Curators: Levent Çalıkoğlu, Peter Cross, Alice Sharp
Artists: Kiran Kaur Brar, Adam Chodzko, Melanie Manchot, Mike Nelson, Olaf Nicolai, Zineb Sedira
Inspired by the celebrated Turkish writer and political figure Nâzım Hikmet's book of poems Journeys With No Return, this project explores the influence of Turkish migration on contemporary art. Journeys With No Return is a project taking place in 3 cities: Istanbul, London and Berlin. The different identity of each city, their different histories and relationships to the phenomenon of migration, has resulted in three different but strongly interrelated exhibitions.
In this project, artists from Germany, Great Britain and Turkey uncover themes around this migration over the last 50 years. Once planned and organized, like the German Gastarbeiter programme, migration has become a crucial question in informing political thinking and popular emotion, transforming ideas of nationhood and subjective senses of identity. Many of the 16 artists in Jouneys With No Return come from migration origins. They all work within this turbulent, fractured area of human exchange and desire.