mostly used the drone parallel to the water as if drawing a map. This reduced the grandeur of the three-dimensional images, making them almost two-dimensional. Similarly, drone footage shots as if panning directly from the front challenges traditional pan shots. Rather than panning towards a place or object, these shots go nowhere, overturning classic viewer expectations and disappointing them.
Similarly, I wanted to slow down the drone’s movement speed to four to five times slower than usual. This steers the viewer towards a deep and thoughtful viewing experience rather than a pleasant stroll. Additionally, I wanted to reduce the saturation of the blue lake and red microbiolite images as much as possible. This intervention moves the images closer to colors like gray or brown, stepping outside the attractive primary color scale. The dried, cracked brown soil that emerges after the water recedes, the soda white that settles on the surface instead of blue water, and the deformed microbial surfaces that resemble dried mud are not typical touristic images, but rather distorted ones.
Magdalena Taube/Krystian Woznicki: From visual and technical standpoints, the exhibition explores the various forms of complicity and entanglement reflected in drone technology. Drones are used to execute alleged criminals and monitor borders. They are also used to artistically and scientifically document tech-supported border violence, as your video “Sedimented Lives” does. At this level of the video work, it seems that you not only point out viewers’ complicity in a regime of technoviolence, but also question your own position as an artist within it.
Pınar Öğrenci: The birth of photography is directly linked to war and technology. Historically, there has been a symbolic relationship between photography and death. This is because the moment the shutter button is pressed is similar to pulling a trigger. Through drone footage, I wanted to take this relationship a step further. If the camera symbolizes killing, then the drone is tied to mass death. If a single photograph can be linked to killing, then images produced by drones must point to mass killing. If so, could I use drone footage to depict the thousands of people lost at the border, in rivers, and in the lake as well as the massive retreat of the lake? As an artist who uses this extremely dangerous device as a tool, I must acknowledge its destructive potential. I treat the drone as both the cause and witness of this destruction. The large images that accompany the film showing the lake’s mass destruction were produced with the same idea related to drones.
Note from the editors: The exhibition “Cemetery of the Nameless” will be on view at Galerie Wedding in Berlin until February 1, 2026.
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