Manifesta 16 Ruhr: Emre Abut

Manifesta 16 Ruhr, organized this year under the title This is not a church opened on June 21, focusing on the region’s multi-layered socio-cultural structure and deep-rooted heritage of migration. The second guest in our interview series with Turkish artists creating site-specific works for the biennial is Emre Abut

Interview: Selin Çiftci

Emre Abut. Photo: Jérôme Hoffmeister

How did Manifesta 16’s curatorial concept, This is not a church and the layered structure of the Ruhr region influence the selection or creation of your work? What would you like to say about the dialogue you established with the curators and the process your work underwent from its initial concept to its exhibition?

The work did not emerge as a direct response to Manifesta’s curatorial framework. The project had already been developing out of my own long-term engagement with the Ruhr region, which is where I was born and raised. After spending many years in cities such as Berlin, Istanbul and Vienna, returning to the Ruhr area meant confronting my own past from a new perspective. This return prompted me to revisit questions that had always been present but had not yet found their artistic form: histories of migration, collective memory, and the ways migrant communities have continuously created their own structures of self-organization and empowerment. The idea for this work emerged independently through that process of reflection and research. What made the dialogue with the curator particularly meaningful was the immediate resonance between my ongoing artistic concerns and the broader questions being addressed within Manifesta 16 Ruhr. The curatorial exchange helped sharpen certain aspects of the project, but its conceptual foundation was already rooted in my own biography and in my engagement with the social and cultural histories of the region.

The Ruhr region is one of the historical centers of the wave of migration from Turkey. What does Manifesta’s geographical selection and the region’s “guest worker” legacy signify for your artistic practice or the work you conceived for this exhibition?

The history of the so-called Gastarbeiter:innen in the Ruhr region is not an abstract historical reference for me, it is part of my own lived experience. My work engages with this legacy through memory, especially through experiences from growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than representing this history in a documentary sense, I am interested in revisiting the social and cultural spaces through which belonging was created. The sound installation I am presenting focuses on music as a space of memory and affirmation. Black music, R&B, hip-hop, and Turkish pop shaped my youth in important ways. They were more than aesthetic influences; they offered orientation and a sense of emotional grounding. They created environments in which different migrant experiences could coexist and where belonging was something lived rather than explained. For me, the Ruhr is a particularly meaningful context for this work because it shows how deeply migration has shaped Germany’s social and cultural fabric. My piece approaches this history not as something concluded, but as a condition that continues to shape questions of presence, visibility and collective agency.

While exploring the region during the preparation process, did any small detail, object, or moment you encountered by chance alter the direction or scale of your work?

There was not really one such moment. The project developed gradually through memories, conversations and returns to fragments of personal and collective archives. Its direction was shaped less by one defining discovery and more by the slow process of recognizing how deeply these experiences had already shaped my understanding of belonging, memory and cultural production. In that sense, the work is not built around a singular moment of discovery but around an ongoing process of listening and remembering.

Emre Abut, Complete Cypher Vol.I, 2026. Photo: Manifesta 16 Ruhr (Rainer Schlautmann)

How do you establish the “silent knowledge” of the visual language you use in your work that functions without relying on the “subtext” of a specific geography? What does the initial connection a viewer, unfamiliar with the historical context, establishes through form and material alone tell you?

It is not my intention to create a work that can only be accessed through a specific geographic or historical framework. Sound plays a central role here because music operates as a form of communication that exceeds linguistic and territorial boundaries. It carries affective knowledge and can trigger recognition or intimacy without requiring prior contextual knowledge. At the same time, the work includes spoken language and archival fragments that may point toward a specific place or history. These elements create additional layers for those who recognize them, but they are not requirements for entering the work. What interests me is the possibility of creating an initial encounter through the atmosphere. Even if a viewer is unfamiliar with the context of the Ruhr region or Germany’s migration history, they can still connect to the emotional structures within the piece.

How do you define locality not merely as a theme, but as a layer that permeates the fabric of your work? When translating a narrative specific to a particular region for the viewer, what elements do you deliberately leave “untranslated”?

Because my medium in this work is sound, locality is not represented in a straightforward or illustrative way. It emerges through sonic fragments that carry the residue of specific lived environments. At the same time, I am not interested in fully translating every regional or cultural reference for the audience. Some things remain intentionally unresolved. Certain linguistic fragments, musical references, or cultural codes are allowed to remain partially opaque. I see this not as exclusion, but as a way of respecting the integrity of situated experience. Complete translation often risks flattening complexity. By leaving some elements open or untranslated I want to preserve their specificity while also inviting audiences to engage through listening rather than immediate comprehension.Ultimately, the dynamics the work addresses, questions of memory, belonging and self-organization, are not exclusive to the Ruhr region. They resonate across many geographies and contexts.

Manifesta holds a mirror to a crisis in Europe with each edition. Amid today’s post-industrial collapse, ecological concerns, migration and war policies, and blurring borders, what does your work suggest about the new forms of life of the future? How does your art establish a relationship of "repair" or "confrontation" with the current fragile state of the world?

My work is less concerned with proposing big solutions than with creating conditions for attentiveness and recognition. I am interested in producing moments that allow people to experience care, understanding, presence and a sense of agency. For me, this is where the political potential of art often resides: not in delivering direct answers, but in generating spaces where other forms of relation become imaginable. I believe in transformation on the micro level. Small shifts in perception, moments of being seen and addressed can have profound effects. In that sense, my work engages with repair not as restoration in a nostalgic sense, but as the activation of capacities that already exist within communities. At a time when public discourse is increasingly shaped by fragmentation and exclusion, I see artistic practice as a way of insisting on forms of relationality that resist those conditions. If there is a future my work points toward it is one grounded in collective presence and in the quiet but persistent possibility of self-empowerment.